Martin is a zoologist by training and an enthusiastic, all-round field naturalist who spends as much of his time as he can outdoors in UK and abroad, studying birds, mammals and plants, but especially butterflies and moths. He is equally at home immersed in the wildlife of the Cambridgeshire village where he lives or the butterflies of a tropical rainforest on the other side of the world. Throughout his career he has championed the need for nature conservation at a global level, including 36 years as a senior staff member for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), where he worked mostly on the development of their international programme through RSPB’s role as the UK Partner of BirdLife International.
He stood down from his RSPB job in 2014 to pursue a new career as an independent consultant, mostly through his company Parides, and is a popular trainer and lecturer. He is very widely travelled worldwide, contributing to many different project initiatives, examples stretching from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the rainforests of Indonesia and West Africa and albatrosses across the southern oceans. Over the years, he has also led and participated in many wildlife tours to a wide variety of destinations, visiting various parts of Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, SE Asia and Africa.
He is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders and co-organisers for 28 years of the Birdfair, the annual festival in the UK, which brought together more than 350 exhibitors from around the world and raised more than £300,000 each year for international conservation projects. He is actively involved in Butterfly Conservation European Interests Group, including field surveys and conservation efforts for threatened and endemic butterflies in various parts of southern and eastern Europe.
