This article first appeared in the October 2025 Edition of Birdwatching Magazine
For my 200th Grumpy Article, a tribute to an ‘ordinary’ birder…
Brian Anderson (1938-2025) was not a top lister, leading campaigner or expert birder; never presented a TV show or put out a daily podcast. He was not a great wildlife writer or life and soul of a twitch. He never found a mega, or worked a patch daily, nor founded a reserve. He didn’t lead and mentor young birders. He’s not famous, few birders knew him well or even knew of him.
Brian was just an everyday extraordinary birder. Don’t get me wrong, he often struggled in the field with sub-optimal eye-sight, sometimes his ID was imperfect. He needed to get close without spooking the birds. Getting close was an issue, as he was a wheelchair user. Polio robbed him of his legs when he was barely a toddler. He spent more than eighty years wheeling. On a private trip to Australia, we spent half an hour constantly repositioning our vehicle until, eventually, Brian managed to see the low-perched Paradise Flycatcher.
But it mostly wasn’t an annoyance for him. He accepted his lot stoically. He worked as an accountant for BP, invested wisely, watched the pennies and raised a family. His retirement was comfortable enough to buy good kit and travel. Every year he visited his daughter in Alabama enjoying the birds in their yard.
I can’t remember how we met, only that it was at the very end of the last century. By 2000 we had formed the ‘disabled birders association’ (now the more ‘PC’, ‘Birding For All’). Several years after that we organised our first overseas birding trip and he celebrated his 60th Birthday in Nairobi serenaded by Hadada Ibis, with an honorary fly past by Little Green Bee-eaters… then picked tiny scorpions and flying termites out of an al fresco birthday dinner. He and his wife Joanna became our firm friends. Every year we met up at our stall at the Bird Fair and made many more friends and recruited hundreds of members.
Most years we organised a trip, where the promised accessible accommodation was often anything but. Brian was never phased. In truth, he would suffer any indignity to get a bird. Picked up bodily by fellow twitchers or propped in the back of a Landrover he extended his British list. Some local birders in India raised him shoulder high, wheelchair and all, to get him over a narrow kissing gate. He never complained about dawn starts overseas… even although that meant waking an hour before everyone else to get ready. (Most people have no clue how much longer everything takes if you are a wheeler).
On arrival in Texas the car hire firm reneged on our promised adapted vehicle. Most of the group could access the Transit Van, the only other vehicle left was a sports car. So, I scraped along unmetalled roads in Mexico as Brian sang ‘Is this the way to Amarillo?’ in the back seat. He liked to laugh and could be very entertaining… he spent most of that trip talking like a character from a pulp fiction western.
He was a keen lister, so keen that, when an Oriental Turtle Dove plummeted from the hotel roof in Singapore and bounced off his shoulder, he looked at its corpse and said “I think it twitched, can I tick it?” We visited five continents together.
If you are ever in a hide that has been properly adapted for all us ‘mobility challenged’ birders, the chances are Brian’s advice, and willingness to road test it, is responsible. Raise a glass of red in thanks, he’d appreciate that.
Brian was my birding buddy and I’ll miss him.
