Lack, David (1910–1973)

English ornithologist who used radar to identify groups of migrating birds. He studied and wrote about the robin, the great tit, the swift, and the finches of the Galapagos Islands.

Lack was born in London and attended Gresham's School in Norfolk and then Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read zoology and graduated 1933. His first paper was published while he was a schoolboy and was a study of the nightjar. On leaving Cambridge he took a job as a schoolmaster at Dartington Hall where he spent his spare time studying robins, leading to the publication of The Life of a Robin 1943. In 1934, he travelled to Tanganyika, and, in 1935, to the USA, where he met Ernst Mayr. In 1938, he spent a year in the Galapagos Islands and wrote Darwin's Finches. He was the director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at Oxford from 1945, where he studied the great tit and swift. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and received their Darwin medal 1972.

During World War II, he worked for the army and was one of the first people to identify migrating birds on radar. He was a devout Christian, writing Evolutionary theory and Christian Belief 1957.