The Eighth Annual William Condry Memorial Lecture

Ddoe a Heddiw - Now and Then

a journey through the world of Welsh and other birds

Jonathan Elphick

With important volumes like The World of Birds (Natural History Museum, 2014), and the best-selling Birdsong (Quadrille, 2012) to his name as well as research credits for Mark Cocker’s important Birds Britannica (2005) and Birds and People (2013), Jonathan Elphick grew up on the North Wales coast: “It all started,” he writes, “in the late 1940s, when I was first entranced by a drake pochard on a small pond in Rhyl.” As a teenager he grew up near Thomas Pennant’s house at Downing, joined the Dyserth and District Field Club and Flintshire Ornithological Society, came under the influence of the important Welsh naturalists Tony Angell and Peter Hope Jones, was in thrall to the writings of Bill Condry, and is now himself one of our most eminent ornithological writers. Taking as his starting point the nature table at his primary school and the ability sixty years ago to roam at will all day around a wide area of traditional farmland, hills and coast, he’ll talk on the birds of North Wales, their endless fascination, the grievous species-loss suffered in recent years and the counterbalancing success stories, particularly in such cases as the peregrine falcon and the red kite.

(Darlith Saesneg – English language lecture)