Second lifetime achievement award for Cooper

A lifetime and counting: John Cooper (left), pictured with BirdLife South Africa chairperson, Vernon Head, was recently awarded the organisation's Gill Memorial Medal.

Retired UCT ornithologist John Cooper has raked in yet another lifetime achievement award for his nearly four decades of study on seabirds. Cooper, now a research associate at the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University, was awarded the Gill Memorial Medal of BirdLife South Africa, making him the first ever local seabird expert to receive the prestigious award.

In February he also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Seabird Group in Hawaii.

Cooper retired from UCT in 2008 after 35 years of research on seabird biology and conservation with the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology and the Animal Demography Unit.

In his acceptance speech aptly titled My Life - An Alternative View, Cooper looked back on his career - from seabirds, clearly, to broader interests, including the arts, history and cycling.