British by birth, James Wolstencroft made his first long haul trip to the tropics, to Malaysia, in 1969. Immediately he was hooked!
His first East African safari was in 1976 whilst a student at Cambridge. Fifty years of full time searching for birds (and other creatures) has carried him around Europe, across North America and Mexico, through Russia, Turkey, Iran, Arabia, much of India and Nepal, through the Himalayas into an early adult life that revolved around tropical Asia.
James’s love affair with “The Orient” intensified during long periods in India and Indochina in the 1980s. He guided his first birding tour to Assam in 1988. During the 1990s James lived in Thailand, in Lao PDR, in the Seychelles, where he worked for ICBP/BirdLife on tiny Aride Island, and in Ethiopia.
Three years in southern Spain preceded his move in 2005 to Tanzania, where he lived with his wife and their two young sons until 2016. After four years ‘back home’ in Scotland he and Elsie returned to the southernmost tip of Europe, to Tarifa in Andalucia, in the fall of 2020.
There, as everywhere, James is devoted to contemplating the constantly evolving global ecosystem. Above all he’s fascinated by the way in which animal migration; which so clearly demonstrates nature’s inherent dynamism; may serve to reassure us that there will always be an unfathomable resilience in a phenomenon of such infinite flexibility and complexity
Trip Reports & Blogs
