Ruttledge, Robert Francis (‘Robin’, ‘Jim’) (1899–2002), ornithologist, was born 11 September 1899 in Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, elder of two sons of Thomas Henry Bruen Ruttledge of Ballinrobe, high sheriff for Mayo 1904, and his wife Mary Caroline, daughter of William Browne-Clayton of Browneshill, Co. Carlow. He also had five half-sisters from his father's earlier marriage to Florence Rose Trant of Co. Tipperary. He was educated at Marlborough College and Quetta Military Academy, India, and served in the Indian army in the 34th (1918–21) and 17th Poona Horse (1921–34). He served in the Waziristan campaign (1919), was commandant of the bodyguard of the governor of Madras (1933–6), and retired from the army in 1939 with the rank of major, but was recalled to the Poona Horse in 1939 at the start of the second world war. He was invalided out of the army before going on active service.
His interest in ornithology began at the family home of Bloomfield House, and was developed further at preparatory school by a teacher whose father had written a book on the birds of Britain. At Marlborough Ruttledge underwent a process of self-education on the subject of ornithology, reading the Zoologist and articles by Robert Warren. At 17 he wrote his first paper, ‘The birds of Lough Carra’, and others followed regularly year after year. In all, he wrote over 200 papers on Ireland's bird-lore, and although he did not acquire any formal qualifications on the subject his theories spread far and wide throughout the ornithological community, and in very many cases he became the authoritative source on bird behaviour.
He spent little of his time in India pursuing his hobby, but on his return to Ireland he rekindled his interest and began by studying the common gull. In 1950 he founded the Saltee bird observatory in Co. Wexford, of which he served as a director (1950–63). In 1953 he founded the Irish Bird Report, which he edited until 1971. In 1964, with John Cabot, he founded the Irish Wildfowl Committee, the progenitor of the Irish Wildbird Conservancy, founded in 1967. Its purposes were to foster conservation and to encourage the development of field ornithology. It acted as joint owner, along with the government, of the Wexford North Slob national wildfowl range. Ruttledge served as the conservancy's first president, and when it acquired its own headquarters in the 1970s, moving from the care of the RIA, its headquarters was named after him.
Ruttledge also published three books on ornithology, testaments to the high quality of his scholarship and his deep knowledge of his subject. Perhaps the most important was The birds of Ireland (1954), which he coedited with P. G. Kennedy, SJ, and C. F. Scroope. This was the first comprehensive study of Irish bird-lore since the work of the same name by R. J. Ussher (qv) and Robert Warren in 1900. He followed it with Ireland's birds: their distribution and migrations (1960). His third book, coedited with David Cabot, was Project Mar: a provisional list of Irish wetlands of international importance, submitted to the second European meeting on wildfowl conservation, Holland, May 1966 (1966). In 1961 he was awarded the Bernard Tucker medal of the British Trust for Ornithology. In 1966 he moved to Greystones, Co. Wicklow, where his garden became a haven for all sorts of birds. He died 13 January 2002.
He married (1928) Mabel Rose, daughter of William Creaghe Burke of Ballinrobe; they had two daughters.