James Denis Summers-Smith (25 October 1920 – 5 May 2020) was a Scottish ornithologist and mechanical engineer, a specialist both in sparrows and in industrial tribology.
[3] He spent childhood holidays in County Donegal, in northwestern Ireland, where one of his uncles, a country parson and a naturalist, taught him about birds.
He decided to make a serious study of a particular bird species, and chose the house sparrow because of the difficulty of travel at the time, under post-war rationing.
[4] Summers-Smith has studied the house sparrow in Highclere, Hampshire; in Hartburn, County Durham; and latterly at Guisborough in North Yorkshire, where he settled in 1961.
[11] Over the course of these studies, he visited dozens of countries, and made observations on all the Passer species (recognised in his classification) except the Socotra sparrow.
[15] In 2008, the prize was almost awarded to Dr. Kate Vincent of De Montfort University and several colleagues, who attributed the decline of the house sparrow to falling insect numbers.