Stewart Conn

My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle … and gradually I shall be able to piece it together(Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853-1936) As though a neolithic arrowhead he’d unearthed at the age of four had entered his bloodstream, its sliver of flint sparking an obsession, the items he acquired over the years ranged

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that