Vale Richard Zann
RICHARD ZANN, who died tragically with his wife Eileen and daughter Eva in the Kinglake fires on Saturday 7 February 2009, was a highly respected teacher and ornithologist with an international reputation for his work on bird behaviour.
He joined the Department of Zoology at La Trobe University in 1972, following an Honours degree in Zoology from the University of New England and Ph D at the University of Queensland under the mentorship of Jiro Kikkawa. His thesis studies probed aspects of the evolution of behaviour and vocalisation in grassfinches, setting his perspective to a combination of penetrating field studies and patient and disciplined laboratory investigation that were to characterize his career, and to mould the attitudes of his graduate and honours students over the ensuing 36 years.
Richard became a leading authority on the Zebra Finch, one of the most popular birds in aviculture and which had paralleled canaries and the budgerigar in being domesticated and producing numerous colour variants. It had also become very popular for experimental studies on behaviour.
However, rather little was known about this key species in the wild, and Richard initiated long-term field studies to settle theoretical questions about ‘how the Zebra Finch worked’ in its natural environment, as vital background to making sense of laboratory studies published in many parts of the world. Additionally, he was able to pose further probing questions for investigation.
Richard was particularly interested in the development of song, and his early finding that young males learned much of their song from their father during a critical period of development had far-reaching implications in the wider arena of kin recognition and learning.
His string of research papers in the leading journals in his discipline led to his magnum opus, a 335 page monograph on the Zebra Finch published by Oxford University Press, and integrating his own work firmly into the massive corpus of earlier literature. Rightly, it has become a classic. In recent years, he had extended his research interests into the sound repertoire of another amazing Australian bird, the lyre bird.
When the then Professor of Zoology, Ian Thornton, initiated a series of expeditions to investigate the biota and colonization patterns of the Krakatau archipelago in the early 1980s, Richard was a ‘natural’ to lead investigations on the birds, and later coordinated the vertebrate data from this important research exercise in biogeography very effectively.
His citation for the award of the D.L. Serventy Medal of Birds Australia for 1998, Australia’s most prestigious accolade for ornithologists, included tribute to his significant contributions toward knowledge of Zebra Finches and Krakatau. Commenting on his Krakatau work, the citation noted: ‘These studies have placed Krakatau alongside the Galapagos Islands in the annals of island biogeography.’
Richard was also a key figure in setting up and developing the La Trobe Wildlife Sanctuary, a key teaching and research facility for the University and environmental resource for the wider community. He chaired the Academic Board’s Wildlife Reserves Management Committee throughout most of the 1970s and ‘80s, until 1994.
However, Richard was not simply a cloistered researcher. He was a dedicated family-man devoted to his wife Eileen and children Christopher and Eva. Generations of undergraduate students have followed his lectures and laboratory classes, and his high rankings from student surveys reveal the respect and liking that a good teacher can foster.
He had an unusually perceptive appreciation of statistics and was THE first person to whom many graduate students took their problems in experimental design and analysis. His patient advice, sometimes involving considerable time and effort, was always given willingly and improved the quality of research well beyond his immediate spheres of interest.
Richard will be sadly missed, by his colleagues, friends and students at La Trobe.