David Happold

David Christopher Dawber Happold, FZS (born April 19, 1936 in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England),[1] in publications often D. C. D. Happold, is a British-Australian mammalogist. His main research interests are the small mammals (bats, shrews, and rodents) of Africa and Australia.

Career

David Happold is the son of Frederick Crossfield (1893-1971) and his wife Dorothy Vectis Happold, née Halbach. From 1947 to 1955, he attended Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, where his father was a headmaster from 1928 to 1960. In 1957, he was matriculated at Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge, where he earned his Master's degree in 1960. That same year he went to Canada, where he attended the University of Calgary in northern Alberta until 1963. From 1961 until 1962 he did field research on the ecology and distribution of mosquitos, in particular near the Flatbush hamlet and Athabasca. In April 1963, he submitted his PhD thesis entitled Studies on the ecology of mosquitoes in the boreal forest of Alberta.

In July 1963 he accepted a position at the University of Khartoum, where he changed his interests to mammalogy. During the three years he spent in Khartoum, he travelled the semi-desert regions of Sudan and studied small mammals. Most of his research included ecological studies of the lesser Egyptian jerboa (Jaculus jaculus) and the greater Egyptian gerbil (Gerbillus pyramidum).

In April 1966, he moved to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (one year before the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War) and began long-term studies on the demography of terrestrial small mammals in the rainforest, on distribution patterns of small mammals in the savannah areas, reproductive strategies of small mammals and on the problems of species conservation in the national parks. David Happold lived in Nigeria for 12 years until he and his wife Meredith, an Australian zoologist, were forced to leave the country in 1977 by various circumstances. They moved to Australia and David Happold took up a post at the Zoology Department of the Australian National University. From January 1977 until his retirement in August 1998, he worked as a Lecturer, Senior lecturer and Reader.

In Australia, Happold and his students worked on many aspects of small mammal ecology in the subalpine and alpine regions of the Kosciuszko National Park, a few kilometres south of Canberra. The studies dealt with demography, reproductive strategies, habitat selection, food preferences, social behaviour, the effects of altitude (especially snowfall in winter) on many areas of life and the problems of nature conservation in mountain habitats.

He also continued his research work in Africa. From 1984 to 1985 and from 1993 to 1994 he lectured as a visiting professor at the University of Malawi in Zomba. In collaboration with his wife, he conducted long-term studies on African bats.

In 1983, Happold described the savanna swamp shrew (Crocidura longipes) from Nigeria in collaboration with German mammalogist Rainer Hutterer from the Museum Koenig in Bonn.

Work

In 1971, Happold published the monograph Wildlife Conservation in West Africa on the behalf of the IUCN. In 1973, the book Large Mammals of West Africa was published. In 1979, he wrote the book Ecology of African Mammals in collaboration with Michael James Delany. In 1984, he wrote the chapter Small Mammals in the book Sahara Desert by John Cloudsley-Thompson. 1987 he published the book Mammals of Nigeria. This comprehensive reference book is the first field guide to list all 250 mammal species recorded in Nigeria. In 2011, Happold published The African Naturalist: The Life and Times of Rodney Carrington Wood 1889-1962 on the game warden and lepidopterist Rodney Carrington Wood, who spent most of his life in Nyasaland (today Malawi). The six-volume work Mammals of Africa was published in 2013, with David Happold as co-editor besides Jonathan Kingdon, Meredith Happold, Thomas M. Butynski, Jan Kalina and Michael Hoffmann. It received the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association in 2014. In 2018, the book Africa from East to West was published, in which Happold describes a journey he made between 1965 and 1967 from Massawa on the coast of the Red Sea from Eritrea to Cap-Vert in Senegal. He also published over 80 scientific articles, often co-authored by his wife.

David Happold is a member of the Zoological Society of London, the British Ecological Society and Fauna & Flora International.

Honours

For his achievements in African mammalian research, David Happold received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge in 1997 and was elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mammalogists. In 2019, David and Meredith Happold were honoured in the specific name of the bat species Parahypsugo happoldorum from Guinea and Liberia.[2]

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References
  1. Stephen A. Orimoloye: Biographia Nigeriana: a biographical dictionary of eminent Nigerians G. K. Hall & Co, Boston, 1977; ISBN 0-81618-049-0, pages 162–163
  2. Rainer Hutterer, Jan Decher, Ara Monadjem, Jonas Astrin: A New Genus and Species of Vesper Bat from West Africa, with Notes on Hypsugo, Neoromicia, and Pipistrellus (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae). Acta Chiropterologica, 21(1), 2019, pages 1–22. doi:10.3161/15081109ACC2019.21.1.001
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