EVENING TALKS: Prof. Ian Newton & Tom Bowser
- ALL AGES
Join us for the first of the festival talks from Prof. Ian Newton OBE, FRS, FRSE and author, wildlife guide and speaker Tom Bowser.
Date and time
Location
Moffat
TBC TBC Moffat DG10 United KingdomAbout this event
- Event lasts 3 hours 30 minutes
- ALL AGES
- Free venue parking
Join us for the first of the festival talks from Prof. Ian Newton and author, wildlife guide and public speaker, Tom Bowser.
IAN NEWTON
Until he retired, Ian Newton worked as an ornithologist involved in research relevant to conservation. He began his ornithological career at the University of Oxford, studying seed-eating birds, and then moved to work for the Natural Environment Research Council, studying first waterfowl and then birds-of-prey, particularly the impacts of DDT and other pesticides. For many years, he was head of pesticide and pollution research at Monks Wood Research Station near Huntingdon. He is especially interested in the factors that limit bird populations, including different forms of land-use, and has made detailed studies of various raptors. He has also been involved in several raptor reintroduction programmes in Britain and North America. Apart from his research, he has served as Chairman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the British Trust for Ornithology and The Peregrine Fund in the USA. In addition, he is a past President of the British Ecological Society and of the British Ornithologists’ Union, and a Fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union. He has written more than 300 papers in the scientific literature, and ten books, including Uplands and birds, reflecting his interests in both birds and land-use.
TOM BOWSER
From their Perthshire livestock farm, Tom and his family run Argaty Red Kites, an award-winning rewilding project. When recently reintroduced kites began to roost on Argaty, Tom’s parents, Lynn and Niall, began providing them a small supplementary feed and invited the world to come to the farm, enjoy the birds’ spectacular flight and learn their history from persecution to extirpation to reintroduction and beyond.
In 2021 the Bowsers became the first private landowners in Scottish history to legally reintroduce beavers into the wild. The animals are now bringing remarkable gains to the landscape, boosting biodiversity and storing water in times of deluge and of drought. Tom tells the story of the project in his new book: Waters of Life: Fighting for Scotland’s Beavers.
Tom is a wildlife guide, public speaker and author. His first book, A Sky Full of Kites: A Rewilding Story, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s First Book of the Year Award. Waters of Life: Fighting for Scotland’s Beavers was published by Birlinn earlier this year.'