This blog is an attempt by me to keep a more meaningful journal of my birding and bird photography near home in South Australia and further afield on my (mostly work) travels. If other people also enjoy it, so much the better. If you don’t, you know where the metaphorical door is…
I date my birding from a trip to mid-Wales in 1993 with university mate SMR Young. His desire to see a Red Kite — then critically endangered but undergoing a precarious recovery centred on a feeding station near Rhyader — took us on a scenic drive through the Welsh countryside and convinced me to buy a cheap pair of binoculars. A few months later while back in Perth for my brother’s wedding I aimed to see as many of the South-west endemics as I could just to grip him off.
It was still just an occasional thing until 1997, when Nikki unwisely bought me a lovely pair of Swarovski roof prisms as a wedding present (a decision I suspect she continues to regret), followed soon after by a long weekend trip with Steve to Norfolk and Suffolk in 1997 to use them in anger for the first time.
Foreign birding started with a work trip to Spain in 1999, followed soon after by my first dedicated birding trip, a long weekend to Extremadura to do the area properly following an earlier recce on my work trip. Subsequently I have done a few dedicated trips to places like Papua New Guinea, The Philippines (actually two trips, but only one fully written up), Poland, Venezuela, Morocco, Sichuan/Tibet, and West Papua , a couple of family holidays when I was allowed a little bit of birding (e.g. New Caledonia), as well as numerous days or weekends here and there tacked onto the beginning or end (sometimes both) of conference and other work trips: places like Brazil, Borneo, Japan, Chile, and Taiwan. All of these and others are available here, or via cloudbirders.