He didn't begin writing seriously until after his arm was shot off. He didn't write about that. But once he started he never stopped. Indeed it was his early ambition to be a writer which caused him to take ornithological field notes into much fuller diaries. But objectivity does not seem any more applicable to biography than to most other human activities.
Every life is at the mercy of prejudice and choice once it leaves the cardboard boxes.
Nevertheless Jock's seemed to be bursting out. On a practical level I learnt a lot about the academic jungle in nineteen years and did all Jock's illustrations for scientific papers. His work was dedicated to wedding the life of an animal in the environment with problem solving in the laboratory, and to saving species which have so far escaped the mindlessly destructive instincts of humans. It is easy to see him as the amusing, roaming man of science and action, filled with combative phrases for the preservation of standards or the environment, but more difficult to see the man of compassion, tenderness and acute aesthetic awareness. The two were often at odds in his life.