James Neil Munro Smith, AOU member since 1982, Fellow from 1994 and recipient of the 2002 Brewster Award, ended an 11-year battle with cancer on 18 July 2005, at home and with family. Jamie was a gifted naturalist, unstoppable scientist, consummate teacher and dear friend to many people fortunate enough to have known him well. Jamie's passion and hard work conveyed a positive, encouraging, but critical edge that engaged students and the public alike. He was well known among ornithologists and ecologists for his empirical and synthetic papers in ornithology, ecology, and conservation, but also for his modest nature, constructive advice, provocative questions, and consistently high scientific and editorial standards. With collaborators from around the world, Jamie contributed more than 100 papers emphasizing birds, but including work on insects, plants, amphibians, and marine and terrestrial mammals. Jamie also edited or contributed to benchmark books on cooperative breeding, reproductive success, ecosystem dynamics, and cowbirds. In 2006, the work ornithologists most closely associate with Jamie, Conservation and Biology of Small Populations: The Song Sparrows of Mandarte Island, appeared posthumously. It summarizes 28 years of research, for which he was awarded the Brewster Medal.
Jamie was a master teacher, training more than 40 students and post-docs directly, and hundreds via committee. He was sought out by students with a wide range of interests for his critical mind and legendary editing skills; the latter often delivered with humor, marginal cartoons, and encouraging terminal comments, despite a daunting red maze of arrows, strikeouts, and insertions. Jamie's mentoring style was versatile. He weighed in when students lost focus—once sending a letter including only the word “focus” and signed “god” to a student distracted by his many good ideas—but he also deftly shepherded students who thrived with encouragement and the freedom to work independently. In celebration of his contributions to careers, teaching, and conservation, Jamie was presented awards for teaching by the University of British Columbia (UBC) and for lifetime achievement by the Canadian Society of Ornithologists.
Jamie, along with Judy Myers, a zoologist and Jamie's partner for over 30 years, cultured a deep and inclusive family life that perennially welcomed students and visitors into a home designed to facilitate collegiality and the exchange of ideas. Fireside chats in the MyersSmith great room are recalled by generations of scientists who either sat cross-legged opposite rising stars and visiting luminaries on the seminar circuit, or responded to pointed questions in the “hot seat” after a relaxed and social dinner. With a guestbook signed by many of the world's best-known ecologists, the Myers-Smith home was a warm and stimulating venue, emphasizing academic camaraderie and discussion, and an always welcoming home away from home for visiting scientists and former students. There is no doubt that Jamie's openness, warmth and intellectual strengths made him a model “scientist-parent” for those seeking a balance of personal and academic accomplishment. Despite missing him deeply, colleagues, friends and students will now extend Jamie's influence by practicing his many lessons, consciously or not.
From birth on 1 May 1944, on the Isle of Bute in Rothesay, Scotland, Jamie was exposed to the islands and wild places that later became his passion. This passion, encapsulated in a teenage devotion to golf that took him to second place at the Scottish Junior Championship, also led Jamie to an interest in birds at the age of 8. Encouraged initially by his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Robbie Fulton, and naturalist Dorothy Marshall, Jamie's research interests quickened particularly on a trip with friend John Shanks to a gannet colony in the Firth of Clyde, while enrolled in chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. With additional encouragement by Prof. Mark Williamson and Scottish naturalist George Waterson, Jamie graduated from Edinburgh in 1967 as a Zoologist, and moved immediately to pursue a D.Phil. under J. “Mike” Cullen at Oxford.
Jamie's arrival at Oxford coincided with the rapid growth of theory and debate on the limits to population growth and roles of selection and drift on individuals, populations, and communities. These topics resonated with Jamie, underscored much of his later work, and led him to many friendships with students and visitors to Tinbergen's Centre for Teaching and Research in Animal Behavior, Lack's Edward Grey Institute for Ornithology, and Elton's Bureau of Animal Populations from 1967 to 1972. Jamie's desire to test burgeoning theory also led him to a program of empirical studies punctuated by experimental work in the lab and field. At Oxford, Jamie also expressed an interest in conservation and social policy. Jamie joined Marion and Richard Dawkins, Peter Grant, Desmond Morris, Chris Perrins, Dan Janzen, and 27 others in a 1972 letter to Nature, to counter “The Case Against Hysteria,” an unfortunate editorial downplaying “half-baked anxieties about what is called the environmental crisis.”
Jamie's research at Oxford focused on foraging behavior and had an immediate effect on the field by drawing attention to constraints faced by foragers deciding where and how to feed. Jamie's thesis on food searching in Song Thrushes and European Blackbirds was published as two papers in Behaviour in 1974. Still cited regularly, the papers report an exhaustive set of observations on wild birds feeding naturally and on artificial baits set out in ways similar to those B. Clarke used in Edinburgh to study apostatic selection. But two studies conducted outside the thesis were perhaps more influential. The first, published with R. Dawkins in 1971, used hand-reared Blue and Great tits in a lab designed to control the quality of “habitat patches” to test key assumptions about the perception of profitability in birds. The second, published with H. P. Sweatman in 1974, extended the approach to test predictions by T. Royama and others that predators maximize efficiency by sampling habitats, spend more time where success is high, and depress prey numbers as a consequence. Smith and Sweatman supported these predictions, but also advised that optimal solutions to foraging problems were complicated by constraints on efficiency resulting from handling time, prey depletion and diversity, and social factors limiting access to food. They concluded, “since evolution results from a series of selective compromises, it is unlikely that truly optimal foraging will be found in nature.” These four papers established Jamie as a clever experimentalist with important lessons on the consequences of individual variation and the expression of optimal behaviors in nature.
With success at Oxford behind him and a Smithsonian Fellowship in hand, Jamie turned his attention to the consequences of feeding specialization in birds for morphological evolution and community composition. In 1973, Jamie joined Peter and Rosemary Grant and Ian and Lynette Abbott for trips to the Galápagos Islands to test van Valen's niche-variation hypothesis as applied to finches. In prophetic papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Ecology, they collectively suggested that natural selection had a controlling influence on phenotypic variation in finches via its effects on individual fitness, but also noted that the tempo of divergence was likely to vary as a function of climate and the intensity of selection. Three decades of outstanding science now support and extend these ideas. In Panama, Jamie also studied Great-tailed Grackles before joining an expedition to Cocos Island, where he and Sweatman contrasted the morphology and feeding styles of Cocos Finches to congeners in the Galápagos. Without time to spare, Jamie departed in August for UBC, replacing J. R. Krebs and accepting the position he held until his death.
In fall 1973, Charley Krebs, Carl Walters, Don Ludwig, Buz Holling, and others at the UBC Department of Zoology and Institute for Animal Resource Ecology were asking key questions in ecology and demonstrating a “muddy boots” ethic for which UBC became known. Jamie was pre-adapted to this mix of theory and empiricism, fell in naturally with his colleagues, and soon met a lifelong partner in Judy Myers. Jamie learned of Mandarte Island from the Grants, previously at UBC, and Dennis Chitty, advisor to Frank Tompa's 1963 thesis on the Song Sparrows resident there. By 1974, Mandarte had hosted 17 years of bird study, and M. M. Nice, R. F. Johnston, and Tompa had proved the merits of Song Sparrows. With a species and island at hand, in 1975, Jamie began recording the life histories of an entire population of marked birds.
Mandarte Island's small size and high Song Sparrow densities allowed Jamie to extend his interests in behavior, ecology, and evolution. Jamie and collaborators such as D. A. Roff, Y. Yom-Tov, R. Zach, A. A. Dhondt, R. D. Montgomerie, and M. J. Taitt, described how sparrows adjusted parental care and brood size to maximize reproductive rate, tested for extrinsic limits on the timing of breeding via food addition and, inspired by S. J. Hannon's work on Willow Ptarmigan, tested experimentally how females responded to the loss of male care and variation in adult sex ratio. Pursuing ideas from the Galápagos, Jamie estimated the heritability of morphological traits and then confirmed these experimentally using brood swaps. By 1979, Jamie had also gathered five years of life-history data for hundreds of birds and was comparing these data to theories of G. C. Williams and others on longevity and reproductive effort.
In 1979-1980, Jamie took leave from UBC and Mandarte to visit J. Kikkawa and the silvereyes of Heron Island and write up his work on life history. He could not have imagined that an overwinter population crash on Mandarte would facilitate his work by ending the lives of nearly all birds there at his departure in 1979 and heighten the impact of subsequent papers about the correlates of lifetime fitness and the effects of brood parasitism. Intrigued by the population's instability, Jamie returned to Mandarte in 1980 to band young and to find ways to extend the study amid the duties of fatherhood. I met Jamie in spring 1981, filmed his daughter Isla's first steps, and banded my first immigrants to the island. The prospect of studying on Mandarte with Jamie was a revelation; I recall a vigorous Scottish giant with ruddy cheeks, wild hair, lilting voice and guitar, and a maze of trails and banded birds. Jamie's offer to join him on Mandarte turned my life forever in a positive direction.
Over the next two decades, Jamie and his students published on a wide range of topics, including waterfowl; goshawks; alpine, tropical, and marine birds; and cowbirds and their hosts. Early collaborations with C. J. Krebs and A. R. E. Sinclair and his direction of large-scale studies of passerines and raptors eventually became the Kluane Boreal Forest Ecosystem Project. On Mandarte, Jamie and students worked on territoriality, food limitation, population regulation, life-history evolution, and the environmental impacts of cowbirds. With D. Schulter and E. Nol, the effects of natural selection on traits linked to reproduction and survival and the developmental effects of age on reproduction were documented. Jamie, with I. G. McLean and C. Rodgers, studied enemy recognition in American Robins and the winter feeding tactics of passerines. By 1989, however, Jamie also questioned the devotion to long-term monitoring, echoing Chitty's 1967 criticism of Lack's “sacred cow that undertaking long-term studies is the best way to decide among rival theories.” Seeking new questions, especially those related to conservation, Jamie ceded the Mandarte sparrows to my students and me and established a research program in the interior of British Columbia. Jamie's decision released him to pursue work on cowbirds and their hosts in Michigan and British Columbia, produce synthetic works on cowbird management, and advise students and recovery teams working on problems related to forestry and small population size in Vancouver Island marmots, spotted owls, goshawks, and orcas. Jamie also maintained his commitment to experimental science. Concerned about the implications of work on Mandarte linking cowbirds to nest depredation, Jamie tested for these effects directly by reducing their numbers sink-habitats occupied by Song Sparrows near Vancouver. On Mandarte, halving parasitism raised nest success in sparrows and reversed the negative trend in their population growth rate. In 2001, Jamie again turned his attention to Mandarte; pursing a desire for synthesis, he led three generations of researchers to complete a book that, regrettably, he never saw printed.
Jamie made sustained contributions to science at many levels for nearly 40 years. He influenced a generation of scientists, and his work on sparrows and cowbirds has had a broad impact. Jamie's mentoring skills and uncommon generosity with data enriched the careers of many, and an award in his name will continue to encourage fieldwork by UBC undergraduates. In Canada, his loss is felt particularly among conservationists in search of even-handed advice. Although he is gone, Jamie's lessons are clear, and many who knew him now practice them.
