Today it is sometimes forgotten how recently ecology and animal behaviour have emerged as respectable sciences from being merely glorified nature study. I can remember hearing, only half a century ago, a distinguished professor stating firmly at a meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology, I think it was, that ‘In Cambridge we do not teach ecology!’ The transition that has taken place in attitudes since those days owes much to people like Peter Jewell. With a background in agriculture and physiology, his decision in the early 1960s to take his skills out into the field, to attempt the elucidation of some of the many problems facing real animals in the real world, was an important shift of emphasis. He brought a grasp of physiological function, and concepts of experimental rigour learned in the laboratory, to subjects that had sometimes lacked these important values. The researches which followed, often carried out in collaboration with the many colleagues and students who were attracted by his philosophy and personality, were part of the growing stream of vigorous new ideas that have shaped present-day attitudes towards ecology and ecological research.