About me

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a birder.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of times spent in the bushveld of South Africa’s Limpopo Province, with binoculars around my neck. In the years since then, I’ve occupied much of my life with finding, watching, and listing birds. Initially, my focus was primarily on the birds of South Africa; however, an evening spent paging through Lynx Edicions’ Bird Families of the World towards the end of high school opened my eyes to world birding. There I was, paging through the birds-of-paradise, toucans, quail-thrushes, and pheasants, and thinking about how incredible it would be to see these birds with my own eyes. I decided then and there that I would try to see as many of the world’s birds as possible.  

At that time, I hadn’t done much birding beyond the borders of South Africa; however, desperate to visit South America, I participated in a high-school student exchange to Argentina. This was a life-changing experience, and my introduction to the Neotropics. I had a delightful host family who were happy to drive me out to the Espinal woodlands to look for tanagers, tyrannulets, thornbirds, hummingbirds, spinetails, and other classic Neotropical groups. By the end of my time in Argentina, the world birding bug had truly bitten.

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to squeeze in some exciting global birding trips during my university holidays and have managed to keep a steady stream of yearly additions to my world lifelist. As I type this, I am undertaking my Honours degree in Biodiversity and Ecology at Stellenbosch University, where I am undertaking a phylogeographic study on the Orange Ground Thrush. I’ve also had the privilege of working with expert international birding guides at Birding Africa and currently work as a birding tour leader for Birding Ecotours – a company offering birding tours around the globe.

I’ve gleaned many of the blog posts on this website from various other sources where I initially published them. So the style of some of them is admittedly a bit inconsistent. Anyway, moving forward, I hope to be posting regularly, with detailed trip reports for you to read through and extract useful information from. I see this birding blog as an opportunity to share my experiences as I embark on a life-long quest to see as many species of birds as possible.