Reginald "Reg" Ernest Moreau (29 May 1897 – 30 May 1970) was an English civil servant who worked as an accountant in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and later contributed to ornithology.
His father was hit by the open door of a speeding train and the injury led to a nervous breakdown with periodic episodes of manic-depression.
The burden of earning and care of the family now went to Moreau's mother but in 1907 they moved from Kingston to Rowledge on the edge of Alice Holt Forest and then in 1913 to Farnham.
In his teens he began exploring the neighbourhood on bicycle and through the books of William Henry Hudson took an interest in observing the local birds.
[1] Moreau was a member of the RSPB through which he met Michael John Nicoll, the director at the Giza Zoological Gardens.
There were fears that lone British travellers would be captured by Egyptian nationalists but he found only friendly company and picked up Arabic.
At Alexandria one March, he spotted a lady picking up buttercups among the wheatears and larks that he was observing and found her knowledgeable about birds.
The young couple preferred to live at Maadi close to Wadi Digha where they kept a pet raven and conducted experiments to see if the plumage colours of larks were genetically inherited.
Williams moved to Amani in Tanganyika as Deputy Directory of a research station there and recommended that Moreau should take up work in the accounts department.
He did not have access to any books on the birds of the region until Admiral Hubert Lynes gave him a copy of Anton Reichenow's Vogel Afrikas.
Through these assistants, Moreau obtained notes on incubation, feeding and collected a mass of data on bird nesting.
[5] The Moreau's were also among the first Europeans to note the joking relationships or the utani system that connected tribes in East Africa.
In 1944 he suggested in a paper in the Ibis that birds, even of the same or very closely related species, laid larger clutches of eggs in the higher latitudes than in the tropics.
One idea proposed by Alexander Skutch was that the clutch size had evolved so that the death rate is offset so that bird populations are more or less stable.
[13] After returning from Africa, Moreau settled in "the tiny and unregarded Oxfordshire village of Berrick Salome".
[14] He wrote, "in 1965 I realized suddenly that, because Berrick was so small and because we were fortunate in still having several people whose clear recollections reached back to between 1890 and 1910, it might be possible to build up for a period about the turn of the century a picture of more than purely local interest.
"[14] His study was published Oxford University Press in 1968 as The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century.