Alan Best

In today's talk Alan Best is to discuss the balance of power in the animal, vegetable, and insect world, all of them to a great extent interdependent for their very existence, and yet acting as a check on each other should one of the three grow too powerful. He will give examples, and at the same time show how nature's balance may be upset by the introduction of some foreign species. For instance, the American grey squirrel and the musk-rat into Britain.

Alan Best is a young sculptor who is also a keen student of natural history. Born in the West of Canada, he spent two years working and studying in the Museum of Natural History in New York while still in his 'teens. From New York he went to Paris to study sculpture, but spent his summers on the Faroe Islands or visited Stockholm pursuing his hobby-the study of the habits of birds. Birds of prey have always particularly interested him.