Almost 60 years have passed since Kirkcudbright’s June Nelson spent a year studying birds in the Galapagos Islands.
Together with husband Bryan, whose research on gannets was already high in the global pecking order, June would often be naked in the searing heat observing boobies – Pacific gannets – and the Floreana mockingbird, of which fewer than 300 now remain.
Such revelations, I learn, formed a lighthearted backdrop to Bryan’s 1968 book Galapagos: Islands of Birds.
The acclaimed work has a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh who stopped off at the Galapagos in the royal yacht Brittania to learn of the Nelsons’ work.
Sitting with June in her High Street home, you sense that even at 86 she’s still something of a free spirit, with a limitless capacity to take life in its stride.
Her honeymoon was certainly unconventional – she and Bryan, who sadly passed in 2015, spent their first weeks together as man and wife among thousands of shrieking gannets on the Bass Rock.
Now, seven years after Bryan’s death, June has reworked his original book to include her own recollections of their time on the volcanic archipelago, 600 miles out in the Pacific from the coast of Ecuador.
Entitled Galapagos Crusoes: A Year Alone With The Birds, June says the new book is “for the layman who likes an adventure story”.
Prior to their 1964 Pacific sojourn, June and Bryan studied gannets on the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth for three years.
From 1961-63, each February to November when the gannets were breeding and rearing chicks, the newly married couple lived among the colony in a crude hut inside the walls of an ancient holy place.
“Bryan put up a garden shed in the ruins St Baldred’s Chapel, which dates back to 600 and something,” June recalls.
“The rock once had a castle for a garrison and in the 1600s was a prison for Covenanters and then Jacobites.
“Much later a lighthouse was built within the enclosure.”
Bryan – who was to become the leading world authority on gannets – and researcher June logged every detail of the birds’ lives on the rocky outcrop.
“We studied everything – their behaviour, the way they connected with each other, how often they changed over on the nest, how the chicks grew, what they ate – everything,” she tells me.
“We were so busy – it was for Bryan’s three-year Doctor of Philosophy thesis at Oxford. I had been really excited to go and had no real preparation for it.
“It was always cold because it was always windy. We had the hut held down by metal hawsers but it still used to sway from side to side. There was a lighthouse keeper on the island at the time so we were not alone.
“When we were there the gannets were restricted purely to the cliffs. Now there are so many there’s virtually no space.”
Gannets can be very territorial and aggressive – as June discovered to her cost.
“A gannet landed on my head once and left a row of holes on my scalp with blood flowing out!”
Immediately after their Bass Rock work was completed in November, 1963, Bryan and June headed straight to the Galapagos – and en route a crime occurred which shook the world.
“We were in New York when Kennedy was shot,” June recalls.
“We were supposed to be going to dinner with the editor of a magazine who was publishing one of Bryan’s articles.
“She could hardly talk because she was so upset. The whole of New York was totally devastated. Down below the traffic gradually thinned out until there was practically none.
“Then the longshoremen refused to load our boat. They said they were mourning their president and were not going to work.”
Four years later, while Bryan was director at Azraq Desert Research Station in Jordan and June rescued injured wolf cubs and jackals at the oasis, the couple were caught up in another world-shattering event – the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War.
“We were in Amman and the windows of the university were broken by shock waves from the explosions,” June recalls.
“The war was very close. We got arrested in downtown Amman for looking suspicious. The head of the zoology department was our contact and he got us out of the police station.”
June, perhaps through her active outdoor life, looks nothing like her 86 years.
Born and brought up in Rawdon, a little village six miles from Leeds, she was born in 1936 three years before World War Two broke out.
“My mother was desperate to go to university but her parents insisted she had to work on the farm,” she recalls.
“She was very bright and talented and was hockey captain and school captain. She had tremendous potential but ended up quite depressed. Back then it was quite hard for women.
“At school we had an air raid shelter where we had to go with our gas masks and sing Home Sweet Home. Places like Hull had a hard time. People were melting down railings and everybody was digging up their lawns to grow vegetables for the war effort. But in our school garden all we planted were cornflowers and marigolds!
“It was all make do and mend – I remember my grandmother, Mable Ives, cutting up my grandfather’s suit and old socks to make rugs. We had no central heating, no double glazing, no fitted carpets, no fridge and no washing machine. My mother Kitty kept everything cool in the oven!
“We had a range and my grannie was a prize baker – she won prizes at shows for all manner of bread and Sally Lunn, a type of teacake. There was rationing too – occasionally we had a quarter-pound box of Dairy Box and my father Morris would divide up the chocolates into five so that everybody would get two and a little bit each.
“He would close his eyes, somebody would point to one of the little piles, then he would say the name of the person who would get it. I have that same passion for fairness and that passion has remained with me. I feel it now about how awful the world is.
“Look at Boris Johnson and all his shenanigans and all the beastly things that are happening. I’m ashamed to be English and view myself as Scottish.
“It’s appalling – and Priti Patel sending refugees to Rwanda for processing is totally disgusting. Australia is doing the same detaining refugees on Christmas Island, one of its territories in the Indian Ocean. Bryan and I lived there for two spells studying the Abbott’s Booby.
“On the one civilised corner of the island was a supermarket and sailing club. All the rest was jungle – or had open cast phosphate mining companies cutting down these trees where the boobies were nesting.
“Can you imagine – gannets nesting 100 feet up in trees?
“They couldn’t take off from the ground so they were helpless.
“Bryan contacted Malcolm Fraser, the Australian prime minister, and appealed to Prince Philip who interceded with Mr Fraser to stop the mining in the nesting areas. This wonderful chap, David Powell, tried to rescue the chicks because they had all fallen on the ground.”
“There’s a national park now.”
Unlike male gannets in Scotland, their Christmas Island counterparts were not aggressive to their chicks and partners.
“We found a nest in a tree on a cliff and climbed up to weigh the chick every day, to observe how they grew and how often they were fed,” June explains.
“The parents were not used to seeing people up there and were quite trusting.
“We took turns to go up and do the weighing. I think that Bryan was the first person to photograph an Abbott’s Booby.
“We were out there in 1968 and on New Year’s Day 1974 went back and took our children, twins Simon and Becky.”
Her education, June tells me, began at the National School in Rawdon – which did not long survive her departure.
“It burnt down not long after I left,” she smiles. “I didn’t do it!
“After that I went to Aireborough Grammar School – and that was demolished. I had nothing to do with that either – I had been left a long time.
“I got Highers to go to uni and got a place to study English but at that time you had to have Latin – and I had German.
“I was never told I needed Latin – it was bizarre. So at 18 I sat a civil service exam and got a post in London.
“They had wanted to send me to Leeds but I wrote secretly to the civil service and asked if I could possibly go somewhere else. So they sent me to London – yippee!”
In 1955 the Swinging Sixties were still years away – and away from work June took to the stage.
“I was in a play in the West Central Hall, a Methodist church, and played a country bumpkin,” she laughs.
“I wore Norah Batty stockings but at the end of the play I had this boyfriend who invited me to a ball.
“When I came out on the stage in this wonderful ball gown this gasp went round the audience – it was the triumph of my life!
The bumpkin had turned into a beautiful swan.”
June passed her test in London “driving along Park Lane for lessons” with perks of her job including cut-price theatre tickets and skiing holidays.
“It was brilliant,” she laughs. “I lived in a hostel to start with and there were four of us to a room.
“My friend would laugh when she opened my wardrobe door – there were tennis rackets and all sorts of stuff for a vast range of activities.”
How did she and Bryan meet, I wonder?
The answer, it transpires, was through her ornithologist godmother, Olave Pennock.
“I’d been birdwatching with my her since I was 12,” June recalls.
“She would stand with binoculars watching the lapwings. And when the parents flew up the chicks would squat down and she would ring them.
“Every Sunday morning I would go on the bus and meet her. When I was still at school she said ‘I have one or two nice men I will introduce you to – but not until you have left school! She would take me birdwatching to Spurn Point near Hull and knew Bryan because he gave talks to Wharfedale Natural History Society and would put him up for the night.
“I thought Bryan was very handsome. Older members used to go for a morning coffee and Bryan and I stayed to ring birds. It started to rain and we sheltered under a table – and I insisted sharing my apple with him.
“Bryan was just about to go to St Andrew’s University so we were a long way apart. He was determined he was never going to get married.
“He thought nobody would be prepared to do the daft things he would do. But things between us just evolved and we wrote to each other a lot.
“Bryan came down to London and invited me to one of the university balls which was a real highlight. Then we had a holiday together and went up to Deeside and Glen Feshie – everything was totally innocent back then. I went with my godmother to the Bass Rock and ringed a gannet before Bryan had!”
In the early sixties, terms of civil service employment were very generous – and June wasn’t long in taking advantage.
“If you worked six years you got a dowry,” she recalls.
“You got a month’s salary for every year you worked. The whole thing was £300 and we decided to get married in Ben Rhydding, near Ilkley, on the first possible day the dowry was due – December 31, 1960.
“The dowry money paid for a deposit on our house in Aberdeen, where Bryan was a lecturer at the university.”
The Nelsons moved to Galloway in 1983, first to Balmaghie Manse, when the twins were nine, then to a farm cottage at Auchencairn below Bengairn.
“The location was beautiful,” says June.
“It was the most fantastic place for wildlife and there were curlews and lapwings nesting all round about you.
“Now there’s a Sitka plantation which the local forest chaps say is no good for anything.”
Bryan was awarded an MBE for his work in 2006 and for their golden wedding the couple embarked on a world tour, taking in New York, Hawaii, Australia then back to Scotland via Hong Kong,
A move to Kirkcudbright from Auchencairn followed in 2014, the year before
Bryan died.
“We just loved Galloway from the start – we were really happy here,” says June with a smile.
“And I love Kirkcudbright – it’s wonderful,”
“It’s near the sea, the people are very nice and I have lovely neighbours.”
Galapagos Crusoes is available at Thomson’s Newsagents in Kirkcudbright and via Amazon.
