Greg Baker

United Kingdom

As a child, I remember my interest in birds developing from a mass invasion of thrushes into the back garden of our house in my hometown of Ipswich during the severe winter of 1962-63. After that, the gift of the Observer's Book of Birds for my birthday sponsored trips to the Suffolk coast but my passion waned as sport and the distractions of a teenage life took precedence. It wasn't until the early 1980s that trips to the English Lake District with my wife-to-be Barbara re-ignited my interest and I soon became an avid visitor to some of the north-west of England's prime birding sites and a twitcher for rarer birds further afield. I spent many happy hours at Woolston Eyes as a part-time reserve warden and Frodsham Marsh was another regular on-and-off patch. An interest in birding videography developed with the purchase of my first camcorder in 1994 - a Canon EX1 Hi8, to which my Canon camera lenses could be attached. So started a new phase of birding activity as twitches became as much focused on filming as seeing the bird. Foreign trips also took on a new emphasis, the results of which I have finally got round to posting on the IBC website. As camcorder technology developed I moved into the world of DV with a Canon XL1 and then more recently into HDV with my current set-ups which include a Canon XH A1 plus 1.4x converter, a Sony HDR-HC3E and an AVCHD Panasonic HDC-SD200. Work commitments mean I cannot travel as much as I would like but I have been fortunate to visit some wild and wonderful places including Antarctica, Kamchatka, Kazakhstan, Svalbard and Tierra del Fuego amongst others. Living in Hartford, Cheshire my local birding is focused on my home patch of Marbury Country Park and Witton Flashes. Slowly but surely I am working through my back-catalogue of video footage and there are many more uploads to come.
IBC Personal statistics:

• First material posted on 15 August 2009
• Number of videos posted: 1798 covering 1059 species (10.62%)
• Number of photos posted: 0 covering 0 species (0%)
• Number of sounds posted: 46 covering 45 species (0.45%)