My father, Jo Moran, who has died aged 91, was an ornithologist, wildlife photographer, climber and mountaineer who became the first person to climb the cliffs of the Noup of Noss in Shetland. He was also the first to photograph the elusive Leach’s Petrel at its nest, tracking down a specimen on the Flannan Isles, beyond the Outer Hebrides.
Belying his love for wild places, Jo was born in industrial Wigan in Lancashire to Thomas Moran, a gas works manager and rugby league referee, and his second wife, Julia (nee Moore). His gleeful irreverence and love of the outdoors was evident at an early age, when he trespassed in the nearby woods of Haigh Plantations. Inspired by dusty library copies of Archibald Thorburn’s illustrated avian books, he first escaped the grimy town on a homemade bike, drawn by rural flocks of linnets and bramblefinches.
Jo left Wigan St Patrick’s RC school in 1944, aged 14, and quickly worked his way up from order boy to manager at the local Co-operative Wholesale Society, spending riotous weekends camping and climbing in the Lakes and Dales.
In 1958, having developed a somewhat debonair attitude to risk, he set out to photograph the nocturnal Leach’s Petrel. Coming to land only to breed and only on the wildest and most remote islands, the bird drew Jo and two friends, Vince Connelly and Harry Shorrock, to the barren Flannan Isle of Eilean Mòr with seas breaking 40ft up the side.
Able to afford only a few rolls of film, the three friends not only survived, but returned triumphant; Jo with his photo of the petrel nesting. Later he travelled throughout Orkney, Shetland and various islands in the west of Ireland, photographing all the British seabirds at nest.
Working by now as a credit draper, in 1963 he made his ascent of the Noup of Noss. Towering 600ft above the pounding surge, often shrouded in sea mist pierced by soaring fulmars, Noss is a fearsome sight. Jo’s account of the climb, published in the Countryman magazine in 1968, revealed that “bellicose gannets seemed to be sitting tight across all logical lines of ascent” as he avoided the sharp and accurate bills of young kittiwakes and evaded angry projections of fulmar oil.
Jo was a fervent supporter of rugby league, and in his spare time he domesticated Orkney voles and black rats, collected primus stoves and adored poetry, Irish music and cultural history.
He married Margaret Hilton, a carer for disabled people, in 1966. She predeceased him in 2011, and he is survived by me, his granddaughter Maggie and sister Margaret.
