Peter Davidson
BC Projects Coordinator

Telephone 877-349-2473

I’ve been a birder since the age of six, when a rural upbringing in south-east England inspired me to join the Young Ornithologists Club (the junior arm of the RSPB in the UK). Developing this childhood obsession into a career seemed more attractive than any other option come fledging time, and so I took an undergraduate degree in Ecology from the University of East Anglia in the heart of Norfolk, one of Britain’s premier birding counties. Whilst there, I led an ornithological expedition under the auspices of BirdLife International to a remote Indonesian archipelago. This ignited a desire to spread my wings further afield, and over the next few years I performed regular migrations to the Middle East and Asia, which included conducting field surveys for BirdLife International and the Ornithological Society of the Middle East. In 1996, I took up a post as a wildlife survey biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Laos, which began a nine-year sojourn in Indochina, evenly split between Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Much of this time was spent conducting bird, mammal and habitat inventories (terrestrial and marine), conservation priority-setting, and designing research and monitoring programs, all the while working alongside national government staff, sharing skills and knowledge. I attained my M.Sc. from the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, conducting a study of the globally threatened Bengal Florican and its relationship with a traditional agro-ecosystem in the Tonle Sap floodplain (South-east Asia’s largest lake), in Cambodia. Most recently, based in Vietnam, I worked as a consultant to several international conservation organisations, and continue to maintain close links with BirdLife International and the Wildlife Conservation Society. I joined BSC in October 2005, and am responsible for the design, development, supervision and delivery of BSC’s BC Coastal Waterbird and Beached Bird Surveys, and providing regional support for a number of BSC’s national programs. My family – that is my wife Julie and our two-year-old son Bram – are building our new nest on the shores of Boundary Bay, one of Canada’s flagship Important Bird Areas.