Hugh B. Cott

His book Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940), popular among serving soldiers, was the major textbook on camouflage in zoology of the twentieth century. After the war, he became a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.

• Birth Name — Hugh Bamford Cott • Born — 6 July 1900 • Birthplace — Ashby Magna, Leicestershire, England • Died — 18 April 1987 • Place of death — Stoke Abbott, Dorset, England • Fields — Zoology • Workplaces — Selwyn College, Cambridge • Education — Selwyn College, Cambridge University of Glasgow • Thesis Title — The Problem of Adaptive Coloration with Special Reference to the Anura • Thesis Year — 1938 • Doctoral Advisor — John Graham Kerr • Known for — Camouflage, Countershading • Spouse — Joyce Radford • Children — 1

Cott was born in Ashby Magna, Leicestershire, England, on 6 July 1900; his father was the rector there. He was schooled at Rugby. In 1919, he graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Leicestershire Regiment. Between 1922 and 1925, he studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He had intended to become a priest, and went to Cambridge to read theology, but after his first year he went on the university expedition to South America, where he studied natural forms in eastern Brazil in 1923, led by the entomologist Frank Balfour Browne, where he became fascinated by natural history, and changed his studies to zoology on his return. He then went on an expedition to the lower Amazon (1925–1926), and on research trips to the Zambesi river area in Africa (1927), including Mozambique, Zambia and East Africa, and Lanzarote (1930). He married Joyce Radford in 1928. He was a lecturer in zoology at Bristol University from 1928 until 1932, when he moved to Glasgow University. He studied under another advocate of military camouflage, John Graham Kerr. His thesis, which he completed in 1935 under a Carnegie Fellowship, was on 'adaptive coloration' – both camouflage and warning coloration – in the Anura (frogs). In 1938 he was made a Doctor of Science at Glasgow, and he became a Zoology lecturer at Cambridge University and Strickland Curator of Birds at the university's Museum of Zoology. Cott served in the Leicestershire Regiment of the British Army as a camouflage expert from 1919 to 1922, and, during the Second World War, with the Royal Engineers as a camouflage instructor from 1939 to 1945. Cott was chief instructor at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Helwan, Egypt, under filmmaker Geoffrey Barkas from its inception in November 1941. After the war, Cott returned to Cambridge, becoming a Fellow of Selwyn College in 1945; he worked there until he retired in 1967. He gave the Fison Memorial Lecture of 1958 on 'Protective Coloration in Animals'. He continued to work from time to time after his retirement, for instance conducting a survey of crocodile nests on the Victoria Nile for the Uganda National Parks in 1972. He died at the age of 86 on 18 April 1987.

• Illustration — Disruptive coloration by Hugh Cott, from Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940) While trying to photograph a hen partridge on her nest, Cott waited for hours for the bird to return, finally taking some pictures of the empty nest before giving up. On developing the photographs, he realized the bird had been there all along, perfectly camouflaged. As a camouflage expert during the Second World War, Cott likened the functions of military camouflage to those of protective coloration in nature. The three main categories of coloration in his book Adaptive Coloration in Animals are concealment, disguise, and advertisement. He studied, described and presented examples of such diverse camouflage effects as obliterative shading, disruption, differential blending, high contrast, coincident disruption, concealment of the eye, contour obliteration, shadow elimination, and mimicry. In his wartime lectures at Farnham Castle, he described nine categories of visual deception: • merging, e.g. hare, polar bear • disruption, e.g. ringed plover • disguise, e.g. stick insect • mis-direction, e.g. butterfly and fish eyespots • dazzle, e.g. some grasshoppers • decoy, e.g. angler fish • smokescreen, e.g. cuttlefish • the dummy, e.g. flies, ants • false display of strength, e.g. toads, lizards • Illustration — Two rail-mounted guns are shown in the photograph. A countershaded one camouflaged by Hugh Cott (above) and one in conventional style (below), August 1940 Cott's account of all this (illustrated by his own pen and ink drawings) is the 550-page book Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940). It was proof-read by Kerr, who commented on its publication 'It is by far the finest thing of the kind in existence'. His co-workers' first-hand accounts of his work in military camouflage can be found in the memoirs of two of his fellow camoufleurs: Julian Trevelyan and Roland Penrose. Peter Forbes wrote of Cott's book: Cott's Adaptive Coloration in Animals must be the only compendious zoology tract ever to be packed in a soldier's kitbag. The book also marks the apotheosis of the descriptive natural history phase of mimicry studies. Although Cott does report experiments on predation to test the efficacy of mimicry and camouflage, the book is essentially a narrative of examples plus theory. • Illustration — Cott was critical of attempts at camouflage not based on "vigorous disruptive contrasts". 1943 painting by Colin Moss of a cooling tower camouflaged with a landscape scene The book was written as war loomed, and published in wartime. Cott makes use of his knowledge of natural history to draw parallels between survival in nature and in war, and to advise on military camouflage, for example commenting: Forbes notes that Adaptive Coloration in Animals is a narrative, short on the experimentation that followed after the war, but Forbes continues: But Cott's book is still valuable today for its enormous range, for its passionate exposition of the theories of mimicry and camouflage. Cott attempted to persuade the British army to use more effective camouflage techniques, including countershading. For example, in August 1940, with the Battle of Britain imminent, he painted two rail-mounted coastal guns, one in conventional style, one countershaded. In aerial photographs, the countershaded gun is essentially invisible. Cott was triumphant, announcing: These photographs furnish most convincing proof of the effectiveness of countershading, and are especially valuable in that we have in them a direct comparison between the two methods. However (like Kerr before him in the First World War), Cott did not succeed in influencing policy on camouflage, and he resigned from the Camouflage Advisory Panel in 1940.

• Illustration — Art with a purpose: Cott's invisible potoo, disruptively patterned Cott was a founding member of the Society of Wildlife Artists, and a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. From material gathered in field expeditions, he made contributions to the Cambridge University zoological museum. Cott possessed considerable artistic skill. Like Abbott Thayer, he used his artistry in his scientific work, including in Adaptive Coloration in Animals, to help argue the case he was making. For example, his black-and-white potoo shows this rainforest bird sitting motionless on a mottled tree trunk, its behaviour and disruptive pattern combining to provide effective camouflage. The philosopher and jazz musician David Rothenberg wrote of Cott's art: Back to Hugh Cott's marvelous engraving of a potoo hidden in a black and white Costa Rican forest, frozen vertically like the tree trunk on which it hides. In nature the visible and invisible dance back and forth with each other, depending on how much we have learned to see. The science and art of this magic merge into one at the moment we grasp it.

• Books * • ————— (1975). Looking at Animals: a Zoologist in Africa. Scribner. • ————— (1959). Uganda in Black and White. Macmillan. • ————— (1956). Zoological Photography in Practice. Fountain Press. • Journals * * * * • ————— (1938). Wonder Island of the Amazon Delta; on Marajo Cowboys Ride Oxen, Tree-Dwelling Animals Throng Dense Forests. National Geographic Magazine.

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