Dick Filby

Dick grew up in Cheam, Surrey and has been an avid birder since before he went to school, although he had to wait until age eight to get his first binoculars, a gift for a field course in North Yorkshire. Since then, he has never stopped travelling across the UK and then the world in search of birds, mammals and wild places.  In 1978 he organised an overland birding trip to India and Nepal: seven months, four blokes and a VW bus, although the latter never returned due to ‘events’ in Iran and Afghanistan.

After working for the RSPB in the 80’s, Dick founded the UK Rare Bird Alert news service in 1991.  He was a founder member of the Oriental Bird Club, and with his passion for conservation also helped raise significant sums for the recent, successful eradication of introduced rats on the Subantarctic island of South Georgia, with the projected benefit of an additional 120 million nesting pairs of seabirds.

Dick is now a part-time resident of Norwich UK and Colorado USA, but is rarely at either home for more than a few weeks at a time, instead guiding trips in distant parts, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and a great variety of places in between.  He did not miss a year in Antarctica for three decades, nor has he missed an autumn on the Isles of Scilly since 1975.  Recent favourites have included guiding in Spitsbergen, Colorado and Ladakh.