https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8334-1510
Mike Perrin died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of the 28 December 2023. He was 77 years old. He was loved and will be missed by his two sons, Benjamin John Perrin and Ian Robert Perrin, his wife of many years – Megan Ives (neé Jones), and his two brothers Robert and John Perrin. A quietly complex person, Mike is fondly remembered. He led an adventurous life in academia, living and working in several countries, including the UK, Canada, Uganda and South Africa. As an academic zoologist with very broad interests, he engaged with and mentored many budding zoologists, always giving his help and time willingly, and often facilitating their success by quietly working behind the scenes. Mike had a strong sense of responsibility and often took on managerial tasks when others would not. He was dedicated to the success of the evolving academic department at the then University of Natal, that he had largely created since his arrival in 1981. He retired from professional life in 2010 to concentrate on his parrot research, to spend time with his beloved dogs and his family in Australia. He continued engaging with intellectual activities, such as the University of the Third Age and writing books on parrots until the very end.
Mike grew up near Kidderminster in the West Midlands of England. Born to Mary Lloyd and George Perrin, on the 28 December 1946, he was the second of three sons. Family life was happy. Mary, a gentle soul and a country-girl, encouraged Mike’s obvious interest while just a boy, in the natural world until her death in 1966. The garden was home to various pets and had an aviary with budgies and parakeets, in which Mike maintained a life-long interest. He attended Queen Elizabeth I Grammar School in Hartlebury, Worcestershire, where he achieved A-levels in physics, chemistry and biology. During his time at school he played soccer and rugby and was a good swimmer. In 1965, he enrolled at Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he obtained his B.Sc. degree with specialisation in mammalogy and chemistry. He did well at university and in the second year of his degree was awarded a grant to attend the British Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium, Dundee, Scotland. He completed his B.Sc. Honours Degree in 1968, achieving a 2/1 grade and moved immediately to Exeter University in Devon where he completed his PhD in 1971 entitled “Exploratory behaviour as related to trapping results and population estimation in the vole Microtus agrestis hirtus (Bellamy 1839)”. For the next few decades, the ecology of small mammals was his main focus.
Mike met his wife, Megan (Meg), at Exeter University and their first son, Benjamin, was born in 1971. At about this time Mike and his growing family moved to Uganda. He had accepted a lectureship in zoology at Makerere University in Kampala. A photograph of the staff from this time was prominently displayed in his office, which once noticed by visitors led to inevitable questions about living under Idi Amin’s regime. Mike said he knew he had to leave Uganda when bodies began appearing on the lake and floating down rivers! Meg, Ben and Ian, who was born in 1973, retreated to the UK as Uganda became increasingly unstable. Being the responsible person he was, Mike saw out his two-year contract at Makerere University after which he returned to the UK. Needless to say, he did not manage to complete any published research while in Uganda, although Africa and its wildlife would prove to be irresistible to him from then on. Shortly after his time in Uganda, Mike took the family to Manitoba in Canada in 1973, to work as a National Research Council of Canada research fellow in the Environmental Research Branch of the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, in Pinawa. Here he examined the winter coexistence of voles in spruce forest. Driven out by the cold, in 1976 Mike moved his family once again, back to Africa to take up a senior lectureship in zoology at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. This move marked the real beginning of Mike’s academic career. He settled into the life of a university academic, meeting several life-long colleagues and friends. This was a happy time for Mike, during which he started supervising postgraduate research on rodent ecophysiology.
Mike arrived in Pietermaritzburg, at the then University of Natal, in 1981. He had been appointed to the headship of the Department of Zoology at the comparatively young age of 45 years. In the words of one of the postgraduate students of the time, Mike “turned that department from a musty Victorian worm hole into a modern scientific concern” (Craig Daniels). Coincidentally the zoology department moved to a modern and much larger building adjacent to the Agricultural Faculty in late 1983. Modern research laboratories and animal holding facilities enhanced the department’s capabilities, and Mike began supervising more postgraduate research than ever before – rock hyrax, black-backed jackal, samango monkeys, gerbils, the desert golden mole, mongooses, duikers, oribi, elephant shrews, and otters, are just some of the animal species whose ecology was explored with his postgraduate students during these halcyon days. A strong postgraduate spirit permeated the ‘new’ department, which Mike actively encouraged, taking part in staff-student sports and social events and field trips, often as far as Namibia, where Etosha lions were captured for contraception experiments. He emphasised the importance of publishing research by encouraging his postgraduates to write up their theses as a set of publishable research papers. Although the norm now, this was not a common thesis style in the 1980s.
Believing that a department is only as good as its staff, Mike began recruiting staff over the next decade to build research strengths in the disciplines of ecophysiology, limnology, entomology, behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. He made several major changes to the departmental administration, teaching curriculum, research focus and fostered a wider engagement with national and international research institutions and universities. Recognising the necessity for empiricism and a quantitative/numerical approach in modern zoology, the undergraduate syllabus was re-organised and undergraduate electives were restructured to enable a grounding in key areas of theoretical and experimental zoology. Staff were encouraged to teach their research strengths in their course content, with semester courses in African Zoology and Experimental Zoology being introduced at the Honours level.
In 1987, following his initiative, the then separate Entomology Department joined Zoology, and the syllabus was restructured to prevent duplication of courses, and greater flexibility in the semester timing and modular structure of courses was introduced. Subsequently, the method of teaching was changed to focus on understanding the concepts and principles of biology; an experimental and “hands on” field-oriented approach was adopted and learning content was reduced.
In the midst of all of these changes to the academic curriculum and departmental restructuring, Mike took on the deanship of the Faculty of Science from 1986-1989, at the University of Natal. As the Dean, he introduced and established the Science Foundation Programme (for disadvantaged African science students), which was a resounding success and continues to this day. Other initiatives that profoundly improved research and teaching at the University of Natal that arose out of his deanship, were a steady increase in science student numbers; greater security for and the retention of established academic, technical and secretarial positions; departmental accreditation by an independent body; correction of the subsidy-formula differential between the humanities and sciences; appointment of permanent Deans and Dean's secretaries; support for the key growth areas of Molecular Biology and Computer Science; and statistical consultation to improve the quality and productivity of research publications. He was instrumental in recommending that the Minister of National Education commission an enquiry into the future needs of science graduates through an assessment of the then state of Science, Engineering, Technology and Education in South Africa. This while also maintaining his position as head of the Department of Zoology and Entomology.
Recognising the importance and benefits of a close association with professional and funding bodies, Mike was for many years a council member of the Zoological Society of Southern Africa (ZSSA), and the Wildlife Management Association of Southern Africa, the Committee of Control and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Oceanographic Research Institute and the Institute of Natural Resources. In 1990 he took the lead in establishing the Mammal Group of the ZSSA, following contributions made at the International Theriological Congress in Rome. He maintained close associations with the Worldwide Fund for Nature, South Africa (formerly the SA Nature Foundation), the IUCN, the Endangered Wildlife Trust, the Wildlife Society, the World Parrot Trust, and Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife (formerly the Natal Parks Board).
Mike continued in his position as head of the Department of Zoology and Entomology until 1996, when he stepped down. By this time the department had changed in its staff complement, course structure, research strengths and productivity, and had become one of the leading zoology departments in South Africa. However, these changes had taken their toll on Mike. In the opinion of many of his close colleagues, stress-related fatigue, which manifested as bouts of depression and irascibility, necessitated a move away from the crushing responsibilities he had been carrying for 15 years. He began to focus his research on mainly African parrot species, founding and directing the Research Centre for African Parrot Conservation at the now University of KwaZulu-Natal. Perhaps harking back to his childhood, he built aviaries in the animal holding facilities, as well as at his home, for several of the African parrot species he studied. He also initiated field studies and published numerous scientific papers on several African parrot species. His students came from all over Africa, including Madagascar, and from Europe, including Italy and the UK. For many of these parrot species, this was the first time that aspects of their ecology had been systematically studied in the wild and “his body of work remains the foundation of much of what we know of those parrot species today” (Rowan Martin, World Parrot Trust). Mike worked closely with the World Parrot Trust (WPT). Among his many contributions to parrot conservation, Mike was a key player in the development of the 2000 IUCN Parrot Action Plan, leading the section on African parrots.
Following his retirement in 2010, Mike became Emeritus Professor of Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He continued to be an active researcher and penned the definitive book on the Parrots of Africa, Madagascar and the Mascarene islands. Even as his health faltered, Mike maintained a keen interest in parrots and, in 2023, co-authored a review of the research and conservation priorities for the African lovebirds. He moved from his family home in Pietermaritzburg in early 2022, to a retirement village in Howick. Here he taught courses on mammalogy at the local University of the Third Age.
Mike published nearly 300 research articles during his career achieving an H-score of 37 (37 of his research papers were cited at least 37 times). He was a zoologist of his time who sought to describe the natural history of relatively unknown birds and mammals, providing a strong foundation for others to build on. His early career focussed on small mammal ecology and particularly their habitat use, diet, gut morphology and function. Much of his research was directed toward solving human-wildlife conflict and animal conservation. For example, he advised SANCOR on the shark-net causing dolphin deaths problem, which resulted in the formation of the Natal Dolphin Working Group. He contributed to a Natal Provincial working group that established carnivore control methods for predators of sheep. He was an editor for many zoological research journals and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. His contribution to our understanding of the biology of so much of South Africa’s wildlife was immense – current research is in many instances built on the foundations he laid. Many of his students have gone on to be important figures in the life sciences. He leaves an important legacy, not least in the students, researchers and conservationists he inspired.
Mike’s research output can be found at: https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?user=jrsqKewAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao