Obituary: Luc Hoffmann

WHEN it came to birds, Luc Hoffmann was no elitist. Every species was precious to him. At boarding school in the Swiss Alps he watched migrating passerines—barn swallows, wrynecks, pied flycatchers—flocking through the passes between the peaks. His first scientific article, written at school, was on migrating shorebirds; his first long expedition, at 16 with his friend Dieter, was to Brittany in search of gannets, a bird rarely spotted in France. His doctoral thesis at the University of Basel was on the colour variations in the down of the chicks of the common tern. As an old man, standing tall and straight, he liked to watch the valiant efforts of brightly coloured bee-eaters to fly, and catch their food, in the mistral. And his binoculars often searched for his favourite, the collared pratincole, so small and neat in its brown and white, which also hunted in the air.