Field Guide to the BirdTrack Team

Nick Moran (BirdTrack Organiser)

For any information about BirdTrack, help with the website, or to make any comments, then Nick is the person to contact, at birdtrack@bto.org.

Nick headed the Biology department at the British School in Abu Dhabi (UAE) until July 2009, when he arrived in Thetford to take over permanently from Mike Prince as BirdTrack Organiser.

Nick has been scribbling wildlife notes from the age of 6. Migrating north from inland North Yorkshire to Fife, Scotland at 18 rapidly expanded his opportunity and appetite for birding and over the next 15 years he travelled extensively in the UK, Europe, Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Nick spent two years in Shanghai, China before moving to Abu Dhabi with his wife Becca in September 2004. There he contributed over 15,000 records to the Emirates Bird Records Committee (for which he is the Secretary) - he has already overtaken this total with BirdTrack records! Notable finds in the UAE included two Brown Shrikes, Paddyfield Warbler (by the laundry room in the school campus!), Marbled Duck, Red Knot and Arabia's first record of Ashy Drongo.

Andy Musgrove

After many years running WeBS (the Wetland Bird Survey), Andy is now Head of Monitoring, a brief that still includes an overview of WeBS, but also of the Breeding Bird Survey, Atlas 2007-11 and BirdTrack, amongst other things. Andy has a strong interest in developing BirdTrack to be the best online bird recording system possible, as he has been scribbling sightings of birds down in paper notebooks since 1983, amassing about 75,000 UK bird records in the process; as a result he is particularly keen to develop an upload facility to get all his old records into BirdTrack [we're working on it Andy, but don't hold your breath...]. Most of Andy's birding has been in Yorkshire, Avon, Cornwall and Norfolk, with his most visited sites being the BTO Nunnery Lakes and Barnhamcross Common, Whitlingham Country Park, Horsey Dunes, Buckenham Marshes, Chew Valley Lake, Landulph Marsh and Knotford Nook. Andy has also recorded birds in 26 countries abroad.

Andy's memorable birding moments include finding Fea's/Zino's Petrel, Yellow-rumped Warbler and Pacific Swift in the UK, whilst overseas highlights include watching raptor migration over Israel and Short-legged Ground-rollers in Madagascar.

Mark Grantham

Mark (the one on the right in the photo) has been involved with BirdTrack on and off for several years and was the Organiser from 2007 to 2008, before moving on within the BTO to focus on the Ringing Scheme. In April 2010 he took on the exciting new role of BirdGuides News Manager, in which he will focus on building the BirdGuides/BTO relationship and developing the scientific value of BirdGuides' news stream. The sharing of information between BirdGuides and BirdTrack will enhance both services, and will in due course streamline bird recording.

Mark grew up birding in Nottinghamshire, but soon found migration at Gibraltar Point Bird Observatory in Lincolnshire, where he is still very much involved with Obs life. Despite having worked in Colombia, Indonesia, Sweden, Mexico and USA, he still finds that there is nowhere quite like the east coast of Britain in the second week of October with an overnight easterly...

Iain is the BTO's Senior Web Developer, and was involved in the evolution of BirdTrack from the (far simpler) era of Migration Watch (2002-2004). Nowadays he has a more advisory role, but still dips into the code now and again. He's primarily responsible for the online development of Atlas 2007-11 and Garden BirdWatch, but juggles this with his role as Joint Head of Information Systems at the BTO (with Karen), overseeing all BTO systems, networks and stuff like that...

Originally from the outskirts of Glasgow, Iain has an ecological background (spending 15 years studying spiders at Paisley Tech, Durham University, then Scottish Agricultural College) and, with the BTO's influence, now feels confident of identifying Wren, Robin, Dotterel, Gough Moorhen, Galapagos Hawk and Kookaburra (more a question of being in the right place, rather than skill). [Err, and which species of Kookaburra Iain?] As an 'obsessed' triathlete, Iain is not happy unless he's spent about 10 hours of the week in the pool, on his lovely road bike or pounding the local Thetford Forest trails. He used to rock-climb. A lot. Then he moved to Norfolk...

Karen has been involved in building and maintaining the BTO's online database since it's beginning (Migration Watch) right through to present. As well as managing this and the internal databases, she is Joint Head of the IS Unit along with Iain.

When not dealing with databases or other IS matters, Karen prefers to be outdoors, and is interested in all flavours of natural history - sadly she isn't an expert in any particular one!

Bryony joined the BTO in July 2007 and was the lead web developer for BirdTrack until she went on Maternity Leave in May 2010. We're all looking forward to her son Leonardo becoming a BirdTracker!

In her spare time she enjoys drawing, knitting, crocheting amigurumi (yes, we had to look that up too) and playing city-building strategy games. She admits to not knowing much about birdwatching but peer pressure recently forced her to buy some binoculars. She still finds it hard to focus them on anything so tends to stick to large subjects like the whale she was watching in the photo.

Staffan Roos

Staffan joined BTO Scotland in 2008, having previously worked in Belfast and Uppsala, Sweden. He has analysed data from BirdTrack and its predecessor MigrationWatch in order to examine the onset, median and length of the migration period of different species. He has also used BirdTrack data to evaluate the spatial distribution of sites monitored in the Hen Harrier Winter Roost Survey (a partnership between BTO and the Hawk and Owl Trust).

Staffan grew up near the famous migration point of Falsterbo in southwest Sweden. For a few years, however, football was more important than birds for him but during his university studies Staffan found the way back to ornithology again. His studies led him to do a PhD in which he examined the relationships between nest predators (mainly corvids) and Red-backed Shrikes in Sweden. Apart from occasional birdwatching trips near Stirling and Thetford, Staffan is interested in bird ringing (still a trainee though), playing football (at a very low amateur level these days), fly fishing and walking in the Scottish landscape.