My first three weeks at the NOA passed in a flash and I really enjoyed meeting all the regular visitors and volunteers. Being back outside and active and doing the thing I love most – working with birds – is very satisfying. I also enjoy the moth trapping immensely as I have participated in this for years but never had the time to really get into it.

My career in conservation started in 1997 when I was intern at the NABU reserve Mettnau in southern Germany and lived right next to the ringing station of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology. During my first weeks I watched strange, scrappy looking chaps disappearing in between the bushes in the morning and then reappearing late in the afternoon until finally one of them told me they were bird ringers and invited me to come and join them. So that was that – I was hooked and spent all me spare time from then onwards at the ringing station.

After my internship I did an MSc in Biology at the University in Tuebingen and continued ringing in my holidays in Germany and abroad. My first paid job in ornithology I got in 2009 when I was Field Worker for the Yelkouan Shearwater Life Project in Malta. After leaving Malta I moved to Norfolk and worked as Education Officer for the Norfolk Wildlife Trust before being appointed joint Warden on Skomer (together with my husband Eddie). We managed the island for six years and then finally needed a break. We took half a year off work, and I went to Australia to ring Waders with the Victorian Wader Study group, to Spain to monitor Montague’s Harriers and spent six weeks ringing at the Ringing Station at Lake Baikal in Russia.

My next job was researching habitat preferences of Grey-headed Woodpeckers for the Swiss Ornithological Institute which involved figuring out how to catch and tag them. After two years in the Swiss mountains I returned to the British Isles and took a post as Tern Warden at Lady’s Island Lake in County Wexford, Ireland. Another three years later I was back in Norfolk working as Ecologist for Norfolk Wildlife Services and finally in April 2026 I started at the NOA.

I feel like I’ve come full circle—doing what my 20-year-old self once dreamed of.

Bee