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Jennifer Owen
Jennifer Owen (born 9 November 1936) was a British zoologist and ecologist. She led a 30 year wildlife study (1972–2001) in a single suburban midlands garden recording 2,673 species. Notably she did this without funding. Living with multiple sclerosis, she made her last recording in 2001. She is described as "one of the great heroines of the 20th-century environmental movement".
Jennifer Bak was the daughter of Kate and Frank Alan Bak. Her father was a noted amateur ornithologist and Leicester based textile manufacturer. She studied zoology at the University of Oxford in 1955. She studied under academics such as Charles Sutherland Elton and gradudated with a first class degree. At university she met Denis Owen. They married on 12 July 1958, after graduation, and together they had two children. She went to the University of Michigan to work as a teaching fellow and complete a research PhD on wasps. After her doctorate she took up teaching positions from 1962 in Makerere University, Uganda and Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone as well as Sweden. While in Africa she noted that her garden had more species of butterfly than the nearby rainforest, due to hosting the savanna species too.
On Owen's return to the department of zoology at the University of Leicester in 1971 she noticed the large number of insects in her garden in the Humberstone suburb of Leicester, so she started to record them in 1972. Her home was a four bedroom, 1920s house at 66 Scraptoft Lane.
She wrote
"My husband, Denis Owen, and I started investigating in detail the flora and fauna (particularly insects) of our Leicester garden in 1971... It is probably fair to claim that more is known about our backyard than about any other area of similar size...In the United Kingdom there is widespread interest in natural history among people with no formal academic training. Lecturing to and writing for such an audience is very rewarding and, hence, enjoyable. I meet my most enthusiastic audiences when lecturing about garden wildlife, and this has led to my interest in and involvement with urban nature conservation."
Owen described her gardening process:
"My garden is, however, a fairly typical suburban garden, occupying 788 square yards (659 m') on a busy corner only 14 miles from the centre of Leicester. It incorporates the usual features: lawn, flower beds, vegetable patches, rockery, compost heap, an apple tree, various fruit bushes, flowering and evergreen shrubs, ornamental Prunus and exotic conifers. Some departures from conventional gardening practice enhance it as a habitat for insects: pruning and clearing of vegetation are kept to a minimum during summer and early autumn; plants with flowers known to be attractive to insects are encouraged; ground cover is maintained by either cultivated plants or 'weeds'; insecticides, herbicides and other poisons are rigorously excluded; and flowers and vegetables are interplanted, an ancient gardening practice believed to minimise pest outbreaks. Despite this, it is in no sense a wilderness; I grow vegetables, fruit and flowers for cutting, and there is space to sit and stroll. There is every reason to suppose, therefore, that the insect fauna of other gardens is equally abundant and varied."
Owens noted that her garden was in the centre of England, on the outskirts of a city, and so "a larger garden with greater structural diversity, near the coast or a large body of inland water, would have a far longer list" of inhabiting species than her own garden. She was one of the first ecologists to recognise the importance of gardens for wildlife, acknowledged in the title of a 1975 joint paper with Denis, which just focused on the butterflies (15 species), hoverflies (74 species) and ichneumonid wasps (455 species) she had recorded in their garden, followed by a later study on ichneumonids and hoverflies. Her broader results of garden monitoring were then presented in a popular book, Garden Life (1983). But after 15 years she was able to present a more complete picture in The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years (1991), described by biologist Ken Thompson as "the most complete account of the wildlife of any garden anywhere in the world". It contained records of 2,204 species (1,782 animals and 422 plants) recorded from the garden.
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Jennifer Owen
Jennifer Owen (born 9 November 1936) was a British zoologist and ecologist. She led a 30 year wildlife study (1972–2001) in a single suburban midlands garden recording 2,673 species. Notably she did this without funding. Living with multiple sclerosis, she made her last recording in 2001. She is described as "one of the great heroines of the 20th-century environmental movement".
Jennifer Bak was the daughter of Kate and Frank Alan Bak. Her father was a noted amateur ornithologist and Leicester based textile manufacturer. She studied zoology at the University of Oxford in 1955. She studied under academics such as Charles Sutherland Elton and gradudated with a first class degree. At university she met Denis Owen. They married on 12 July 1958, after graduation, and together they had two children. She went to the University of Michigan to work as a teaching fellow and complete a research PhD on wasps. After her doctorate she took up teaching positions from 1962 in Makerere University, Uganda and Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone as well as Sweden. While in Africa she noted that her garden had more species of butterfly than the nearby rainforest, due to hosting the savanna species too.
On Owen's return to the department of zoology at the University of Leicester in 1971 she noticed the large number of insects in her garden in the Humberstone suburb of Leicester, so she started to record them in 1972. Her home was a four bedroom, 1920s house at 66 Scraptoft Lane.
She wrote
"My husband, Denis Owen, and I started investigating in detail the flora and fauna (particularly insects) of our Leicester garden in 1971... It is probably fair to claim that more is known about our backyard than about any other area of similar size...In the United Kingdom there is widespread interest in natural history among people with no formal academic training. Lecturing to and writing for such an audience is very rewarding and, hence, enjoyable. I meet my most enthusiastic audiences when lecturing about garden wildlife, and this has led to my interest in and involvement with urban nature conservation."
Owen described her gardening process:
"My garden is, however, a fairly typical suburban garden, occupying 788 square yards (659 m') on a busy corner only 14 miles from the centre of Leicester. It incorporates the usual features: lawn, flower beds, vegetable patches, rockery, compost heap, an apple tree, various fruit bushes, flowering and evergreen shrubs, ornamental Prunus and exotic conifers. Some departures from conventional gardening practice enhance it as a habitat for insects: pruning and clearing of vegetation are kept to a minimum during summer and early autumn; plants with flowers known to be attractive to insects are encouraged; ground cover is maintained by either cultivated plants or 'weeds'; insecticides, herbicides and other poisons are rigorously excluded; and flowers and vegetables are interplanted, an ancient gardening practice believed to minimise pest outbreaks. Despite this, it is in no sense a wilderness; I grow vegetables, fruit and flowers for cutting, and there is space to sit and stroll. There is every reason to suppose, therefore, that the insect fauna of other gardens is equally abundant and varied."
Owens noted that her garden was in the centre of England, on the outskirts of a city, and so "a larger garden with greater structural diversity, near the coast or a large body of inland water, would have a far longer list" of inhabiting species than her own garden. She was one of the first ecologists to recognise the importance of gardens for wildlife, acknowledged in the title of a 1975 joint paper with Denis, which just focused on the butterflies (15 species), hoverflies (74 species) and ichneumonid wasps (455 species) she had recorded in their garden, followed by a later study on ichneumonids and hoverflies. Her broader results of garden monitoring were then presented in a popular book, Garden Life (1983). But after 15 years she was able to present a more complete picture in The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years (1991), described by biologist Ken Thompson as "the most complete account of the wildlife of any garden anywhere in the world". It contained records of 2,204 species (1,782 animals and 422 plants) recorded from the garden.