On this site we present a selection of the bird and other wildlife photographs we’ve taken over the last few years. Our primary interest is bird photography, which started in 2008 during a holiday in Borneo. We bought our first ‘serious’ camera equipment for that trip, including a Canon 100 – 400 mm zoom lens with the intention of photographing animals, and particularly the Orangutans. However, the sight of a Stork-billed Kingfisher flying down the Danum River proved a turning point and shifted our focus mainly onto birds.
From 2009 we started to take dedicated bird photography holidays beginning with Goa in India, which is a popular birding destination for British birders during the northern winter. Some of the trips were taken with dedicated birding tour companies, such as Tropical Birding and Birding Ecotours, while others were arranged by ourselves, such as the Greek island of Lesbos, which we particularly enjoy visiting during the spring migration. Work commitments also took us abroad frequently and we were often fortunate in being able to add a few days of birding when working in bird-rich parts of the world.
Since 2008 we’ve been fortunate enough to photograph more than 3,100 bird species across all seven continents and have taken more than one million photographs along the way. Here we present some of our favourite photographs from the roughly 100,000 images we have in our archive. The bird photographs are presented in galleries according to taxonomic family sorted in alphabetical order. The classification of birds into families is constantly changing as new genetic information becomes available and there are significant differences between the various bird taxonomic classifications available. However, here we have used the Clements 2021 taxonomy, which can be seen at https://www.birdfamiliesoftheworld.com/bird-families-list/.
We’d like to thank the many outstanding bird guides, both professional and keen amateurs, we’ve had over the years, without whom we’d have only seen a fraction of the birds presented here. We’d particularly like to thank Dylan Vasapolli (Birding Ecotours, South Africa), Raffaele Di Biase (Puerto Varas, Chile), Jason Boyce (Birding Ecotours, South Africa), Lee Kok Chung (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Don Cowan (South Africa), Pablo Cervantes Daza (Tropical Birding, Ecuador), Diego Gallegos (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Emmanuel Guzman (Costa Rica), Lokesh Kumar (Delhi, India), Rosli Omar (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Loven Pereira (Goa, India), Matt Prophet (Cape Town, South Africa), Fernando Diaz Segovia (Santiago, Chile), Marcus Nash (Norfolk, UK), Paola Soublette (Santiago, Chile), ChooEng Tan (Penang, Malaysia), Titus Imboma (Birding Ecotours, Kenya), Giancarlo Ventolini (Birding Ecotours, Colombia), Danilo Rodriguez Madrid (Panama), Danilo Rodriguez Jr (Panama), Jorge Pineda (Panama), Leon Marais (Lawson’s South Africa/Namibia), Cameron Cox (Tropical Birding, Costa Rica), Andres Vasquez (Tropical Birding, Argentina), Ebrima Barry (The Gambia), Aladin Jammeh (The Gambia), Rob Massom (Australia) and Zakaria Bah (The Gambia).
We hope you enjoy the photos on our site.
John and Maggie