Born: 1943, United Kingdom
Died: 16 March 2025
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Dawn Whyatt
This biography has been shared from The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Dawn Frith and her husband, Cliff contributed greatly to Australasian ornithology. They carried out long-term studies of bower birds and birds of paradise in northern Queensland and in New Guinea, from which they have written the first – and often the only – accounts of the nesting biology and behaviour of these species
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Educated University of London (PhD in marine biology ca 1967). Lecturer in zoology for 4 years; worked at the Royal Society of London Research Station on Aldabra Atoll in the western Indian Ocean, monitoring the seasonality of insects for the British Museum of Natural History; senior biologist, Phuket Marine Biological Centre, Thailand 1974-78. Over the past 18 years she and her husband, Cliff, have published more than 50 papers in international ornithological journals, and have also authored an excellent series of books for a more general audience on the fauna of North Queensland. D.L. Serventy Medal, Birds Australia 1996 (jointly with her husband).