Gone birding

The BBC correspondent on his lesser-known role as president of an avian charity

- Jack Watkins

THERE’S a passage in Far Horizons, Frank Gardner’s account of ‘unusual journeys and strange encounters from a travelling life’, where he describes peering into the abyss of a hissing Sumatran volcano, which reads like a Jules Verne or an H. G. Wells adventure story. In another age, he might have been an explorer. It’s no surprise that he spent hours listening to the last of the old-school desert adventurers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, befriender of the Marsh Arabs and intrepid tracer of the source of the Awash River.

Even after the horrific incident in Saudi Arabia in 2004, when al-Qaeda militants emptied a pistol-load of bullets into Mr Gardner’s body and left him using a wheelchair for life, the BBC security correspondent has remained a man of action, still travelling, abseiling and scuba diving. However, this son of two diplomats is also a quiet, thoughtful observer of Nature. His interest in birds led to his recent appointment as president of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO).

‘I was six when my mother introduced me to birdwatching, when we lived in the Netherlands,’ he recalls. ‘By the time I was nine and we’d moved back to England, I was really into it, mapping out where nests were, identifying eggshells, getting excited when a kingfisher visited the pond and taking my parents to see a tawny owl after I’d discovered its roost.’