Sir Frank Fraser Darling FRSE (23 June 1903 – 22 October 1979) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author, who is strongly associated with the highlands and islands of Scotland.
[1] Living at Dundonnell and later in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive.
[4] The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to Fraser Darling's hopes of undertaking further research on the grey seal and, being too old for active military service, he chose to farm rather than leave the west coast of Scotland for wartime civilian work.
In 1942, the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Thomas Johnston, asked him to run an agricultural advisory programme in the crofting areas of the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
To gather these facts, he recruited five assistants, all young Highlanders: people personally acquainted with the crofting life who could converse with crofters in their native Gaelic rather than in the English of officialdom.
Concerns at the Department of Agriculture about the radical nature of the findings of the survey and its implied criticism of the policies it had been pursuing led to repeated delays to its publication.
The Highlands had first been stripped of their natural forest cover, then they had been subjected to repeated burning, to intensive grazing, to overstocking and to other forms of maltreatment which had drained their soils of fertility and made them steadily less productive.