I developed an interest in birds aged six and had achieved some degree of competence in the identification of common birds at Teesmouth and in the North Yorkshire Moors by the time I was eleven. Under the expert tutelage of Graham Bell and Philip Stead from 1955, my skills improved rapidly and my aspirations widened so, when I left school aged seventeen, birds dictated my career choice  –  I joined the Foreign Office to experience them in the wider world.

After a short stint of ‘relief duty’ at the Embassy in communist Bulgaria in 1964, where I was taking a risk even using binoculars, I was posted to The Gambia, which was gaining its independence from Britain in February 1965. As a still penniless junior civil servant, I did not own a camera of any sort, but the flight out had a night stop in the Canary Islands so I took the opportunity to buy a SLR Yashica and a telephoto lens at reasonable cost. The Gambia was a photographer’s paradise, with exotic species like Abyssinian Roller, various bee-eaters and Temminck’s Courser seemingly unafraid of humans. But I remained a birdwatcher first, and soon realised the camera was often an obstacle to the study and enjoyment of the bird. I therefore made the decision to leave the camera behind most days, restricting myself to intensive photography only occasionally.

I adopted the same strategy in Turkey and Pakistan but found the riches of Ethiopia harder to resist. My last posting, Mozambique, before transferring to the Nature Conservancy Council, was also newly independent (from Portugal) and under Marxist rule. I was arrested twice and thankful for Diplomatic Immunity, so photography was out of the question. Fortunately, the Kruger National Park, with its photogenic game animals, was just across the border, which I was able to visit twice.

Back in the UK, I resisted the pressure to put photography before birdwatching in order to ‘prove’ records of unusual birds. The old bird collector’s adage: “What’s shot is history; what’s missed’s a mystery” still holds good, it seems, in the camera age. This pressure intensified with the advent of digital photography but I’m still a dinosaur when it comes to modern technology.

I had reasonable success with a small Panasonic bridge camera on the ornithologically unknown island of Santa Maria in the Azores, to which I moved in 2009. Why is it that Nearctic waders are so more approachable than Old World species?

Now I have a more sophisticated Fujifilm bridge camera and a Canon SLR with a Sigma telephoto lens. Less mobile in my eighties, I can no longer take the latter with me in the field and bridge cameras have serious limitations when it comes to birds in flight. Much of my photography in the Algarve, where I now live, is therefore done from my veranda. As this looks over a wild valley attractive to migrants and is under the main flight line to and from the south-west tip of Europe, Cape St. Vincent, only 20km away, there are plenty of opportunities to photograph overfliers. But, in the dense cover of the valley and my garden, most of the many rarities still manage to elude my lens.

Sadly, my transparencies have deteriorated over the years and my enforced absence from humid Santa Maria for a year (2011) accounted for some of my most precious images. When I was bemoaning their loss to a friend, he commented: “Well, at least you don’t have to worry about what to do with them before you die!” The big advantage of digital is that the loss of colour integrity and the mould problem have been eradicated, so the photographs here are heavily biassed towards the post-digital era. I have included a few damaged images of special significance.

Whilst field study of an individual bird can reveal much more about the species than its appearance, photographs sometimes contain details not obvious to the observer at the time. Each unique image is therefore worthy of preservation. In most cases it is just a frozen memory for the photographer, but some have a story to tell, and I have tried to select those from my surviving collection which offer an element of ‘added value’.