John Martin Boyd

John Morton Boyd CBE, FRSE (published as J. Morton Boyd; 31 January 1925 – 25 August 1998) was a Scottitish zoologist, author, and conservationist.

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Quotes

The 1870s saw the awakening of a desire among scientists to become more highly organized. The influence of Huxley and Darwin among others had spread north and the tangible outcome was the botanical papers by J. H. Balfour and C. C. Babington (1882-84) and J. W. H. Trail (1898-1909). Within this upsurge of interest came the Harvie-Brown and Buckley Fauna (1888) and work on the freshwaters by Scott (1891), followed by the Bathymetrical Survey of the Scottish Freshwater Lochs by Sir John Murray and Laurence Pullar (1910). This was perhaps the first great work of the modern scientific era in the Outer Hebrides and is still the baseline for work on freshwaters, to which little has since been added.
- Boyd, John Martin, ed (1979). "Introduction by John Martin Boyd". The Natural Environment of the Outer Hebrides. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section B: Biological Sciences , Volume 77 [papers from a symposium, 11–12 October 1977]. pp. 3–19. doi:10.1017/S0269727000012604. (quote from p. 4)

The Boreray sheep have survived for 50 years without interference by man and maintain high density on rich maritime pastures heavily manured by seabirds. They are a blackface breed obtained from a cross between old Scottish shortwool and early blackface sheep. There is a population of about 400 on about 55 ha of pasture and the rams and ewes (with lamb and yearling rams) run in separate groups. The survival of rams is poor compared with ewes with an adult sex-ratio of about 10 ewes to 1 ram. Numbers of sheep fluctuate between 330 and 460 without causing sheet erosion, landslipping and disruption of the vegetation. The conservation plan for Boreray rests on continued non-interference with the sheep and no sheep should be introduced to the island.
- (July 1981) "The Boreray sheep of St Kilda, outer hebrides, Scotland: The natural history of a feral population". Biological Conservation 20 (3): 215–227. DOI:10.1016/0006-3207(81)90030-6.

Conservation of nature is a culture of the twentieth century possessing its own philosophical, ethical and scientific frame which is distinct from those of agriculture, forestry and other producer industries. In the latter, conservation is directed towards the creation and maintenance of the quality and quantity of the product, be it cereal, wood pulp or automobiles; in the former, nature conservation is directed towards the maintenance of numbers of different species distributed in different assemblages of natural or semi-natural type and towards the care of geological and physiographical features.
- "Nature conservation by John Morton Boyd". Two Hundred Years of the Biological Sciences in Scotland. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section B: Biological Sciences, Volume 84. 1983. pp. 295–336. doi:10.1017/S0269727000013841.