Jennifer Owen

Jennifer Owen was a British zoologist and ecologist. She led a 30 year wildlife study (1972–2001) in a single suburban midlands garden recording 2,673 species. Notably she did this without funding, working with the RHS, and universities in Britain and America. Living with multiple sclerosis, she made her last recording in 2001. She is described as "one of the great heroines of the 20th-century environmental movement".^[1]

Jennifer Bak was the daughter of F.A. Bak, ^[2]a noted amateur ornithologist and Leicester based textile manufacturer. She studied zoology at the University of Oxford in 1955. She studied under academics such as Charles Sutherland Elton. She gradudated with a first class degree. At university she met Denis Owen. They married after graduation in 1958 and she went to the University of Michigan to work as a teaching fellow and complete a research PhD on wasps. ^{[1] [3]} After her doctorate she took up teaching positions from 1962 in Makerere University, Uganda and Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone as well as Sweden. While in Africa she noted that her garden had more species of butterfly than the nearby rainforest, due to hosting the savanna species too.^[1]

On Owen's return to the department of zoology at the University of Leicester in 1971 she noticed the large number of insects in her garden in the Humberstone suburb of Leicester, so she started to record them in 1972.^[1][4][5] Her home was a four bedroom, 1920s house on Scraptoft Lane, with a 741sqm garden. ^[1]

She was one of the first ecologists to recognise the importance of gardens for wildlife, acknowledged in the title of a 1975 joint paper with Denis, which just focused on the butterflies (15 species), hoverflies (74 species) and ichneumonid wasps (455 species) she had recorded in their garden, ^[6] followed by a later study on ichneumonids and hoverflies.^[7] Her broader results of garden monitoring were then presented in a popular book, Garden Life (1983). But after 15 years she was able to present a more complete picture in The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years (1991), described by biologist Ken Thompson as "the most complete account of the wildlife of any garden anywhere in the world".^[8] It contained records of 2,204 species (1,782 animals and 422 plants) recorded from the garden.

After 30 years of recording (1972–2001) she published an updated book, Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-Year Study (2010), which revealed a total of 2,673 species, including 533 species of ichneumonid wasp, 442 species of beetle, 375 species of moth, 183 species of bug, 94 species of hoverfly, as well as 474 species of native and garden plants and 64 species of vertebrate (54 of them birds). She recorded 20 invertebrate species new to Britain, four of which were previously undescribed.^[8][9] She discovered in her garden six species of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) previously unknown to science.^[1] In Thompson’s words “Few enough of us would contemplate trying to assemble a complete inventory of the beetles, birds, butterflies (and a great deal else) in our gardens for even one year; to persist for 30 years is an achievement that will probably never be equalled". ^[8] "It is estimated that had she the time and expertise available, the final tally would have been in excess of 8,000 species." ^[1] In the 21st century, "the plot has endured the fate of so many of its neighbours. Once home to broad leaf trees, vegetables and a pond, it has been drained, felled and block-paved". ^[1]

In 2010 Owen was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Memorial Medal for outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture and the British Ecological Society's Ecological Engagement Award.^[10][8]

Owen had a son and a daughter with Denis Owen. They divorced in 1994.^[3] In the 1980s she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she was a wheelchair user in later life. ^[1] She died on 8 November 2015 and is interred at Scraptoft Natural Burial Ground.

• Owen, J. 1982. Feeding Strategy. University of Chicago Press ISBN 978-0-226-64186-7
• Owen, J. 1983. Garden Life. Chatto & Windus ISBN 978-0-70112-610-0
• Owen, J. 1984. Mysteries and Marvels of Insect Life. EDC Publishing ISBN 978-0-88110-173-7
• Owen, J. 1991. The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years. Cambridge University Press ISBN 978-0-521-34335-0
• Owen, J. 2010. Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-year Study. Royal Horticultural Society ISBN 978-1-907057-12-0