Martin Kitching​

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I’ve had a fascination with the world around me since a very young age, when birds and the night sky first gripped my imagination. The challenging four year old always asking ‘why?’ That was me. The challenging 59 year old always asking ‘why?’ Still me.

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After a varied career, I left my job as a high school teacher in 2007 and launched Northern Experience Wildlife Tours – still my employer 19 years later, and work is a mixture of guiding day trips, leading photography and wildlife holidays, after-dinner speaking, and ecological surveys. Since 2009 I’ve coordinated the North East Cetacean Project, mapping whale, dolphin, and occasionally seabird, abundance and distribution off the coast of North East England. I’ve been a pelagic wildlife tour organiser/operator since 1997, and the sea is still my happy place whether on a small boat on the North Sea (finding the first Wilson’s Storm-petrel for the British North Sea, and accumulating enough images to create the world’s second-largest White-beaked Dolphin photo-ID catalogue are both highlights), or crossing oceans and visiting other countries as a member of the OWE Team. My first cruise with OWE was to Shetland, the Faroes and Orkney in August 2023, and since then I’ve guided/lectured on cruises in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, round Britain, Mediterranean, crossing the Atlantic (east to west, south to north, west to east), Faroes (again) & Iceland, Iceland & Greenland.

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I’m currently writing my first book (the next edition of ‘Where to Watch Birds in North East England’), and I wrote the cetacean species accounts for ‘Mammals, Amphibians, and Reptiles, of the North East’.

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As a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society you’ll probably find me out on deck at all times of the night when the sky is cloudless, and I’m always happy to be asked questions about wildlife, photography or astronomy 😊