Tracing A Seabird Legacy
Dunedin-born author and photographer Neville Peat’s latest book Seabird Genius: The Story of L.E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross, and the Yellow-eyed Penguin, is included in the Guardian’s Christmas ‘Birdbooker Report’. “[This is] the first biography of Lance Richdale (1900-1983), who achieved international fame as the father of Otago’s albatross colony from 1936 and for his research on the behaviour of the Yellow-eyed Penguin — Time magazine dubbed him ‘The Dr Kinsey of the penguin world’. Peat’s biography searches the traces left by this shy and obsessed man for some answers to two questions: why? and what drove him? Richdale’s legacy is a nature tourism industry in Dunedin worth $100 million a year and the longest-running seabird population study in the world.” Peat has written over 30 titles since the late 1970s.
