Brian Small

When and how did your interest in wildlife begin?

My interest in birds began at an early age, inspired by both my parents, who gave me my first binoculars aged seven, and a love of drawing them; I can still remember drawings of Hobby and Kestrel (copied from Raymond Ching’s paintings) proudly displayed at my primary school, though luckily perhaps I can’t remember what they looked like. I tried to draw from life, but though it was difficult the process of looking carefully at birds helped inspire a deeper interest in bird identification, which I still have today.

As a boy, my free time would be taken up with cricket in the summer, football in the winter, and birds whenever I wasn’t doing these. Professor of Geography at Southampton University, Dad would take me off school for days at a time to go to the county ground at Southampton to watch Hampshire play Australia or the Dell to watch the Saints – Barry Richards and Mick Channon were my childhood heroes. At weekends, we would head to local birding spots: Dibden Bay (when it was good), Farlington, the New Forest or Portland – often meeting up with Mike Witherick. I saw my first Wilson’s Phalarope at Dibden in 1974 (and another in 1977, the same year as a Lesser Yellowlegs), but Dad rarely took me off school to watch birds; I never forgave him for not taking me to see the Wallcreeper at Cheddar in 1976, though we did head to the Suffolk coast each May.

I was also lucky as a child to have parents that loved to travel abroad. With four sisters it became an adventure to drive to France or Switzerland each summer camping, or Spain or even Kenya a couple of times. Birds and wildlife were important parts of these trips, as well as imposed geomorphology lessons! I can still remember walks along lanes in the Causses, watching Woodchat Shrikes hawking bees, or on glaciers with the odd Wallcreeper flicking ahead as it searched for moth larvae. At an early age, birds (and drawing birds) plus travel became a huge part of my life.

What did you do before working for Naturetrek?

I can’t say I was an enthusiastic pupil at school, but I was good at art and later photography, so it seemed natural to head to Art School – Winchester then Farnham – where I gained a degree in the art and history of Photography in 1985. But what then?! I spent three years working as a naturalist in the New Forest at Beaulieu for the ‘Out of Town Centre’ set up by Jack Hargreaves. Each week, a group of children from London (tough kids from the Inner London Education Authority) would come down to stay on a working farm and I would teach them about the landscape by traipsing them across the heath and through woodlands, showing them the birds and wildlife. It was hard to know who got more out of it; me I suspect, as I found Honey Buzzard, Great Grey Shrike and in 1988 five Little Egrets on Beaulieu Mill Pond – a time when they were still rare.

A year’s teacher training in South Wales followed, then with Janet, I moved to Suffolk where I ended up teaching photography and art to GCSE and A-Level pupils in Framlingham. I loved teaching, but also loved birds, illustration and travel – with many trips to Cyprus, Israel, and various states in the US – and eventually I made a huge decision to stop teaching full time and to do all of them! I continued to do supply teaching, but supported this with various book illustration projects and tour leading for Limosa Holidays, for whom I would eventually lead over 100 tours to far-flung locations. Bird illustration was never lucrative, but I was lucky enough to be involved in some great books: field guides to the Middle East, East Africa and the Horn of Africa, but these were eclipsed in a way by working on the Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW).

What other interests do you have outside of wildlife?

Besides family life, which I shouldn’t really dismiss too lightly, birds and wildlife are a huge part of my life, especially my local patch, and I have enjoyed writing articles on identification of gulls, shrikes, etc. Other than these I continue to do a bit of sport. Running was big for me when I was a little younger, running 10km and half marathons (1hour 22min was my fastest time way back when), but time and aching joints have caught up with me and I do less now. With Ben, my son, I played a bit of cricket for Southwold, and nowadays I head out on my mountain bike a lot – most of my local birding is done from it. I continue with an interest in landscape photography, but on a more amateur level than I would like – I miss the old black-and-white film and darkroom processing, I guess.

When and where was your first tour leading assignment?

My first tour leading a group was in 2001 with Mike Crewe, who ‘taught me the ropes’ during a week in the Pyrenees, before I was let loose the following year with a number of tours on my own. Having been made redundant due to COVID in 2020, I am relatively new to Naturetrek, but have been lucky enough to have guided a handful of day walks at various spots along the Suffolk coast. We have enjoyed some superb walks about Dunwich, Walberswick and Aldeburgh, memorably seeing Stone Curlew flocks, finding three Glossy Ibis and an Eastern Yellow Wagtail at Dunwich!

Do you continue to do bird illustration?

Do you have a favourite bird, mammal or plant?

Wow! This is a tough question. I go in and out of love with some birds, but (oddly many will no doubt think) still really enjoy seeing a first-winter Caspian Gull – as those that have walked with me in Suffolk will attest. I get great pleasure from Stonechats, wheatears and shrikes – maybe because they sit out and still so I can draw or photograph them? I like the challenge of gull and wader identification, but I guess my favourite would be Black-tailed Godwit – I am lucky to have a local flock on the Blyth Estuary.

Butterflies are a bit of a hidden pleasure and, though most tours I guide centre on birds, I am super keen on seeing butterflies wherever I go. On my Switzerland tour to the Swiss Alps in summer, we spend a fair time looking for butterflies with up to 100 species possible in a week! My European list has now edged above 300.

What is your most memorable wildlife encounter to date?

Another toughie! Having been lucky to travel so much, most memorable encounters fade or get usurped by new experiences. Last year, watching 1000s of Snow and Ross’s Geese whiffle in to Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, against a deep blue sky and snow-capped mountains is still vivid, as was watching a Black-browed Albatross head south off Southwold!

I think the encounters that stick with you are the times when birds, wildlife and landscape come together in one special moment. Like all seven members of the Small family (including an 11-year-old me) stuffed into a battered Peugeot 404 estate, driving along dusty, bumpy, rust red roads through Tsavo West in Kenya, with Dad banging on the roof of the car trying to get Black Rhinos to look up for photographs, and constantly hoping they didn’t charge! Or walking with friends along a forest trail in Kakamega, western Kenya, and bumping into a Blue-headed Bee-eater perched quietly in trackside bushes glowing a deep ultramarine blue in the gloom.

What are you reading at the moment?

I read a lot of an evening, varying from various detective books (currently Jo Nesbo) to travel-based bird books (‘The Jewel Hunter’ by Chris Gooddie), but also historical novels. Two books I go back to time and again are: ‘This Thing of Darkness’ by Harry Thompson, which is a great read about Captain Fitzroy and Charles Darwin’s travels on the Beagle; ‘The Peregrine’ by J A Baker is a beautiful, evocative book, so beautifully written that when I have finished it, it is as if a part of my life is missing…

What new destination would you most like to travel to next?

I still enjoy re-visiting favourite locations – Switzerland, Cape May, New Mexico, Morocco, Borneo, Georgia – but there are a couple of places I hope I might visit one day. Sulawesi and Halmahera intrigue me, lying beyond the Wallace Line and into a whole new avifauna of which I have no experience – Lilac-cheeked Kingfisher, for example. I have yet to reach the west coast of the USA, a big gap on my North American bird list, so California or Washington would be fun. Anywhere really!

Contact us to find out where Brian will be leading Naturetrek tours to next!