The Breconshire Bird Recorder has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Welsh Ornithological Society.

The society’s award, given to Andrew King at their annual Winter Conference in Aberystwyth, recognises more than 50 years of monitoring, recording and ringing wild birds, principally in Breconshire.

Andrew is only the second Breconshire-based birdwatcher to receive this award.

Andrew has been the Breconshire Bird Recorder, a voluntary role, since 2002 and over that period has written and edited 20 editions of ‘Breconshire Birds’, the annual ‘bible’ of wild bird occurrence in the county. Andrew, who lives close to Llangors Lake, visits that site several times a week and fully values it as a magnet for resident and migrant birds alike. Its range of habitats supports a longer list of species than any other inland site in Wales. In March 2012, he accompanied the then Prince of Wales to open a new green oak birdhide at Llangors Lake. Through The Prince’s Trust, both were heavily involved in the hide’s design and development, which is still visited by thousands.

In July 2023, after several years suspecting Ospreys would breed in the area, he found a natural nest being built by a pair near Talybont-on-Usk in the Usk Valley. This is the most southerly natural nest in the UK and the first in the county for over 250 years. The pair returned in 2024 and were celebrated by a new charity ‘Usk Valley Ospreys’ (www.uskvalleyospreys.org) formed to enable their protection and provide insights from a nest-camera funded by the Welsh Government to educate a new audience about this engaging species. Andrew is the current chairman of the charity and in coming years expects to see this breeding species spread to other locations along the Usk and Wye Valleys.

The award also recognises his roles within the UK Rare Breeding Birds Panel to develop the recording of rare breeding species, and more locally as the Brecknock Regional contact for the British Trust for Ornithology. He supports local surveyors undertaking a wide range of bird surveys developed by the BTO and even finds time to visit Scotland annually to monitor upland species there. Andrew ranks among the top ten of over 3,000 bird surveyors in the UK for the number of survey visits undertaken in the last 30 years. In more recent years he joined Llangorse Ringing Group to understand more fully the habitat requirements, longevity and migration patterns of lakeside species.

Andrew was raised in Hampshire, where, as an 11-year-old, he visited water-meadows in the Itchen Valley with his ‘rural studies’ schoolteacher who managed the meadows by flooding them at appropriate times of year to improve their value for birdlife and for agricultural enrichment. The thrill of opening sluice-gates on feeder streams for those reasons remains with him today. His career in agriculture research and development brought him to South Wales, and latterly in the agriculture civil service probably also stemmed from those exploits on the chalk-stream and riverbanks back in the late 1960s.