It's A Calling

Warwick Tarboton is a true naturalist and respected as one of the country’s foremost natural history authors and bird photographers. There is little doubt that he has influenced many people to take their interest in birds in particular to the next level.

- Warwick Tarboton

You have had a lifelong involvement with birds, having turned a schoolboy hobby into a career. You’ve stuck with your calling for a long time. For people who don’t know you, can you give us some of the highlights?

The birding bug bit me when I was 13 years old and I can thank many of the older members of the Wits Bird Club all those years ago – Graham Pattern, Royce Reed, Forsyth van Nierop, Des Hewitt, Clive Hunter and others – for fostering my interest and enthusiasm during my schoolboy and immediate post-school years. Highlights? I feel that my whole life has been an ongoing highlight, as opportunities have opened up for me all along the way.

My parents decided that I could never make a living from birds and suggested I might try geology instead. So when I finished school they sent me off to then-Rhodesia to test the waters by working as a field assistant for a geological exploration company and I lived a glorious year in the bush, spent mostly birding. From this experience, I wrote my first ‘papers’ on the avifauna of the West Sinoia district of Zimbabwe (with the late Richard Brooke) and the breeding habits of Retz’s Helmet-shrike.

I then went the geology route and spent seven eventful years in this industry before I realised that friends I’d made through birding, like Alan and Meg Kemp, Carl Vernon and Peter Milstein, made a perfectly good living from birds and that I was missing out. At about this time Nylsvley Nature Reserve came into being and the Savanna Biome Programme was initiated in this reserve. Joining this remarkable project provided me with the opportunity to change lanes and become zoologically qualified.