Vale – James (Jim) Royce McKinlay

1929-2023

The fact that there are still shorebirds nesting on Omaha’s northern tip can largely be credited to the committed work of the late Jim McKinlay, and his wife Laura, in the early 1990s. The couple were among the first to recognise that development at Omaha was putting increasing pressure on the birds, particularly then endangered NZ dotterel. They started trapping pests in 1993, initially targeting cats, until they realised that the greatest culprit in the decimation of the dotterel population at the time was hedgehogs. Once they stopped the hedgehogs from eating the dotterel eggs, t...