My story
Birdwatching is my greatest passion, it gives me enormous fulfilment in life, takes me to the most beautiful and remote places in this world and makes me understand nature and all its complexities in a much better way.
I guess my fascination with birds began when I was just a couple of months old and I started mumbling my first words. I called my stuffed animal Pica pica, which later turned out to be the Latin name for magpie. When I was a toddler and other kids drew houses and cars, I drew birds. I could stare in awe at these feathered wonders as they came to feed at the bird table in our back garden. That is the wonderful thing about birds, you don’t have to travel far to watch them, they are all around us, ever present, night and day, without them it would be eerie silent.
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.
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As soon as I could read my parents bought me my first bird-book and with the help of my grandfather’s old binoculars I started identifying those beautiful birds in our back garden. Suddenly there were Great- and Blue tits, Song thrushes, Blackbirds, Jays, Robins, Green- and Great Spotted Woodpeckers and even the odd Sparrowhawk hunting all the former species!
I never stopped identifying birds and now, more than 25 years later, I set a world record, wrote two books about birding, made a documentary film, and committed myself to conserving birds and the ecosystems on which they depend.
Most of you didn’t have the luck to be struck by the “birding virus” at such a young age. That is too bad, but not all hope is lost! My mission is to bring out that naturalist who lives in all of you. I strongly believe that people first need to fall in love with nature, before they realise they depend on their natural environment for the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe.
Happy Birding!
