Georgia Locock

For the past few years Birdfair has always been one of the highlights of my year. This year was particularly special after also being given some fantastic opportunities, which was very exciting!

Over the weekend, whenever I was on Twitter, I was seeing lots and lots of comments about Birdfair. Everyone seemed to be enjoying it greatly. That’s one fun aspect of the Birdfair, putting faces to the Twitter handles. Along with meeting new people, and chatting with old friends too. All are like-minded and very friendly. I’d love to name all the fantastic and inspirational people I met over my two days at the Birdfair but there was just too many!

I also thoroughly enjoyed looking around a lot of the marques and learning more about the work of different organisations, charities and so on. On a more serious note, it’s a great place where these orgs can network, join together in raising awareness, promote what they do and get more people involved. There’s always so much to do at the Birdfair, unfortunately I could only make Friday and Saturday so I didn’t get to do everything I planned to, like go out onto the reserve, but it’s top of my list for next year!

I was also taken back by all the excitement, and my nerves, for the two events I was involved with. The Friday evening event was brilliant! If you didn’t see it, myself and Josie Hewitt were compering the evening lecture with Chris Packham, Simon King and Nick Baker. They came out with some brilliant stories, which were very funny and entertaining. This was mixed with the second half consisting of some more serious stuff which was really interesting. Then just when I thought the evening event was all over, myself and Josie were presented with some Zeiss binoculars which was a massive surprise but nevertheless just amazing!

Once back at our digs, I got very little sleep after all the excitement. I was trying to decide if I was more looking forward to going out with my new bins for the first time or nervous for my talk the next day. I think it was a bit of both!

The next morning we went for a walk around and I met with some friends before heading to the Events Marque for my short talk with Chris Packham and two other young birders, Josie Hewitt and Connor Coombes. Josie was up first, she spoke about the great work she does, bird ringing and the science behind it. Then it was Connor who spoke about his photography and how he got into it all. Then I gave my talk which was about some of my campaigning work, getting people involved and involving young people. Then afterwards, Chris spoke and summed it all up.

It was definitely a fantastic experience and one I won’t forget! Plus it was the Birdfair which is always very enjoyable. A big thank you to Tina and Nigel who were backstage and calmed my nerves to some degree. Along with helping us prepare for the event, making it happen and much much more. As well as Chris who was brilliant and involved with giving us the opportunity to talk on Saturday, and the BTO too.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get many photos but I’m told that videos of the events will be put online so when they are I’ll post them!