James Wolstencroft
Birding Guide & AuthorAbout James Wolstencroft
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.
James and his family lived in Spain between 2002 -2005 and 2020-2024, Tanzania between 2005-2016, and Scotland between 2016-2020.
In the spring of 2024 James and his wife Elsie bought a small house, partly as a private nature observatory, on Scurdie Ness near Montrose overlooking the North Sea, in Scotland. The south-facing garden is very small and sadly was rather barren when first they moved-in. It is James’s principal ambition to turn it into a thriving wildlife oasis, a miniature ark and a ‘magnet for migrants’, both insect and bird.
Here in Scotland, as everywhere in the world, 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
