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| Philip Munn |
The following Letter to the Editor appeared in a 1914 edition of The Ibis - journal of the British Ornithologists' Union
Sir - It may interest some of your readers to learn that an immature Greenland Falcon flew on board the Braemar Castle in Lat. 38° N. and Long. 12° W (west of Lisbon) on October 21.
It was caught after it perched on the rigging.
I think this must be the farthest south for this species.
Philip W. Munn.
Laverstoke
Hampshire
December 4, 1913
* ONE of the most intriguing ornithologists of the first part of the 20th Century was former Army officer and banker Philip Munn - not least because what happened in his personal life.
Was it some midlife crisis that prompted him to quit a comfortable existence in the UK - including the companionship of his novelist-wife and their daughter - in order to settle on what was then a remote and relatively undeveloped Spanish island?
Whatever the facts, if he hoped for an unbroken idyll, he was set for some unwelcome surprises.
For much of the 1930s and 1940s, Majorca was embroiled in political unrest - first the Spanish civil war, next partial invasion by a Fascist Italian regime, then rule, in effect, by Hitler’s Gestapo.
Conditions became so wretched for Munn that he was forced to flee his farmland home in favour of exile, until war ended, in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon.
Yet there were also plenty of happy times, many of them when he was watching and recording the birdlife of the island.
Munn became an expert on several species - for instance, the Kentish Plover and the Little Ringed Plover - and, quite soon after his arrival he wrote this illuminating and entertaining account of his discoveries which was first appeared in The Ibis, journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union of which was a member.
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| This e-book is now available, price £2, on Kindle |
http://bitly.ws/e6tb
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