Norman Moore, who has died aged 92, was a gentle giant in the field of wildlife and conservation policies. He emerged into the public arena during the 1960s as leader of a team that highlighted the devastating effects that organochlorine pesticides were having on British wildlife. The revelation eventually led to a ban on pesticides such as DDT, followed by a slow but dramatic recovery in the populations of many animals at the top of the food chain, in particular birds such as peregrines, eagles, red kites and sparrowhawks.
Moore’s team made its findings at the Nature Conservancy’s Monks Wood research laboratory near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where, from 1960, he was head of the toxic chemicals and wildlife division. The team found that dramatic declines in numbers among birds of prey were primarily a result of egg-shell thinning caused by pesticides, and that species were under threat of extermination because their eggs were structurally too weak to survive in the nest.
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