British Birds, editorial

British Birds has a panel of editorial advisors, who review material (papers, notes, letters etc) submitted to the journal. The members of the board collectively cover a wide range of ornithological interests, but if something is beyond the scope of the panel, external experts are consulted before a decision on publication is made.

Below are short profiles of the BB editorial board and, below them, the editorial staff.

Dawn Balmer

Dawn Balmer Dawn lives in the Brecks in Norfolk and has worked for the BTO since 1992, where she is currently Atlas Coordinator for Bird Atlas 2007-11. She is a keen birder and ringer and enjoys local birding as well as the occasional twitch farther afield. She has been involved with OSME (the Ornithological Society of the Middle East) for many years and is a regular contributor to Sandgrouse. Dawn enjoys all aspects of natural history and just loves spending time outdoors.


Ian Carter

Ian Carter Ian has worked as an ornithologist for Natural England and its predecessors for over 20 years, focussing especially on birds of prey, reintroductions and bird licensing. He is an avid collector of bird monographs and wrote one on the Red Kite, which was first published in 2001. He has contributed to numerous papers and popular articles on bird conservation, and has been a member of the BB editorial board since 1998.

Richard Chandler Richard is also a Trustee of BB2000 Ltd, and a former Chairman of Directors. His profile is here

Martin Collinson

Martin Collinson Martin cut his birding teeth as a teenager in North Wales, and subsequently in the Cambridge Bird Club. He has been an editorial board member for BB since 1998 and is an associate editor of Ibis. He is Chairman of BOURC and Convenor of its Taxonomic Subcommittee. He lives on the coast near Aberdeen and can usually be found staring into the sycamores trying to add Icterine Warbler to his patch list.

Chris Kehoe Chris began birding in the mid 1970s at local sites around Merseyside then on various twitching jaunts and foreign holidays. His first extended foreign birding trip took him to India and Nepal for 4 months in the mid 1980s. In the early 1990s he moved to northeast England, where he interspersed local patch watching with foreign birding excursions. He now works as a freelance bird tour leader, particularly in the tropics. Chris spent a while coordinating BBRC’s work on subspecies identification and assessment, is a member of BOURC and is currently living on Merseyside once more. His academic qualifications include a masters degree in English renaissance literature.

Robin Prytherch

Robin Prytherch Robin was born in Sussex but school took him to London. Work there, as a structural designer, then took him to Bristol. Not long after he joined the Natural History Unit in Bristol, where he worked for 23 years researching, directing and producing a wide range of programmes (TV and radio). Luckily, early retirement allowed him to put more time into his long-term study of the Common Buzzard, which continues. He has subscribed to BB since the 1960s and joined the editorial board in 1987.

Nigel Redman

Nigel Redman Nigel lives in East Sussex and is a publisher for A&C Black, responsible for the Christopher Helm and T&AD Poyser imprints. Since 1982 he has guided more than 100 tours for Birdquest, mainly to Asia and Africa. He has been an active birder since the mid 1960s, a subscriber to BB for more than 40 years and a member of the editorial board since 1998. He is a former chairman of OBC (the Oriental Bird Club) and has served on the councils of the BOU, OSME and ABC (the African Bird Club). Nigel is also co-author of Where to Watch Birds in Britain and senior author of Birds of the Horn of Africa.

Brian Small Brian starting birding in the late 1960s and 1970s in Hampshire, with his interest in sketching and identification developing hand in hand.  Following a degree in photography and a PGCE, he started teaching in Suffolk, where he still lives.  The first book he helped to illustrate was Birds of the Middle East (1996), followed by Birds of East Africa; since 2004 he has worked more-or-less full time on illustration (leading the odd bird tour for Limosa in between times), working on a number of titles including Handbook of the Birds of the World, Birds of the Thai-Malay Peninsula (2007) and Birds of the Horn of Africa (2009).  His most recent publication is the Helm monograph on Reed and Bush Warblers of the World (2010), using plenty of brown paint in the process.  He has served on the British Birds and and Suffolk Ornithological Records Committees.

Steve Votier

Steve Votier Steve spent his formative years birding in Norfolk, but is now based in southwest England where he is a lecturer in Marine Ecology at the University of Plymouth. After completing his first degree at the University of Newcastle, he spent 7 years at the University of Glasgow completing a PhD and post-doctoral positions on seabird ecology. As well as serving on the BB editorial board since 2006, he is a member of both the BOURC and BBRC and also recently joined the BOURC Taxonomic Sub-committee. Certainly most at home in field, either working on seabird islands or looking for scarce migrants.

Editorial staff:

Roger Riddington

Roger Riddington Roger became the BB Editor in 2001. His birding addiction started in his home county of Lincolnshire in the late 1970s, but he has lived in Shetland since 1994. After a season at the bird observatory on Fair Isle in 1992, he returned to the island in 1994 as warden. In 1998 he moved to mainland Shetland and spent three years as manager of the Shetland Biological Records Centre, before starting work for BB. He now lives with his wife, Agnes, at the south end of mainland Shetland and, like all the BB editorial staff, works from home. South Mainland now vies with Fair Isle as his favourite birding area, and he enjoys WeBS counts and beached bird surveys as well as hunting for rares within a few miles of home.

Caroline Dudley Caroline has been passionate about birds and other wildlife since a small child. After university, she spent six months voluntary wardening for the RSPB before joining the BTO in 1986. She spent most of her 13 years there as Assistant Nest Records Officer. Between the late 1980s and late 1990s, she was a keen twitcher as well as birder but now enjoys local birding, surveying butterflies and Red Squirrels near her home on the Isle of Wight. While at the BTO, she had been asked to proofread colleague’s work and enjoyed this so much that she decided to train as a copy-editor/proofreader. She took a Postgraduate Diploma in Publishing at Watford College in 2001 and was delighted to be offered the post of Assistant Editor for BB in 2002.

Peter Kennerley Peter has been an Assistant Editor of BB since 2002. He began birding in Manchester in the 1970s and has since travelled extensively in search of birds, with a particular passion for all things Asian. While living in Hong Kong and Singapore during the 1980s and 1990s he developed a comprehensive understanding of many of the little-known birds of this exciting region, in particular within China. He is an experienced ringer, a skill which has enabled him to fully appreciate the subtleties which define many challenging Asian species, and has published numerous articles, mainly discussing field identification. For eight years he served on the Hong Kong Records Committee and is co-author of The Avifauna of Hong Kong, published in 2001. He is coordinator for the RIACT subcommittee of BBRC, tasked with establishing criteria for the identification and assessment of rare races occurring in Britain and Europe. He is a popular tour leader and regularly leads birdwatching groups to destinations throughout Europe, Asia and North America.