Stewart Conn

My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle ... and gradually I shall be able to piece it together(Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853-1936) As though a neolithic arrowhead he’d unearthed at the age of four had entered his bloodstream, its sliver of flint sparking an obsession, the items he acquired over the years ranged from Darwin’s whalebone walking-stick, Napoleon’s toothbrush and a pair of Florence Nightingale’s mocassins to shrunken heads and tons of ancient armour. But despite all his squirrelling, the museum to house them remained illusory.

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that bears his name on the Isle of May; while in the cottage we shared, coffee-mugs and cigarette-butts cleared, and like as not whisky glasses from chess the night before, he’d set up his carousel of colour-slides to display the field marks of various species — pointing out such features as eye-stripes and wing-bars, nesting habits and flight-patterns — or draw lightning sketches, his profile more and more that of a raptor.