James Gilroy is a Lecturer in Ecology at the University of East Anglia. His childhood fascination with bird migration led him into a career studying the long-distance movements of animals, and how these movements are changing in in response to human impacts. Since completing his PhD in the UK, he has worked in many countries around the world, including spending several years at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Oslo, as well as long spells in the tropics. He remains an obsessive birder and vagrant-hunter (when time allows!), and still pours religiously over weather charts in an effort to predict the arrival of interesting species in his local area.