Skip to navigation, or go to main content.

WINGS Tour Leaders – David Fisher

David Fisher

Image of David Fisher

David Fisher was born in Cardiff in 1954. Though casually interested in birds from an early age he started birding on 11 October 1969 when he accidentally flushed a Kingfisher from under a bridge over a stream near his home. On joining the local bird club he made friends with various slightly older birders who had cars, and by December 1970 was already ‘twitching’ around Britain, seeing the UK’s first Desert Warbler at Portland that month. Most of his bird activities remained local however, primarily in his home county of Glamorgan and within a few years he became a member of the Glamorgan Records Committee. The following two years’ school holidays were spent at Portland and Fair Isle bird observatories and from October 1971 David made annual pilgrimages to the Isles of Scilly where he quickly made friends with many of Britain’s more active birders.

From 1973 to 1976 he attended Weymouth College of Education where he trained to be a teacher, obtaining a Certificate of Education in the latter summer. Rumours to the effect that David chose Weymouth College because of its proximity (walking distance) to the bird reserves at Radipole and Lodmoor (and only a bus ride from Portland Bill) may have more than a grain of truth to them. While at college he met other birders who wanted to travel abroad in search of birds and so in 1974 he set off with four other students in a transit van overland to Turkey where they spent three months birding from dawn ‘til dusk. This culminated in a three-week sojourn atop the Camilça Hills in Istanbul studying the raptor migration through September. David used the data compiled to write the main scientific report that supported his teaching qualification in Weymouth college.

In the summer of 1976 he spent ten weeks in Trinidad and Tobago obtaining a firm grounding in the Neotropical birds that he loves so much. While there he found the first two Black-headed Gulls for South America. Returning to the UK David was employed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as a contract warden, initially at Radipole Lake in Weymouth and then as a species protection warden in North Wales where he watched over nesting Peregrines. In September 1977 he was taken on to the RSPB’s full time staff, working in their education department as Activities Organiser for the Young Ornithologists’ Club. Based at the RSPB’s headquarters in Sandy, Bedfordshire David now had easy access to Norfolk and quickly adopted the habit of spending most weekends at Cley-next-the-sea on the north Norfolk coast, one of Britain’s top mainland birding locations.

In 1978 he was invited to join the council of the newly formed Ornithological Society of the Middle East, remaining a council member for 11 years and editing the society’s newsletter for the latter half of that period. While working for the RSPB David spent his annual holidays travelling overseas mainly in pursuit of Western Palearctic birds, and destinations included Mallorca, Spain, Morocco, the Canary Islands, and Israel, though he also moved further afield visiting California and Arizona in 1980 - a trip sadly inspired by the imminent demise of the California Condor. In 1979 David’s friend Mark Beaman helped a London travel company to set up a new bird tour company called Sunbird, and Mark invited him to lead a tour to Greece in the spring of 1980. This went very well and as a consequence David was offered Sunbird’s first full-time staff leader post from March 1981. Tours to Morocco, Israel, Siberia and Mongolia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Kenya quickly followed and by 1982 David was seldom at home. In the middle of that year the owners of Sunbird, Serenissima Travel, decided to sell the company and after several months of uncertainty, WINGS bought Sunbird and appointed David it’s new Managing Director. The office was moved to Sandy where it was run by David and Jennifer Thomas who was Sunbird’s office manager until July 2004.

The following 20 years flashed by in a never ending round of bird tours interspersed by office work. To date David has led more than 140 tours to 30 countries on 6 continents. These include 25 tours to Kenya, 19 tours to Australia, 14 to Venezuela, 8 to Argentina, and 7 to Brazil. He has now spent a total of more than three years birding in the field in South America and two years each in Africa and Australia. Besides his tour leading duties, David has also travelled widely privately, visiting 66 countries in search of birds and has now encountered and enjoyed experiences with more than 6,500 species. David regards South America as the top bird continent and he is currently a council member of the Neotropical Bird Club. However, he regards Kenya as the top single country for birds and has been a member of the East African Rarities Committee since its inception in 1984. David is also Chairman of the Seychelles Bird Records Committee and is a member of the American Birding Association’s Listing and Ethics Committee.

In between all of this, David edits birdwatching site guides for Prion Limited, a publishing company of which he is a director and helped to found in 1986. He is a keen sound recordist, and long-time proponent of minidisc, which he uses extensively on his tours. David archives his recordings at the National Sound Archive of the British Library in London and is pleased to have added quite a few species to their collection. He has recently become fascinated by digital photography, and is using it extensively for his keen interest in butterflies and dragonflies.

David retired as Sunbird’s Managing Director in 2001, but continues to serve as a director of the company and of course, as a staff leader. He is now spending increasing amounts of time going on WINGS and Sunbird tours as a paying participant, which he regards as just about the best way to travel the world in search of birds!

Tours

Back to leaders list