Sir Patrick Bateson

“Suddenly we heard the hooter and dashed down,” Bateson recalled later. “They said to us, ‘You’ve got to get off the cliff in two hours because the ice is moving in. If you don’t leave now, you’ll be stuck for the winter.’”

Having already survived a blizzard he was keen to comply. Six months later he produced the first detailed description of the gull. He went on to become an outstanding ethologist — an expert on the behaviour of birds and animals.

As a lover of birds who as a teenager had spent hours observing those on the Northumbrian coast, the unassuming Bateson broke new ground in his research. He even took his studies home, conducting mild experiments with kittens by dropping them from a height on to duvets. Instinctively, they twisted mid-air to land on their feet.

Naturally generous, Bateson revelled in co-operating rather than competing with fellow scientists. His work on imprinting — or early animal learning — with Gabriel Horn led to the discovery of the precise area of an animal’s brain that is used for imprinting. With wry humour he christened the equipment he devised to test theories of sexual imprinting — why birds, in this case quails, choose particular mates — the “Amsterdam apparatus”. Windows would light up to reveal female quails whenever the males strutting outside paused in front of them. Bateson established that the quails ogled their first cousins most, but were not attracted by female siblings or second cousins. When they died, the Bateson family freezer was stuffed with dead birds — and they feasted on quail pâté.

Bateson’s discoveries led to the flourishing of this field known as mate-choice, generating discussion about whether human taboos on incest were mirrored in the animal world.

When unexpectedly elected as the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1988, Bateson, who was also interested in human behaviour, entertained a dazzling galaxy of world leaders, ranging from Mikhail Gorbachev to the Dalai Lama. His wife, Dusha, nearly tripped over a monk snoring on the floor outside the Lama’s bedroom.

In these grand surroundings, students found it reassuring to see the provost brushing his teeth in the lodge as they visited the library first thing in the morning. Shy new arrivals often pondered leaving in their first fortnight, but the kindness of Bateson and Dusha, as they invited undergraduates to share wine and beef stroganoff with them, proved reason enough to stay.

Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson — always known as Patrick — was born in 1938 to Richard, a half-Norwegian expert in timber drying, and Solvi, the vivacious daughter of Paal Berg, Norway’s chief justice, who had run the country’s resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War.

Patrick was born in England in a house designed by his father in the Chiltern Hills. When Richard was wounded and captured at Dunkirk, his son sent him a card on which he had drawn a man hanged from a gibbet and written: “I hope the Germans don’t hang you because I love you.”

At the end of the war his father returned home, but he was in ill health and died ten years later. Patrick’s decision to become a biologist was fostered by a cousin, whose brother, William Bateson, was the scientist who coined the term “genetics”.

While studying at Westminster School, he enraged a chemistry master by devoting hours to rowing as a member of the first eight and he kept the cello he played in the orchestra in the hope, never fulfilled, of performing with his children. Deeply unassuming, he was astonished to win the sole first among his fellow students of natural sciences at Cambridge. There he met Dusha Matthews, a history student.

They were married in 1963. She was 21, he 25, and they had an extended honeymoon sailing on the Queen Mary to America, where Bateson won a Harkness fellowship at Stanford. He was awarded a fellowship to Cambridge two years later. As a young lecturer, he became an impassioned supporter of CND, and felt that the free flow of ideas between disciplines was encouraged by the dining system at Oxbridge.

Birds, his first love, were only one strand of his research. He conducted groundbreaking experiments with monkeys, and later led inquiries into dog breeding and research on nonhuman primates.

At home he bred cats, initially Russian blues and later Egyptian Maus after his elder daughter, Melissa, introduced the breed to her parents. “Dad said that if you live with animals you get so much more insight about what is going on in terms of their developmental behaviour,” she said. For hours, Bateson watched cats play, observing the altruistic relationship between a mother cat and sickly newborn kittens.

He invented Bateson’s cube, which evaluates research proposals according to the degree of animal suffering involved, the quality of the research and the potential medical benefits. More controversial was a study, commissioned on behalf of the National Trust, of the impact of hunting on red deer. He concluded that they experienced hunting as equivalent, in terms of stress, to losing a limb. He was stunned by the rage the report generated.

By then, he was provost of King’s, a role he never sought, but won by a handful of votes. Having survived on the salary of an academic, the splendour of the provost’s role spelt a dramatic change in lifestyle. Bateson sought advice on reading in chapel before the broadcast of the annual Christmas festival of carols and lessons. An atheist, he fancied the Tudor bosses on the ceiling resembled an angry God glowering down at him.

He and Dusha threw their energy into entertaining. An early shock was Princess Margaret. Asked to invite her to an Advent service, Bateson’s “jaw dropped” on learning that she would be staying with him for the weekend.

Having survived the visit — “the most amazing song and dance” — Bateson’s jaw fell a second time on hearing that the princess had requested a return visit. He grew to like her during her subsequent six stays.

Without doubt, his biggest headache was a private lunch for Salman Rushdie. Although under a fatwa, Rushdie emerged from hiding to give a speech in King’s chapel, while armed special branch officers lurked behind the dining-room curtains.

Known as “the provost-gardener”, Bateson introduced herbaceous borders in the lodge garden, and grew roses that clambered into apple trees. In Who’s Who, along with opera, he listed “turning wilderness into garden” as a hobby. He did this in Suffolk, where he retired with Dusha, who survives him, after leaving King’s in 2003.

Their daughter Melissa also became an ethologist. “I owe Dad so much for his encouragement,” she said. Only six weeks before his death she had discussed her latest paper with him. Her younger sister, Anna, works at The Guardian.

Asked what defined Bateson, his daughters responded “kindness”. His outstanding mind was not unusual at King’s, remarked a Cambridge friend. He truly stood out, however, for consideration, a quality “far less common in the competitive world of Cambridge”.

Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS, emeritus professor of ethology and former provost of King’s, Cambridge, was born on March 31, 1938. He died of heart failure on August, 1, 2017, age 79