Alan Cowan was a consultant surgeon and general practitioner in Canberra, Australia. He was born in London on 13 June 1929, the son of Samuel Cowan and Helen Cowan née Normington, both schoolteachers. He attended Wandsworth Grammar School for Boys and completed his schooling in Surrey, where he and his family were evacuated during the Blitz in London. In 1946, he began studying medicine at King’s College, London and qualified in 1951. In the same year he married Anne Gammon, and they went on to have four children – John, Stephen James, Robert Alan and Sarah Jane. Between 1953 and 1955 he carried out his National Service as a captain at the British Military Hospital in Tripoli, Libya. After leaving the Army, he continued his hospital work, holding appointments at Southport General Infirmary, the Royal Free, Tindal and Queen Charlotte’s hospitals. He gained his FRCS in 1957 and a diploma in obstetrics in 1966. In 1966 he and his family moved to Australia and settled in Canberra, where Alan worked for the rest of his medical career, both as a specialist surgeon and a general practitioner. In 1969, I met Alan at a three-week camp for birdwatchers on Cape York in far north Queensland. It was not long before we realised how much we had in common: we were both from England, both doctors and both had an eagerness to see and learn as much as we could about the remarkable environment and birds around us, not just for the purpose of ticking them off on a list. We spent a lot of time together on that trip. One common interest was classical music and Alan’s knowledge was clearly profound, particularly of the works of Bach. I had sung in Bach’s B minor mass at school, but Alan’s knowledge went far beyond this, particularly with the sacred cantatas, of which I knew nothing. He waxed lyrical about them, talking about who had recorded them and which performances he thought were the best: he had a remarkable intellect. Alan was not only a Bach enthusiast. He had a fine voice and was a member of the Canberra Choral Society for many years. He loved almost all classical music, and I remember sitting transfixed with him in Canberra at a marvellous concert of Haydn symphonies. Another of his great loves was birdwatching, particularly seabirds. He went on a number of oceanic expeditions, and it was seabirds behind his decision to join the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE). He over-wintered as a medical officer at Carey station and, on his return, was awarded the Polar Medal in 1979. The Antarctic is not for the faint-hearted and there were many hazardous situations there in inflatable boats but nothing to compare with the voyage of the *Totorore*. This was a tiny 11 metre yacht, being sailed by its owner around Cape Horn, and then up the western side of South America, all in search of seabirds. He needed a crew to make the venture possible and Alan put his hand up, flying to the southerly tip of the continent to join the boat. By all accounts, it was a successful but highly testing journey through some of the wildest seas in the world. Sometime later, the *Totorore* and its master disappeared at sea without a trace. Alan had been very fortunate. His marriage to Anne ended and for some time he was alone and not very happy. It was a source of great joy for him when he met and, in 1987, married Susan Poultney. The renewed vigour and enthusiasm which emerged was inspiring to all who knew him. They met through choral singing and continued to sing and to travel extensively. It did not need a psychologist to see that they were happy together. In 1999, I was studying and photographing owls around the world and, high on the wanted list, was the snowy owl, the great white owl of the Arctic. I asked Alan if he would like to come and he eagerly accepted, saying that Susan would come too. The trip was a great success, and I still have a photograph of Alan, dressed like an Inuit, struggling against the wind to put up my bird hide in the snow. Three years later, I called on Alan again. This time, the quarry was blakiston’s fish owl in Japan, the largest owl in the world and one of the rarest. Sumio Yamamoto, our host, had organised accommodation in a traditional Japanese guesthouse, which was an experience in itself. Conditions were very cold, with heavy frosts at night, but Alan’s Antarctic experience stood him in good stead and we both thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working together with this mythical bird. In his later years, Alan was not in the best of health but, to talk to him, one would never have guessed it. He had cardiac problems and some major hip complications but made light of both and remained as positive and switched-on to the world as he had ever been. Over the years, he had been a regular contributor of letters to *The Canberra Times* and I gather that this tradition continued to the end, with his final letter to that paper still waiting to be published at the time of his death. Alan Cowan was fatally injured in a road accident near his Canberra home on 22 July 2021, a tragedy for himself, for his family and for all who knew him.