As a child growing up on the outskirts of war-ravaged London, my friend Peter Mundy, who has died aged 81, would scramble across the rubble, scavenging anything of interest and imagining himself as a great vulture soaring over the vast African plains. His childhood fantasy led him to Africa in the early 1970s, and that is where I met him, in 1976. Over the following decades I watched him become one of Africa’s leading conservationists and a world expert on African vultures.
Peter was born in Chard, Somerset, to Winifred (nee Blondel), a nurse, and her husband, Alfred, an import-export manager at the Ford plant in Dagenham. Pete grew up in Romford in Essex, where he acquired the broad cockney accent that never left him and amplified his irreverent sense of humour. After attending Royal Liberty grammar school, in 1960 he went to Worcester College, Oxford, to read zoology. He opted, instead, to read the complete works of Dostoevsky and learn the saxophone. Inevitably he was rusticated, and afterwards spent several years playing with various R&B bands, ending up with Screaming Lord Sutch.
In 1972, armed with a BSc in zoology from King’s College London, he sailed for southern Africa to start a DPhil at the University of Rhodesia. A year later he co-founded a group that was to make a huge contribution to vulture conservation in southern African – the Vulture Study Group (VSG). In 1977 he met Verity Cubitt, a sociology researcher, and they married in 1982, two years after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
The VSG published his DPhil thesis, The Comparative Biology of Southern African Vultures, in 1982, and in 1984 Pete was appointed ornithologist in Zimbabwe’s department of national parks. His son, Matthew, was born that year, and his daughter, Emily, in 1987.
By then he had begun work on The Vultures of Africa, with two co-authors, Steven Piper and John Ledger. It was published in London in 1997, selling out its 7,000 print run. In 2003 he became a professor at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, and remained in post until retirement in 2021.
“I have sometimes wondered what good I did for the birds of Zimbabwe,” Pete wrote in 2022. “Certainly, I wrote lots of papers about them, and I ringed thousands of them. But …”
In my view there are no “buts”. The birds of Zimbabwe, of southern Africa, and indeed of the whole continent of Africa, as well as the people who work to study and conserve them, could have had no better champion.
Pete is survived by Verity, his children and his granddaughter, Ashley.
