Elizabeth Lack

She also had parallel interests in violin and piano and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but the start of World War II brought a premature end to her attendance there.

As a young woman in wartime, she served with numerous other Allied female recruits in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in England and France, maintaining and driving ambulances in Europe.

[1] After her marriage and changing her name to Elizabeth Lack, she continued her research, travelling to the French Pyrenees with her husband at least twice to study the birds and insects that migrated southward toward Spain, through high mountain passes.

Elizabeth and son Peter Lack (aided by James Monk) completed the book and supervised its printing, Island Biology, Illustrated by the Landbirds of Jamaica (University of California Press, 1976).

[1] Elizabeth Lack is widely credited for her "prodigious amount of work" to produce the "massive and authoritative" A Dictionary of Birds compiled for the British Ornithologists' Union with co-editor Bruce Campbell,[4] for which she was awarded an honorary life membership in that organization.