Gerard Frederick van Tets

Who was Gerard Frederick van Tets?

Gerard Frederick van Tets, otherwise known as Jerry van Tets, was a twentieth century British, Canadian and Australian ornithologist and palaeontologist. Born to Dutch parents, Hendrik Barthout van Tets and Thérèse van Heukelom, in London on 19 January 1929, Van Tets spent his childhood in the Netherlands. Following World War II, he moved to England to complete his schooling at Hazelmere. He completed two years of national service with the Royal Engineers in England and Austria before emigrating to Canada where he studied at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, obtaining his PhD in 1963. He became a member of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1958. In November 1963, he married Patricia Anne Johnston in Vancouver, British Columbia, moving shortly thereafter to Australia, where he joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in the Division of Wildlife and Ecology, now the Division of Sustainable Ecosystems.

Van Tets swam for the swimming teams of British Troops Austria, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.

Van Tets received recognition for his studies on bird strike damage to aircraft, and later for his studies of the bird bones in the Australian National Wildlife Collection, including those of the extinct Tasman Booby which he described scientifically in 1988, and became a specialist authority on the mutton bird and the cormorant family. Together with Michael Crowley, Chris Davey, Peter Fullagar, Ederic Slater, Petrus Heyligers and others, Van Tets helped to establish and maintain a long term ecological study on Montague Island, NSW. Van Tets served as compiler for the first four bird volumes of the Zoological Catalogue of Australia and as a sub-editor for behaviour for the first three volumes of the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds.