Neil Gartshore is the principle guide for the Dorset Birding and Wildlife Experience. He has travelled in search of wildlife for nearly 30 years, visiting many parts of Europe and further a field  to South Africa, Kenya, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and USA. He has led trips in the UK, South Africa, Japan, Lesvos, Mallorca and Spain. 

Neil was born in Leicestershire where his natural history interest developed at an early age. Working in a bank he spent holidays volunteering on nature reserves, including Handa Island where a fascination for seabirds began. A move to Shetland in 1981 continued this interest and led to a career change in 1983 when he took up his first conservation post on the Farne Islands, returning there in 1984 and 1985. 

A three month break to South Africa in the winter of 1984/85 hooked Neil on the country. He returned in 1986 to work as a field research assistant for the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. Based in Cape Town, the post included 14 months studying seabirds on the sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Islands. 

Returning to the UK, he took up an RSPB contract in the summer of 1988 on Coquet Island, returning for the 1988 season’s seal work on the Farnes Islands before, in 1989, beginning a 17-year stretch with the RSPB. Contracts on the Mawddach Valley and Minsmere were followed in March 1991 with an assistant warden’s post on the heathlands at Arne in Dorset. Over the next 14 years he progressed to the post of Senior Warden at Arne before becoming the Dorset Reserves Manager in 2005. He left in June 2006 to get out from behind a desk and to develop other interests. 

He keeps in contact with his conservation roots by working as a freelance bird/visitor surveyor - recent survey work has taken him around different parts of the UK including Brechfa Forest (Wales),The Solent, Thetford Forest, Cannock Chase and the north Kent coast as well as to local areas around Poole Harbour.

He has been involved with the Dorset Bird Club for many years and is currently the Chairman. In the past he spent three years as the Dorset County Bird Recorder and continues to manage a project to input the clubs' old paper records onto a database.

In 1997 Neil established Calluna Books, specialising in buying and selling out of print natural history books. Check out the website at:  www.callunabooks.co.uk

He is the author of ‘Best Birdwatching Sites: Dorset’ published by Buckingham Press.

Copies available from Calluna Books.