J. Denis Summers-Smith

Who is J. Denis Summers-Smith?

James Denis Summers-Smith is a British ornithologist and mechanical engineer, a specialist both in sparrows and industrial tribology.

Summers-Smith was raised in Glasgow, where he was born in 1920. He spent holidays in Donegal, in northwestern Ireland, where his uncle, a country parson and a naturalist, taught him about birds. For six years during World War II, Summers-Smith was an Intelligence Officer in the British Army, stationed on the east coast of England. During this time, he had little time for birdwatching, except when surveying "such likely spots for invasion" as coastal marsh in Suffolk.

After the war, Summers-Smith began his successful career as a mechanical engineer for Imperial Chemical Industries. He obtained several degrees in engineering around this time, and a PhD in physics in 1953. In 1975, Summers-Smith received one of the three annual Tribology Silver Medals given by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. His job as an engineer allowed him to travel widely, and he used trips abroad as opportunities to study sparrows.

Summers-Smith began his study of the House Sparrow in 1947. He decided to make a serious study of a particular bird species, and chose the House Sparrow because of the difficulty of travel at the time, under post-war rationing. Summers-Smith studied the House Sparrow in a village in Hampshire, in a town in Durham, and eventually at Guisborough in North Yorkshire, where he settled in 1961. During these studies, he was arrested twice for looking around yards with binoculars at early hours. Summers-Smith was a founding member of his local bird club in 1960, and he wrote the instructions for the British Trust for Ornithology's first Common Bird Census in 1962. His study of the House Sparrow resulted in a number of papers in prestigious journals, and his 1963 monograph The House Sparrow, published as part of the New Naturalist Monographs series. After The House Sparrow was published, Summers-Smith began studying the House Sparrow's relatives in the genus Passer. Over the course of these studies, he visited dozens of countries, and made observations on all the Passer species except the Socotra Sparrow. This research into the sparrows as a whole resulted in a monograph on the genus Passer, published in 1988 as The Sparrows, and one on the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, the 1995 The Tree Sparrow, both of which were illustrated by Robert Gillmor. He also wrote In Search of Sparrows, an account of his worldwide travels researching sparrows. In 1992, Summers-Smith received the Zoological Society of London's Stamford Raffles Award, for his "world-renowned work on sparrows".