‘Bio’ for James Wolstencroft
British by birth, James Wolstencroft made his first long haul trip to the tropics, to Malaysia, in 1969. Immediately he was hooked!
His first East African safari was in 1976 whilst a student at Cambridge. Fifty years of full time searching for birds (and other creatures) has carried him around Europe, across North America and Mexico, through Russia, Turkey, Iran, Arabia, much of India and Nepal, through the Himalayas into an early adult life that revolved around tropical Asia.
James’s love affair with “The Orient” intensified during long periods in India and Indochina in the 1980s. He guided his first birding tour to Assam in 1988. During the 1990s James lived in Thailand, in Lao PDR, in the Seychelles, where he worked for ICBP/BirdLife on tiny Aride Island and in Ethiopia.
Three years at Tarifa in southernmost Spain preceded “the big move” in 2005 back to the tropics, to Tanzania, where he lived with his wife and their two young sons until 2016. After four years ‘back home’ in Scotland he and Elsie returned to Tarifa in Andalucia, in the autumn of 2020.
Here, as everywhere, James is devoted to contemplating the constantly evolving global ecosystem. Above all he’s fascinated by animal migration – partly because it so perfectly illustrates nature’s inherent dynamism – and how it is able to soothe and reassure us. Even in the bad times!
When we fully realise that there will always be unfathomable resilience in Nature. In phenomena of such stupendous flexibility and infinite complexity.
Vagrant Mind 