Hello and thanks for visiting my website. I hope you enjoy it. I have been watching and drawing birds for as long as I can remember. My fascination was kindled at the age of five when my father began taking me on nature walks in the south Oxfordshire countryside (it was Berkshire then). During my early teens it was the diversity of birdlife, the subtleties of plumage variation and the unending learning curve of birding that captured my imagination. Encouraged by my elder brother Richard who, being thirteen years my senior, was already illustrating books professionally (entomological subjects not ornithological luckily), I set my sights on following in his footsteps. On his recommendation, one route I didn’t take was to art college. The development of his insect illustrating had stagnated during his time there and his advice was, “stay at home and paint birds”…  I did. My major break came in 1985 when I was lucky enough to win the British Birds Bird Illustrator of the Year and Richard Richardson awards. The resulting publicity generated several book project offers including producing the plates for Rare Birds of Britain and Europe with authors Per Alstrom and Peter Colston. My main interests continue to be the identification and taxonomy of holarctic birds and over the last fifteen years I have also illustrated Auks of the World and have had plates in Birds of the Western Palearctic and other guides covering the birds of Southeast Asia, India, Madagascar, and Malaysia. I have also produced plates for identification articles and papers describing new  species to

science in such journals as Birding World, British Birds, Dutch Birding, Limicola, Var Fagelvarld, Ibis, The Auk and the Wilson Bulletin. For the last few years I have been one of a team of artists producing the plates for the Handbook of the Birds of the World (Lynx Edicions). I am also currently working on a new field guide to the Rare Birds of North America with authors Will Russell and Steve Howell for Princeton Press. I enjoy foreign birding and have travelled widely throughout the Western Palearctic as well as to North America, South America, India, and China in search of birds. Aside from painting, I have also been County Bird Recorder for Oxfordshire since 1994, I’m a member of the British Ornithological Union Records Committee, and an identification consultant to Birding World.