It started in South Africa

One of the earliest photographs of me at age six, is me feeding an oiled penguin as part of the rehab process. So it kind of got stuck in pretty early.

We were always allowed to choose what we did for our birthdays and I always wanted to do a nature drive. I think what really cemented it for me was I saw a bird in a paddock away from the car and it was bouncing up and down, so we stopped.

Having seen that secretarybird, I knew I wanted to work with animals, and then my choices really were to be a vet or to be a wildlife biologist. Back in those days we were called zoologists.

So, I decided I would rather work with animals in their habitats than people's pets. That steered me then towards doing zoology at the University of Cape Town and I specialized in marine ornithology, because I wanted to go and work in Antarctica.

So I gave up on that idea and I went back to the UK and I worked for a conservation organisation on birds that were critically endangered.

I worked on grey partridges for seven years and then went to Scotland and worked on black grouse, trying to look at ways that we could improve populations working within the farmland environment and forestry.

That's how I ended up as a professional ecologist/ornithologist.