Dr. Pritchard is married to the former Sibille Hart of Georgetown, Guyana, and they have three sons -- Sebastian, Dominic and Cameron.
He is best known as an authority on the biology and conservation of turtles and tortoises. Both before and after receiving his doctorate in 1969, he has undertaken extensive field work with turtles in all continents and many remote islands, and he has established a permanent field station for turtle conservation in northwestern Guyana. Three species of turtle are named after him -- a snake-necked turtle from New Guinea, a pond turtle from northern Burma, and a giant fossil sideneck turtle from Colombia.
He has been recognized as a “Champion of the Wild” by the Discovery Television Channel, and as a “Hero of the Planet” by TIME Magazine. In 2001, he was declared “Floridian of the Year” by the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.
He has written seven books: Living Turtles of the World (1967); Marine Turtles of Micronesia (1977); Encyclopedia of Turtles (1979); Turtles of Venezuela (1984); the Alligator Snapping Turtle (1990, 2006); and Galapagos Tortoises: Nomenclatural and Survival Status (1996) and Tales from the Thébaide (2007). He also translated Encyclopedia of Turtles by Bonin, Devaux and Dupré from the French for Johns Hopkins (2007). In 1998 he wrote the preface for a reprint of John Van Denburgh’s celebrated 1914 monograph on the Galapagos Tortoises. He also authored “Saving What’s Left,” a manual on saving environmentally endangered lands in Florida that has been widely acclaimed by conservationists, legislators and lobbyists alike.
He has served on numerous policy committees. He was Chairman of the Florida Endangered Species Advisory Committee, founding chairman of the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, a member of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group, and was co-chairman of the SE Region Marine Turtle Recovery Team, and a member of the USFWS Manatee, Kemp’s Ridley, and Florida Panther Recovery Teams. He also served on the National Academy of Sciences Sea Turtle Conservation Committee.
At Florida Audubon, he worked on a great variety of field, data-gathering, and writing projects from 1973-1996. Many of these were undertaken in partnership with the late Dr. Herbert W. Kale, longtime Vice President for Ornithological Research at FAS. These projects included a survey of radionuclides in wildlife on phosphate-mined lands in Polk County, Florida; preparation and publication of the above-mentioned book, “Saving What’s Left,” and an analysis of wildlife utilization of restored wetlands on former mining land in Florida.
Various research and conservation projects and consultancies have taken him to Micronesia, Trinidad, Sénégal, Surinam, Costa Rica, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Galapagos Islands, and he has travelled extensively, especially in Africa and Asis, in the course of filming turtles for a cinematography project entitled “The Turtle Planet.” Two hour-long specials, Bostami, Vishnu, and Walter, and Sidenecks of Gondwanaland have already been produced in this series. He has produced videos including Homeward Journey, about sea turtle conservation in Florida, and a promotional film entitled Every One Counts describing the work of the Florida Audubon Bird of Prey Center; and he has also appeared in numerous television productions speaking on the subjects of turtle biology and conservation. These include Farewell Ancient Mariner (a Greenpeace sea turtle documentary); Adios Arribadas (a sea turtle documentary made by the Florida Institute of Oceanography); The Heartbreak Turtle (a special on the plight of Kemp’s ridley, made by KUHT Television of Houston, Texas); Something Nobody Else Has (a documentary on the decline of the alligator snapping turtle, funded by the Louisiana Foundation for the Humanities). He also appeared in Reclaiming the Land, a documentary about phosphate mine reclamation made by IMC Fertilizer Corp. Most recently, he featured extensively in a BBC4 television production about the Galapagos Islands and the Pinta Island tortoise.
Dr. Pritchard has developed the art of conservation without confrontation, recognizing that finding common ground with those identified as opponents, and developing consensus positions by a process of mutual education, may be the only way of establishing lasting changes without provoking constant challenges and demanding impracticable levels of law enforcement. He has applied these techniques both in Florida and around the world, and has, over the years, been invited by the governments of nations ranging from Trinidad and Tobago to Papua New Guinea to develop socially sensitive programs for wildlife conservation. In Mexico in the 1980s he engaged in a series of dialogues with the proprietor and owner of a major marine turtle slaughterhouse and international industry in turtle products, who was identified by many as being beyond the conservation ethic. These exchanges resulted in the individual in question leaving the industry, and ultimately to the closure of the operation.
Dr. Pritchard has also worked with the Arawak people of Guyana for many years, gently but firmly steering them towards a more protective attitude to the wildlife species, especially marine turtles, upon which they depend. This project has attracted international attention, and was described in the National Geographic book Hidden Worlds of Wildlife. It was also featured in a special for the Paris television network Canal Plus (shown widely in Europe), and the Guyana conservation program has resulted in Dr. Pritchard being selected as a featured conservationist for the Canadian television series Champions of the Wild, shot on-site in Guyana in May 1998, and already aired extensively in Canada, the United States, and the U.K.
In the course of the last several decades, Dr. Pritchard has undertaken a demonstration project to show that a useful systematics collection of natural history specimens can be built up without sacrifice of live animals. The collection of turtle and tortoise specimens that has resulted, numbering over 13,000 specimens, is the most comprehensive in existence, with 100% of genera and about 95% of living species being represented. In 1998, with funding from the Chelonia Institute, this collection was established in permanent housing at the newly-established Chelonian Research Institute in Oviedo, Florida, the property including two buildings and about ten acres of largely forested grounds.
Dr. Pritchard is a popular lecturer and speaker, at home and overseas, both on topics relating to his specialty and on general topics relating to endangered species conservation, travel, and philosophical subjects. He is also a photographer whose work has been exhibited at the United Nations and that has appeared in National Geographic, National Wildlife, International Wildlife, Audubon, World Book Encyclopedia, Natural History, and numerous textbooks and “coffee table” books. He is fluent in Spanish and French, and has published in both of those languages. His Manual of Sea Turtle Conservation Techniques, prepared for the West Atlantic Turtle Symposium and since revised and reissued, has been translated into Spanish and Hebrew.
