Leslie Desmond Edward Foster Vesey-Fitzgerald MBE, Irish-born naturalist and ecologist, was an expert on grasshoppers and locusts, and made extensive botanical collections in many countries.
Vesey-Fitzgerald, known as Desmond or Vesey, was born in Dunleer, Ireland, and graduated from Wye Agricultural College, University of London, in 1930. Joining the Colonial Service in 1932, he worked with the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad and from 1933-1936 conducted research into biological control of sugar cane pests in Brazil, British Guiana and the British West Indies.
Switching the focus of his research to pests of coconut palms, Vesey-Fitzgerald next worked in the Seychelles, Madagascar and coastal East Africa, and in 1938 married Rosalinda Hindson. The couple moved to Malaya in 1939, where Vesey-Fitzgerald was appointed entomologist at the Rubber Research Institute. He joined the war effort here with the Federal Malay States Volunteer.
From 1942-1947 Vesey-Fitzgerald worked in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Oman with the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit. In 1946 he was invested as Member, Order of the British Empire (MBE). After a two-year interlude in Kenya as a game warden and biologist, he rejoined the Red Locust Control Unit, this time based at the research centre in Abercorn, Northern Rhodesia (Mbala, Zambia) in the role of Senior Scientific Officer.
Although his work at Abercorn was supposed to consist of a three-month secondment, Vesey-Fitzgerald remained there for 15 years, He then joined the staff of the National Park service in Tanzania as an ecologist, in 1964.
As well as his expert knowledge of insect pests, Vesey-Fitzgerald had a broad knowledge of other invertebrates, notably butterflies and dragonflies, as well as mammals, birds, and snakes. Conducting surveys and making collections everywhere he went, he contributed significant amounts to herbarium collections. He authored numerous works on varied topics, from the vegetation of the Seychelles (1940) to the snakes of Zambia and Tanzania. He was an authority on the grasslands of Central and East Africa, on which subject he produced several works in the last decade of his life. He died in Nairobi in 1974.
Vesey-Fitzgerald is commemorated in the plant species Aloe veseyi Reynolds and in the Vesey-Fitzgerald's Burrowing Skink (Janetaescincus veseyfitzgeraldi), from the Seychelles. He was a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and of the Royal Geographical Society.
Sources:
1975, Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Series C. Journal of Meetings, 39(11): 57-58
C.A. Spinage, 1992, "Vesey's Horn", Pachyderm, 15.
