Английская Википедия:Ian Heslop
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Ian Robert Penicuick Heslop (June 1904 – 2 June 1970) was a British naturalist, lepidopterologist and marksman. He is particularly known for his studies of the butterfly Apatura iris (purple emperor), and for his discovery of the Nigerian subspecies of the pygmy hippopotamus, named Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi after him.
Born in India in 1904, Heslop grew up in Bristol, where he studied at Clifton College. His father, a soldier and keen butterfly collector, encouraged his early interest in butterflies. He continued this pursuit at Cambridge University, where he studied classics and became a successful rifle and revolver shot. He donated two trophies for varsity shooting matches – one of which is still named in his honour – between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Heslop entered the Colonial Service in 1929 and became an administrator in the Owerri province of Nigeria, where he became a prolific hunter and documented what may be the last reliable sightings of Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi. He returned to England in 1952, where he taught Latin in various preparatory schools until his retirement in 1969. He was also involved in the establishment of several nature reserves, and frequently appeared on British radio to discuss nature.
Heslop's biographer, Matthew Oates, described him as "one of the most successful collectors of British butterflies".Шаблон:Sfn He was regarded as a leading authority on the history of British butterflies and a particular expert on Maculinea arion (large blue), of which he discovered or rediscovered several British populations. He wrote most of Notes and Views of the Purple Emperor, a 1964 collection of papers on Apatura iris, which has been called "a meditation on [his] all-pervading passion".Шаблон:Sfn
Early life and education
Ian Robert Penicuick Heslop was born in India in 1904, shortly after 2 June.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn His father, Septimus, served in the British Army as part of the Royal Engineers.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop grew up in Bristol,Шаблон:Sfn where he attended Clifton College, a public school in the city.Шаблон:Sfn
Septimus Heslop was a keen butterfly collector.Шаблон:Sfn According to Oates's biography, the younger Heslop first began to collect butterflies at the age of seven, when a family member gave him a jar of Pieris larvae to keep him entertained through a bout of mumps. His mother subsequently forbade him from collecting: two years later, however, Septimus returned from service in India and permitted his son to resume the hobby.Шаблон:Sfn On his eleventh birthday, he collected his first Vanessa cardui (painted lady) using a net owned by his uncle, a vicar, who used it to catch bats in his church.Шаблон:Sfn
At Clifton, a number of pupils interested in butterfly collecting attended the school's Scientific Society, which was allowed on periodic afternoons to take trips to collect specimens. In 1921, he made what Oates calls "his first major capture", that of a Nymphalis antiopa (Camberwell beauty) in the Forest of Dean. In 1923, he visited the New Forest, a noted site for butterfly collecting, for the first time, with his father.Шаблон:Sfn
Cambridge University
Heslop's parents intended for him to follow his father into the Royal Engineers, though Heslop himself aspired to a career in zoology or as a museum curator; the family therefore compromised on sending him to Cambridge University with a view to a post in either the civil service or colonial administration.Шаблон:Sfn The journalist Benedict Le Vay described him as "among the pleasantly battiest of 20th-century Cambridge eccentrics".Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop went up to Cambridge in 1923,Шаблон:Sfn where he read classics at Corpus Christi CollegeШаблон:Sfnm and was a member of the Officers' Training Corps.Шаблон:Sfn He met and befriended Charles de Worms, then studying at King's College, who would become a noted lepidopterologist and Heslop's long-time friend and collecting companion.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop and de Worms often travelled to nearby Wicken Fen and the woods near Huntingdon in search of specimens.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop secured what Oates calls a "good" MA, despite spending much of his final year collecting butterflies.Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop was a prominent member of the Cambridge University Small Bore Club (CUSBC), which took part in smallbore rifle shooting: he helped Cambridge to back-to-back victories in the annual varsity match against Oxford University between 1923 and 1926. He received his blue in shooting,Шаблон:Efn and was CUSBC's captain in 1926.Шаблон:Sfn He was also a prominent revolver shot: in 1929, Heslop presented the trophy awarded ever since for the varsity match in revolver shooting, which was known as the "Heslop Match" until 1948.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn He also donated the trophy for the smallbore varsity match, which continues to be known as the Heslop.Шаблон:Sfn
Colonial service
After graduating in 1926, Heslop spent the summer of 1927 on excursions to collect butterflies, then returned to Cambridge in 1928 for a course in colonial administration. On 3 July 1929, he left for Nigeria,Шаблон:Sfn then a British colony, to take up a position with the Nigerian Administration Services as part of the British Colonial Service.Шаблон:Sfn He was stationed in the southern province of Owerri, where he rose to the rank of district commissioner.Шаблон:Sfn His duties in Nigeria included presiding over legal cases: he acted as a magistrate in trials of local people charged with slave trading, and was once required to supervise an execution.Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop learned to speak the Igbo language, and became an expert in local wildlife as well as a prolific hunter,Шаблон:Sfn acquiring the nickname "King of the Hunters". He took part in local ceremonies,Шаблон:Sfn but wrote unfavourably of the people of his district in a report to his British superiors about the Nkalu people:
Heslop took leave twice a year to return to England, usually over the main butterfly-collecting season; he wrote the first edition of his Check-List of the British Lepidoptera while in Nigeria, with little access to libraries or museums.Шаблон:Sfn Despite these difficulties, the Check-List was considered a "standard work" of lepidopterology by the 1970s.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop considered, though never completed, writing a book on his time in Nigeria,Шаблон:Sfn which he later described as the happiest in his life.Шаблон:Sfn
While in Nigeria during the early 1940s, Heslop met and married Eileen Huxford, a Church of England missionary: the two were engaged in 1942.Шаблон:Sfn Huxford took up shooting and butterfly collecting after meeting Heslop, and went with him on hunting expeditions.Шаблон:Sfn In 1951, finding it difficult to raise a family in Nigeria, Eileen and their children returned to England.Шаблон:Sfn They lived in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, which would be Heslop's family home for the remainder of his life.Шаблон:Sfn
Study of the Nigerian pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi)
Heslop has been described as a "key player" in the history of the pygmy hippopotamus, a species known by the name Шаблон:Lang in his jurisdiction.Шаблон:Sfn Before the 1940s, western naturalists generally considered that the animals could not be found in Nigeria, since the nearest generally-recognised population was in Liberia, around Шаблон:Convert to the west.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop made his first report of the existence of the species in Nigeria in 1934.Шаблон:Sfn
However, his observations were frequently disbelieved in the academic community.Шаблон:Sfn He shot two of the animals in 1935 and sent their skulls to the British Museum (Natural History) in London for scientific study.Шаблон:Sfn He shot another in 1943, and prepared the animal's entire carcass as a scientific specimen;Шаблон:Sfn he sent its skin to the British Museum in 1968, and it was used by the naturalist Шаблон:Ill to demonstrate that the Nigerian pygmy hippopotamus was indeed a distinct subspecies from the Liberian (Choeropsis liberiensis liberiensis). Corbet assigned the Nigerian subspecies to the genus HexaprotodonШаблон:Efn and named the subspecies heslopi in Heslop's honour.Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop had intended the specimens he took to serve as evidence of the existence of the subspecies,Шаблон:Sfn which he believed to be on the verge of extinction.Шаблон:Sfn In 1945, he estimated that no more than thirty of the animals remained, divided between small, isolated populations.Шаблон:Sfn He also ate meat from the animal, describing its taste as "intermediate between beef and pork".Шаблон:Sfn He counted the skull and jaw of his third hippopotamus among his most prized possessions, and kept them until his death, when his wife Eileen donated them to the British Museum along with his hunting records.Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop's work with the pygmy hippopotamus remained largely unknown and uncelebrated during his lifetime.Шаблон:Sfn In 1953, the Nigerian Inspector-General of Forests acknowledged the pygmy hippopotamus as among Nigeria's native mammals, albeit as the one with the narrowest known geographical range.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop's reports remain the last confirmed sightings of the Nigerian subspecies,Шаблон:Sfnm and it was designated extinct on the IUCN Red List in 1994.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop is the only person known to have written an account of Choeropsis liberiensis heslopi in the wild.Шаблон:Sfn
Butterfly collecting
Heslop's attitude to butterfly collecting has been described by Oates as "turning the gentle pursuit of butterflies into an extreme country sport".Шаблон:Sfn He collected his first example of Leptidea sinapis (wood white) on the tracks at a railway station, only narrowly escaping being hit by an oncoming express train. In 1968, aged sixty-four, he waded and swam into a flooded Woodwalton Fen to collect examples of Lycaena dispar batavus (large copper).Шаблон:Sfn
He had a particular interest in Maculinea arion (large blue); in 1949, he rediscovered the existence of the species in the Polden Hills of Somerset, and later discovered previously-unknown populations of it in the Quantock Hills and near Minack Head in Cornwall.Шаблон:Sfn In his obituary of Heslop, the naturalist John F. Burton wrote that he had probably been the greatest living authority on the distribution of the species.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop's greatest obsession, however, was with Apatura iris (purple emperor), which he called in his diary "the monarch of all the butterflies".Шаблон:Sfn
De Worms considered Heslop's acquisition of specimens from sixty-five species to be the most ever attained by a single person, and described Heslop as "probably the foremost authority of his day" on the history of British butterflies.Шаблон:Sfn Among butterfly collectors, he acquired the nickname "the Purple Emperor" after Apatura iris,Шаблон:Sfn following a tradition of ascribing to collectors the name of a particular species: de Worms, for instance, was nicknamed "the setaceous Hebrew character" after the moth Xestia c-nigrum.Шаблон:Sfn Heslop kept thorough notes on where and how he acquired his butterflies, but refused to share detailed information about where he found rare species such as Apatura iris, for fear that other collectors would damage the sites or butterfly populations.Шаблон:Sfn
Michael Salmon, a historian of British butterfly collecting, describes Heslop as a "[naturalist] with the blood of the old Aurelians in [his] veins", referring to the eighteenth-century pioneers of the discipline who formed London's Society of Aurelians.Шаблон:Sfn On Heslop's death, his wife Eileen donated his collection of British and African butterflies to the Bristol City Museum.Шаблон:Sfn The collection included over 150 specimens of Apatura iris alone.Шаблон:Sfn
Notes and Views of the Purple Emperor
Heslop published Notes and Views, originally intended as a guide to collecting Apatura iris, in 1964, alongside the naturalists George E. Hyde and Roy E. Stockley. It comprises a collection of thirty-three papers, often reprints from academic journals, of which twenty-nine were written by Heslop, three by Stockley and one by Hyde, who also provided the book's colour photographs. Heslop funded part of the publication himself, gathering the remaining funds by private subscription.Шаблон:Sfn
Oates has described the book as "gloriously anachronistic", partly because most of the papers had been written during the early-to-mid 1950s and were already behind Heslop's own knowledge of Apatura iris, and partly owing to the archaic, classicising style of Heslop's writing: Oates judges that there is "more Latin and Greek in the book than science".Шаблон:Sfn Reviewing the work in The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation, the journal's editor S.N.A. Jacobs wrote that it had "more appeal to the enthusiastic amateur than to the professional entomologist" and criticised Heslop's vagueness as to the precise locations of Apatura iris habitats, but praised the detail of the work and Hyde's photography.Шаблон:Sfn Oates considers it "a masterpiece in obsession, a meditation on an all-pervading passion, and a literary monument to the history of butterfly collecting".Шаблон:Sfn
Later life
Heslop returned from Nigeria in 1952,Шаблон:Sfn and taught Latin in sixШаблон:Sfn British preparatory schools.Шаблон:Sfn These schools were located in Wiltshire, Sussex, in the CotswoldsШаблон:Sfn and near Romsey in Hampshire, all – "providentially", as de Worms put it in his obituary of Heslop – located near rich habitats of Apatura iris and other collectable butterflies.Шаблон:Sfnm He was involved in the establishment of nature reserves around the United Kingdom, including Blackmoor Copse near Salisbury and Shapwick Heath in Somerset.Шаблон:Sfn
Towards the end of his life, Heslop was a frequent panellist on Country Parliament,Шаблон:Sfn a BBC Radio 4 show which answered listeners' questions on wildlife and the countryside.Шаблон:Sfn He retired from teaching on 22 July 1969.Шаблон:Sfn He fractured his hip in a fall in March 1970,Шаблон:Sfn bringing on an embolism from which he died on 2 June 1970.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn
Personal life
Oates describes Heslop as "a large and distinctive man, with a stentorian delivery and a voluble command of English".Шаблон:Sfn He has also been characterised as "a solitary creature, preferring the peace and privacy of collecting on his own to the companionship of others".Шаблон:Sfn
Heslop had one son, and daughtersШаблон:Sfn named Margaret,Шаблон:Sfn and Jane.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn
Selected publications
Footnotes
Explanatory notes
References
Sources
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