ALTHOUGH his name is not as well known as those of other influential figures in 20th-century ornithology, Tony Norris had an identifiable part in the build-up to the mass public interest in birds that now exists. His special subject was the impact of agricultural changes on birds.

In that respect one of his several books, The Distribution and Status of the Corncrake, had particular poignancy. In decline since Victorian times because of increasingly mechanised harvesting, the species was still fairly widespread while he was a boy. By his old age it was extinct in Britain, apart from a few Scottish islands where traditional farming continues.

Norris’s achievements included instigating Bardsey Bird Observatory off the coast of North Wales. He was then honorary secretary of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), and he went on to figure significantly on the council of the RSPB as it grew into Europe’s biggest conservation organisation. The chairman of the council was his father-in-law, Lord Hurcomb, who figured strongly in the shaping of the historic 1954 Protection of Birds Act.

In his mid-fifties Norris also became proprietor of a nursery specialising in rare lilies of the South African nerine genus, another lifelong passion that also brought him honours.

Cuthbert Antony Norris was born in 1917 at Cradley, Worcestershire, where his father was the vicar. His mother was the daughter of Reginald Hudson, who ran a family printing firm in Birmingham, where Norris subsequently worked and rose to become chairman.

Educated at Monkton Coombe, Bath, Norris went to the London School of Printing, and started in the family business, Hudson & Son, in Birmingham in 1936. The same year he joined the bird-watching organisation that is now the West Midland Bird Club (WMBC), to which he devoted most of his next 69 years.

He was called up in 1939, commissioned in 1940 and seconded to the Royal West African Frontier Force in 1942, serving in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. A major by 1943, he also served in India and Burma, where he was mentioned in dispatches. In 1940 he married Cicely, daughter of Lord Hurcomb.

During the late 1940s he rejoined the family business and helped his friend Peter Scott to set up the headquarters of what is now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire. He also wrote four bird books.

Observatories opened in several notable bird-migration locations around Britain after the war. One of these was founded as a direct result of Norris’s visit in 1952 to a small island, Ynys Enlli (“Isle of Currents”), off the Llyn (Lleyn) Peninsula in 1952. On returning home he wrote: “It is remarkable that an island as well situated as Bardsey should be so little known to ornithologists.”

With the help of the West Wales Field Society and others, the Bardsey Bird and Field Observatory was launched in 1953. A committee was formed to establish it, with Norris a joint chairman. He was linked to the observatory for the rest of his life, and the WMBC still has three representatives on its council.

Since then more than 280 bird species have been recorded on Bardsey. The observatory has been responsible for 230,000 birds being fitted with leg rings, subsequent recoveries of which contributed to migration knowledge. One of its Manx shearwaters, ringed in 1957 when at least five years old, was declared the world’s oldest known bird when it appeared again last year.

Norris became chairman of the WMBC in 1953, and was president from 1975 to 1994. In that time the club organised counts of the hundreds of thousands of starlings that used to roost in Birmingham city centre. During these the police had to be notified as this involved much rooftop clambering and peering through binoculars at high ledges of buildings from pavements at dusk.

The RSPB, now with more than a million members, had fewer than 10,000 when Norris joined its council in the late 1950s. He chaired its finance and general purposes committee for four years during the early 1960s, when the society began mushrooming towards its current size.

Switching from its cramped headquarters in Eccleston Square near Victoria station, London, to The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire, in 1961, was an essential first step in this expansion. The finance chairman was a prime figure in the move, and Norris used his own cash to clinch the deal for the new property quickly. He often spoke of how — for just a day — he personally owned The Lodge, which remains the RSPB’s national home.

Despite such intense activity, he and his wife still managed to find time to buy some derelict Queen Anne stables in Clent, Worcestershire, in 1955, and they spent the next ten years restoring the building and gardens. The lawns were used for archery parties, reflecting another joint pastime — both were keen members of Worcestershire Archery Society.

In 1972 they moved to Brookend House, Welland, Worcestershire. By this time Norris’s nerine cultivation — which included producing new species from his painstaking work on twin scaling (bulb multiplication) — had grown into a full-time horticultural business, and he was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal.

Active in local politics, Norris served on Hereford and Worcester County Council from 1977 to 1985. He was also founder and first chairman of the Worcestershire Trust for Nature Conservation, and he chaired the county branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. He was also honorary secretary and editor of the Nerine Society from 1966 and a member of the Royal Horticultural Society committee from 1968.

His books included: The Birds of Fair Isle (1939); The Birds of Warwickshire (1947); A West Midlands Birds Distribution Survey (1950); and The Birds of Bardsey (1952).

Norris was awarded the RSPB Gold Medal in 1964, the BTO Bernard Tucker Medal in 1959 and its Jubilee Medal in 1994.

After the death of his wife in 1976, he married Barbara Dean, who helped him in his numerous interests until her death in 1998. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage.

Tony Norris, ornithologist, horticulturist and businessman, was born on January 9, 1917. He died on February 25, 2005, aged 88.