Rosemary Parslow, who has died aged 90, spent much of her life studying the wildlife of the Isles of Scilly, the archipelago off the coast of Cornwall, on which subject she was the acknowledged authority.
She first set foot on the islands in 1958 to ring seabirds and collect specimens of marine life for the Natural History Museum. That visit, she recalled, “was the start of a lifetime love affair with Scilly”. Visiting the islands once or twice every year, she documented all their wildlife, from seabirds and bats to wild plants and the denizens of rockpools and shallow seas. She was the natural choice to author the standard work on the islands’ wildlife, The Isles of Scilly (2007), in the New Naturalist Library published by Collins.
