LONG-SERVING MAGAZINE EDITOR TO SPEAK AT COUNTY BIRD CLUB’S 2018 AGM

Roger - fan of folk-rock (and Man U)

A BUMPER  turnout is in prospect for the Lincolnshire Bird Club’s annual meeting  at the Admiral Rodney Hotel in Horncastle on March 20.

The guest speaker will be Dr Roger Riddington, long-serving Editor of the authoritative British Birds magazine, who is coming back to his home county, Lincolnshire, from the Shetlands where he and his family are based.

The son of a self-employed milk roundsman, Roger grew up and went to school in the Alford area where he discovered the joys and challenges of birdwatching while exploring the fields and wood around his home.

He was lucky to receive plenty of encouragement from an old schoolpal of his father, namely the late Ted Smith, driving force behind the founding of Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve, Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust and many other nature-associated initiatives.

After impressive A-level results, Roger won a place at Oxford University where his degree subject was Geography.

Following graduation, he was poised to take a job in Cambridge with global accountancy firm Arthur Andersen, but decided, instead, to take a PhD second degree, researching movement and dispersal in great tits.

This proved to be the springboard for a career in natural sciences and ornithology which included four years as warden on Fair Isle.

To this day, though he has travelled extensively, Fair Isle remains his favourite birding location.

At the annual meeting, Roger will doubtless talk about his life and work as Editor (for the past 17 years) of British Birds which is  a five-days-a week job. He also contributes to the annual Shetland Bird Report.

Highlights of his career include unexpectedly encountering what was the third UK record of thick-billed warbler on Out Skerries on September 14, 2001.

Lowpoints include having his Zeiss Dialyt 10x40 binoculars, a 21st birthday present, and his Bushnell Spacemaster scope stolen in Seville at the end of the  first day of a 1989 holiday in Spain.

During his presentation, Roger may perhaps also reveal whether he has yet had the opportunity to realise a long-held ambition - to watch spoon-billed sandpipers in their breeding grounds on the Chukchi peninsula in Russia.

Off duty, he likes the music of Scottish folk-rock singer-songwriter Malachy Tallack, who also lives on Shetland, and books by the food writer, Nigel Slater.

As he confessed to fellow birder Keith Betton in an interview which was published in 2015 in the book Behind The Binoculars (co-authored by Mark Avery), Roger is a Manchester United fan.

The AGM starts at 7.30pm, and there is no admission charge.