Donald Ian Mackenzie Wallace (14 December 1933 – 4 November 2021), known as Ian Wallace, D.I.M. Wallace,^[1][2][3] or by his initials DIMW,^[4] was a British birder, author and artist.

Wallace was born on 14 December 1933 in Norfolk, England, to Scottish parents. He was educated at Loretto School, near Edinburgh.^[5] Early in the 1950s, he undertook National Service with the King's African Rifles in Kenya.^[5]

Wallace was the second chairman of the British Birds Rarities Committee^[6] and was a contributing author to The Birds of the Western Palearctic.

In 1963, Wallace was among a party of birders,^[7] led by Guy Mountfort^[8] and including Julian Huxley,^[8] George Shannon^[7] and, James Ferguson-Lees,^[7] that made the first ornithological expedition to Azraq in Jordan.^[7] The expedition's recommendations eventually led to the creation of the Azraq Wetland Reserve and other protected areas.^[9] Papers from the expedition are in the United Kingdom's National Archives.^[10] He identified at least four species previously unknown in Nigeria.^[11]

He was the Honorary Life President of Flamborough Ornithological Group (since 2000), and of Flamborough Bird Observatory.^[12]

Wallace appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4's Saving Species, discussing his October 1960 observations of the visible migration of birds over London, on their 50th anniversary.^[13]

He was described as "one of the very top ornithologists in the UK",^[14] "one of the great names of British bird-watching",^[15] by the BBC as "a pioneer of ornithology [in the United Kingdom]",^[13] and by Mark Cocker as both "one of the godfathers of modern birding"^[4] and "the grand old man of birds".^[16]

Wallace lived in Staffordshire. He died on 4 November 2021, at the age of 87.^[17][18][5] A five-page obituary was published in British Birds.^[19]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2008)

• Discover Birds, Deutsch (1979), ISBN 0-233-97100-9
• Birdwatching In The Seventies, Macmillan (1981), ISBN 0-333-30026-2
• Watching birds (illustrated by Alan Harris, Ian Jackson), Usborne (1982), ISBN 0-86020-655-6
• Birds of Prey of Britain and Europe (paintings by Ian Willis), Oxford University Press (1983). ISBN 0-19-217729-X
• Beguiled by Birds, Christopher Helm (2004), ISBN 0-7136-6535-1 (publishers' page)