Wilderness and Plenty

by Frank Fraser Darling

Some marking to the tanned page edges. Orders received by 3pm Sent from the UK that weekday.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Sir Frank Fraser Darling FRSE LLD (born Frank Darling) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author, who is strongly associated with the highlands and islands of Scotland.

While working as a Clean Milk Advisor in Buckinghamshire, and longing for a research post in Scotland, Fraser Darling heard about the work of the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, and in the early 1930s the Director, Francis Albert Eley Crew, offered him a place there to study for a PhD. From 1929–1930 he was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Breeding and Genetics, part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, at Edinburgh. In 1934 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Living at Dundonnell and later in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive. He described the social and breeding behaviour of the red deer, gulls, and the grey seal respectively, in the three academic works A Herd of Red Deer, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle and A Naturalist on Rona.

In 1944, the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Thomas Johnston, appointed Fraser Darling as Director of the West Highland Survey, tasked with gathering facts to inform future land use and management in the Highlands and Islands. His report, West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology, was finally published in 1955.