Who we are and what we do

Giving back to birding

• Through our work with the British Birdwatching Fair, held every August at Rutland Water, we have contributed more than £58,000 towards worldwide conservation causes identified by the event’s organisers. Read more about some of these important projects here.
• The magazine is also a BirdLife Species Champion for the Critically Endangered Azores Bullfinch, and has so far raised almost £12,000 in support of Europe's rarest passerine - online donations to this important cause can be made at www.justgiving.com/priolo.
•  In association with the RSPB and BirdLife International, we also organise the annual Birdwatch UK Bird Race. This one-day, county-based birding event has also raised many thousands of pounds for conservation work at home and overseas.

Editorial team

Founder and Managing Editor Dominic Mitchell
Sub-editor Rebecca Armstrong
Staff Writer Emma Pearce
Photographic Consultant Steve Young
Identification Consultant Keith Vinicombe

Advertising and administration

Advisory panel

Mike Alibone
With a life-long interest in birds and a degree in Ecology, Mike Alibone first wrote for Birdwatch in 1994. He is a keen and active Northamptonshire birder and, formerly having been the county bird report editor and Northamptonshire Bird Club’s newsletter editor for many years, now runs the local bird news website. He has occasionally contributed notes and articles to a number of publications including British Birds and Birding World, and travelled the length and breadth of Britain and Europe and as far afield as South-East Asia and the USA in search of birds. Mike has a keen interest in birding optics and their field-testing, and writes most of the optics reviews and articles on optics buying advice for the magazine.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser has been a regular contributor to Birdwatch since 2002. Following graduation from Stirling University he became warden of the Isle of May. After an expedition to uninhabited Inaccessible island in the Tristan da Cunha group in 1983/84, he then worked at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, and subsequently as a freelance environmental consultant, writer and lecturer. He has a number of scientific papers and many popular articles to his credit, as well as two books (A Fynbos Year and Between Two Shores), both illustrated by his wife, Liz, a botanical and wildlife artist. After 12 years in South Africa and a spell in Seychelles with BirdLife International, he is now Conservation Officer for the RSPB in the Lothian and Borders region of south-east Scotland. Mike is also a past member of council of the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, former editor of its newsletter Scottish Bird News, and a founding member of the Western Cape Rare Birds Committee. His main ornithological interests are the birds of the Cape, island endemics and their conservation, albatrosses, advances in avian taxonomy and garden birding (his best garden tick being Scotland's first Iberian Chiffchaff).

Chris Harbard
Chris Harbard was for many years a leading light in the RSPB through his work in the society’s press office, making frequent media appearances and comment on behalf of the society, and he also helped with the early development of its highly rated website. Subsequently, he assisted Swarovski Optik in the launch of its birding presence on the internet, and more recently Chris worked with BirdLife International and the RSPB in their global ‘Save the Albatross’ campaign. When not guiding ocean-going tour groups in the Antarctic, Atlantic or North Pacific, he is often out in the field birding near his home in Cambridgeshire.

Erik Hirschfeld
Erik Hirschfeld lives in Malmö, Sweden. He started birding seriously in 1973, at the age of 14, when a flock of Waxwings perched outside his bedroom window as he was doing his maths homework. He picked up a bird book, made a list of what he could see at his family’s holiday destination the coming summer, and barely passed his maths. Erik has been heavily involved in ornithology since the early 1980s, including managing a WWF-funded project on Barn Owls and co-founding both Sweden’s Club300 and leading Scandinavian bird tour operator AviFauna, which he also worked for as a tour leader. He has served on the Swedish Rarities Committee twice and is currently on the Jordanian Rarities Committee, and has held council positions in various ornithological organisations. His civil career is in air traffic control, which enabled him to bird more or less daily for five years in the Middle East (he still describes this as "the best birding of my life’). Waders have always held a particular fascination, and Erik set up shorebird ringing schemes in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, and counts both Crab Plover, Kittlitz Plover, Grey Hypocolius and Blyth’s Pipit on his ringing list. He has a number of publications to his name, mainly on identification, phenology and migration. His most recent project is the launch of the Rare Birds Yearbook, published in association with BirdLife International. Living just 30 km from Falsterbo, he is the only Advisory Panel member to count White-tailed Eagle on his garden list. With a family and three young children he cannot spend as much time in the field as he would like, but is hoping for a Lesser Spotted Eagle returning from Falsterbo to fly over his garden one day.

Killian Mullarney
Killian Mullarney hails from Co Wexford, Ireland. He is one of Europe’s best-known bird artists, especially since the publication of the highly acclaimed Collins Bird Guide, which he co-authored with Lars Svensson, Dan Zetterström and the late Peter Grant. A member of the Irish Rare Birds Committee, he has many articles and papers to his credit, not least a series also co-authored with Peter Grant entitled The New Approach to Identification, which helped revolutionise understanding of moult and topography in relation to bird identification. More recently, his illustrations have featured in the latest edition of the National Geographic Guide to Birds of North America, as well as in an extensive series of definitive bird stamps for Ireland. A keen sound recordist, Killian also contributed to The Sound Approach to Birding, and as a staff leader for the bird tour company Sunbird he has travelled extensively in search of birds, especially in the Western Palearctic and Asia.

Bill Oddie
Described on his MySpace page as a “Part-time television superstar (only to Middle Eanglanders on BBC2)”, Bill Oddie OBE is Britain’s best-known birder by a country mile. Comedian, conservationist, natural history presenter, author and “full-time birder”, he has been a key contributor to Birdwatch over many years – his Gripping Yarns book, based on his long-running magazine column of the same name, remains a birding best-seller. Bill cut his birding teeth in the West Midlands, but these days is most often be seen out in the field on Hampstead Heath in north London, or on the Isles of Scilly – at least when he’s not filming Springwatch, Autumnwatch or Bill Oddie goes Wild for the BBC.

Hadoram Shirihai
Hadoram Shirihai is the Middle East’s best-known ornithologist. For many years while based at Eilat in southern Israel, he conducted extensive studies of raptor migration, founded the International Birdwatching Centre, and took a leading role in the work of the Eilat Ringing Station. During this period he also documented many new bird species for the country. He has written seminal identification papers on Western Palearctic birds for many leading journals and co-authored several books relating to the region, in particular that with David Christie and Alan Harris, The Macmillan Birders’ Guide to European and Middle Eastern Birds. In addition, his highly acclaimed The Birds of Israel was selected as Bird Book of the Year by both Birdwatch and British Birds. More recently, he co-authored Sylvia Warblers, the definitive account of the identification and taxonomy of the genus. A growing interest in seabirds and marine mammals has led to two further acclaimed titles, A Complete Guide to Antarctic Wildlife and Whales, Dolphins and Seals, while work with Lars Svensson on another book, The Photographic Handbook of Western Palearctic Birds, is well advanced. In the course of his travels he has now also photographed almost 3,000 bird species, an achievement which has provided him for plenty of material for a new 10-year project with Hans Jornvall, the Photographic Handbook of Birds of the World.

Keith Vinicombe
Keith Vinicombe started birding in April 1962, at the age of eight. During the 1960s he cut his ornithological teeth at Chew Valley Lake, Somerset, augmented by regular spring and autumn holidays at Portland Bird Observatory in Dorset. From 1972-75 he studied geography at university in Swansea, where he found nine of Britain’s first 11 Ring-billed Gulls. Keith served on the British Birds Rarities Committee from 1982-91, and in 1989 published his first book,The Macmillan Guide to Bird Identification, a project he started with his late partner, Laurel Tucker. A short spell on the British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee was followed in 1997 by a second book, Rare Birds in Britain and Ireland: a Photographic Record, in which he was able to put forward theories on occurrence patterns and vagrancy. Numerous papers and articles in British Birds were followed by increasingly regular contributions to Birdwatch, leading to his appointment in 2000 as the magazine’s Identification Consultant, a position which enables him to indulge his enjoyment of writing. In May 2006 he married his partner, Jane, who finally made him realise that not all the best things in life have feathers.

Martin Woodcock
A keen birder since childhood, Martin Woodcock started working on the paintings for the Field Guide to the Birds of South-east Asia in 1966, and has since illustrated many books and written two, as well as various articles and papers. He has travelled widely in Asia and Africa to study birds. Painting the colour plates for the seven volumes of The Birds of Africa was a major project which spanned 25 years. Martin was Honorary Secretary of the British Ornithologist’s Club for five years, and was a co-founder of the African Bird Club, serving as its first chairman and currently as its President. He was winner of the British Birds Bird Illustrator of the Year competition in 1983, is a member of the Society of Wildlife Artists, and has exhibited paintings internationally. He lives with his wife Barbara close to the north Norfolk coast.

Steve Young
One of Britain’s foremost bird photographers, Steve Young has been associated with the magazine since the very first issue, when his image of a Dotterel was published on the front cover. Since leaving the Post Office in 1992 to take up photography full time he has been a regular columnist for the magazine, as well as its Photographic Consultant. He has written three books, Birds on Film, An Essential Guide to Bird Photography and A Field Guide to Bird Photography, and was photo editor for the Photographic Handbook of the Rare Birds of Britain and Europe and the Photographic Handbook of the Wildfowl of the World. Steve also writes a monthly column for Outdoor Photography magazine and has contributed many photos to other magazines, journals and books. A keen golfer, he lives in Liverpool and still finds time to bird his local patch at Seaforth twice a week. Steve’s favourite species are Little and Ross’s Gulls – he has seen 13 of the latter in Britain, and says he will die a happy man when he finds one on his local patch!


Key contributors

In addition to the editorial team and advisory panel, regular contributors to the magazine in various capacities include Ted Abraham (Birdline North-West), Mashuq Ahmad (Birdline South-West), Alan Davies (Birdline Wales), Robin Chittenden (Birdline East Anglia), Chris Galvin, Martin Garner, Ren Hathway, Dave Holman (Birdline East Anglia), John McLoughlin (Birdline North-East), Angus Murray (Birdline Scotland), Markus Varesvuo and Angus Wilson. Other contributors over the years have included Arnoud van den Berg, Tim Cleeves, Dick Forsman, Hilary Fry, Steve Madge, Anthony McGeehan, Klaus Malling Olsen, Lars Svensson and Ian Wallace.
Web credits

Website design Heathcliffe Bird

Photography all images © Steve Young (www.birdsonfilm.com) unless stated otherwise

Special thanks also to Chris Harbard