About the Author

When Colin Tudge was a small boy, he could recognize only five kinds of birds. Following a childhood spent at London Zoo and in conversation with a bird-watching cousin, he began to perceive that 'ordinary birds' included pipits and wagtails, terns and kestrels, and a miscellany of crows, not all of which were black. So began a lifelong interest in birds and how they live. After studying zoology at Cambridge, Colin wrote for the New Scientist and was a documentary maker for BBC radio. Now a full-time writer, he appears regularly as a public speaker. A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he was a visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics for ten years.