Vale Emeritus Professor Henry Allan Nix AO (8 July 1937 – 2 February 2022)

Abstract

With the death of Henry Nix in February, Australia lost an influential and inspiring ornithologist-ecologist and a great enthusiast for birds. Henry was gentle, generous and charming, with an outstanding intellect and wicked sense of humour. A natural, communicator and ideas man, he developed and maintained networks of scientists and amateurs, and inspired and mentored many researchers both in Australia and internationally. Henry grew up in suburban Ipswich, Australia, in a street surrounded by industrial mills, but developed a passion for nature, birds in particular. His family may have subscribed to Wild Life magazine, which had a section for ‘Boys and Girls’, to which, in July 1950, ‘Hal Nix’ contributed an article on the domed nest of a Nutmeg Mannikin, set on a branch about 5 m from the ground. Expecting to see young mannikins, Henry climbed to the nest, instead flushing a rat which ran over him to escape, leaving its two pups. ‘Did rats normally nest in such situations?’, he asked, winning one of several monthly prizes of 5/-. He also wrote asking where he might learn more about birds and was chuffed to receive a letter from Alec Chisholm, urging him to join the Royal Australasian Ornithologist’s Union (subsequently Birds Australia and now BirdLife Australia, (BLA)). This he did early in 1951, when he was 13 years old. The five shilling prize would not have gone far towards the 25 shilling membership fee and he was challenged by the papers in Emu, but he persisted. In 2001, the year the organisation was celebrating its centenary, Henry was elected President, having served on Council since 1999 and a Fellow, the organisation’s highest award, in 2006. In between joining BLA and his stint as President, he had a distinguished career, first as an agricultural communicator and scientist at CSIRO, later in academia (detailed elsewhere, e.g. Anon. 2019; Saunders et al. 2022). He also received many prestigious awards, including Officer of the Order of Australia: ‘for service to the environment, particularly the conservation of natural resources, and to land management through the development and application of simulation models for ecologically sustainable land utilization’. Henry’s final President’s column ended with a plug for what was another of his life’s passions and one of his greatest contributions to science: ‘Reliable data, information and knowledge are central to the development of policies and management strategies to save our birds’ (Nix 2005). From early in his career, he pioneered and promoted the importance of computer-based inventory and evaluation systems to guide policy and management approaches to large-scale ecological challenges. In the 1970s, with colleagues, he developed BIOCLIM, a climatic database package that has found wide application, from agriculture to dung beetle introduction and climate change prediction, particularly through species distribution models (SDM). The principles and ideas behind BIOCLIM have influenced much subsequent research, although this is not always acknowledged (e.g. Booth 2018). Henry’s first BIOCLIM paper was ground-breaking. It predicted the post breeding dispersal movement patterns of Australian birds and has stood the test of time (Nix 1976). Another important and influential paper, on the environmental determinants and evolution in Australia (Nix 1982), paved the way for the current focus on the role of climate change in understanding past, present as well as future biotic patterns. Perhaps his last BIOCLIM publication on birds, on elucidating the distribution of the Superb Parrot, appeared in EmuAustral Ornithology (Manning et al. 2005). In the late 1970s, keen to get a handle on the status of Australian birds, Henry was instrumental in setting up and analysing BLA’s first and second Atlas projects. He was also a dedicated contributor of EMU AUSTRAL ORNITHOLOGY 2022, VOL. 122, NO. 2, 153–154 https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2022.2071632