Mark Brazil is a widely travelled field ornithologist and an experienced writer. He was educated at Keele and Stirling universities in the UK and received a doctorate for his studies of the behavioural ecology of the Whooper Swan in Scotland and Iceland. His interest in swans has continued and he spends part of each winter studying them in Hokkaido where he is currently Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation at Rakuno Gakuen University, Hokkaido. His main research interests have centred around East Asian birds, particularly the Japanese avifauna.
He is the author of A Birdwatcher's Guide to Japan (Kodansha International 1987), The Birds of Japan (Helm 1991), and Wild Asia: Spirit of a Continent (Bateman 2000). He has written research and review papers on a wide range of species and has contributed a regular column on natural history to The Japan Times newspaper continuously since 1982. He has been involved in the making of many natural history television documentaries, writes on travel, cultural and natural history topics for a wide range of publications, and calls Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand, home.
