Austin Roberts was a South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

n zoologist. He is best known for his Birds of South Africa, first published in 1940. He also studied the mammalian fauna of the region: his work The mammals of South Africa was published posthumously in 1951. The 7th edition of Roberts' Birds of Southern Africa which appeared in 2005, is the standard work on the region's birds.

Life

Roberts, son of a church minister, was born in Pretoria and grew up in Potchefstroom, South Africa. He gained much of his early knowledge of zoology from Thomas Ayres

Thomas Ayres

Thomas Ayres was a British born South African ornithologist. In 1850 he migrated with his family to Natal where he started to collect birds. In 1865 he and his brother Jack moved to Potchefstroom, where they hunted and traded with the Boer settlers...

 (1828–1913), one of South Africa's first amateur ornithologists. Roberts was employed by the Transvaal Museum

Transvaal Museum

""The Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, formerly Transvaal Museum, is a natural history museum situated in Pretoria, South Africa....

 from 1910 to 1946. From this base he studied the bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

s and mammal

Mammal

Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young...

s of South Africa. To further research, he established a collection of ca. 30,000 bird and 13,000 mammal specimens at the museum. He was author of several manuscripts and articles in scientific publications. In 1935 the University of Pretoria

University of Pretoria

The University of Pretoria is a multi campus public research university located in Pretoria, the administrative and de facto capital of South Africa...

 awarded him an honorary doctorate degree. Austin Roberts died on May 5th, 1948 in a motor car accident in the Transkei region.

The Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary in Pretoria

Pretoria

Pretoria is a city located in the northern part of Gauteng Province, South Africa. It is one of the country's three capital cities, serving as the executive and de facto national capital; the others are Cape Town, the legislative capital, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital.Pretoria is...

 is named in his honour.

Works

• The Mammals of South Africa. Johannesburg 1951–54 (p. m.)
• Our South African Birds
  Our South African Birds
  Our South African Birds is an album of South African birds published in 1941. Printed in English and Afrikaans, it was issued with spaces for 150 cigarette cards distributed by a consortium of tobacco companies....
  
  (Ons Suid-Afrikaanse voëls). Cape Times, Cape Town 1941.
• The Birds of South Africa. H.F.&G.Witherby Ltd., London, 1940.
• Museums, higher vertebrate zoology and their relationship to human affairs. Pretoria 1935.