From Birdwatcher to CEO: What 30 Years in Conservation Taught Me

It started with fishing. My father would take me out on Poole Harbour as a boy, and while he watched the line, I watched the birds. Oystercatchers working the mudflats. Terns diving. The harbour was alive in a way that made everything else feel muted by comparison. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I was feeling was a connection to something vast and ancient and worth protecting.

By the time I was fifteen, that feeling had crystallised into something more deliberate. In 1989, I took my first conservation role at the National Bird of Prey Sanctuary. I spent my days with secretary birds, American black vultures, and Andean condors. These were not garden birds. They were creatures built for a world we were rapidly dismantling, and caring for them in captivity taught me the uncomfortable truth that captivity was often all we had left to offer.

Two years later, at seventeen, I volunteered at Jersey Zoo with the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. Gerald Durrell’s ark. The place that existed not as entertainment but as a last-ditch effort to breed endangered species back from the edge. I worked with Mauritius kestrels, one of the rarest birds on Earth at the time. I helped care for lemurs. I ate my lunch sitting in the gorilla enclosure, which sounds absurd until you’ve done it and realised that being that close to a great ape recalibrates everything you thought you knew about the boundaries between species.

I was lucky enough to fleetingly meet Gerald Durrell himself at his 67th birthday celebration. He was already unwell by then, but the force of his personality was undimmed. The encounter lasted minutes, not hours, but the impression lasted a lifetime. Here was a man who had bent an entire institution around the principle that every species matters, and who had done it with joy rather than guilt.

The fieldwork years

My twenties were spent in the mud. Wetland bird surveys in the Somerset Levels. Bat emergence counts in disused railway tunnels. Vegetation transects across chalk downland so steep I once slid thirty metres on my back clutching a quadrat. The fieldwork taught me two things that have governed everything since.

First: nature is not a concept. It is specific. It is this particular population of water voles in this particular stretch of riverbank, and if you do not understand the granular, local reality, your grand strategies will fail. I have watched well-funded conservation programmes collapse because they were designed by people who had never knelt in the habitat they were trying to save.

Second: data matters more than passion. I arrived in conservation burning with conviction and discovered that conviction without evidence persuades no one. The best conservation argument I ever made was not a speech. It was a spreadsheet showing three years of population data that proved a development site held a regionally significant breeding colony. The planning inspector did not care about my feelings. She cared about the numbers.

Ecosulis and the practical work

In 2002, I joined Ecosulis and helped build it into a multi-million turnover rewilding-focused business. Twenty years of habitat restoration, wildlife fencing innovation, green roof technology, and thousands of ecological projects across the UK. Ecosulis was where I learned that conservation cannot survive on grants and goodwill alone. It needs a business model. It needs to demonstrate value in terms that the broader economy understands.

The pivot

By my mid-thirties, I had hit a wall that every field ecologist eventually encounters. I could survey a site, document its value, write the report, and still watch it get destroyed because the economic argument for development outweighed the ecological argument for protection. Every time. Without fail.

The system was not broken. It was working exactly as designed. It just did not value nature. And no amount of ecological data would change that unless nature had a price that showed up on a balance sheet.

That realisation was uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues in conservation saw economic valuation as a betrayal, reducing sacred landscapes to commodity units. I understood the objection. I shared it, emotionally. But I had watched too many sacred landscapes get bulldozed by forces that spoke only the language of money. If nature could not speak that language too, it would keep losing.

CreditNature

Founding CreditNature in 2020 was the logical conclusion of everything I had learned. The science of ecosystem measurement had advanced to the point where credible quantification was possible. The financial sector was beginning to take nature risk seriously. The regulatory landscape was shifting. All the pieces were on the board.

But building a company that bridges ecology and finance is a daily exercise in translation. Ecologists and investors think differently, speak differently, and mistrust each other for historically good reasons. My job, more than anything, is to stand in the gap between those worlds and make each legible to the other.

What thirty years taught me

I will distil it to three things.

Patience is not passivity. The timescales of ecological recovery and institutional change are measured in decades. You have to be willing to work for outcomes you may never see, while maintaining the intensity to act as though everything depends on what you do today.

Rigour earns trust. In a space plagued by greenwashing and inflated claims, the most radical thing you can do is be scrupulously honest about what you can and cannot measure. Credibility is the only currency that appreciates over time.

The personal is strategic. Every effective conservationist I have ever met was driven by a specific, intimate relationship with a place, a species, or a landscape. The boy watching oystercatchers from his father’s boat in Poole Harbour was not wasting his time. He was building the emotional foundation for a lifetime of work.

I still watch birds. Most mornings, before the emails start, I spend twenty minutes with binoculars and a cup of tea. It is not nostalgia. It is recalibration. A reminder of what all the spreadsheets and frameworks and investor calls are actually for.