My friend Clive Byers, who has died aged 68, was one of Britain’s best-known bird artists, whose forensically accurate illustrations graced many books, including the groundbreaking series Handbook of the Birds of the World.
During the 1970s Clive was an avid twitcher: his determination to see a rare bird was legendary. He and a schoolfriend hitchhiked from their Surrey homes to a remote Scottish island for a rare Arctic visitor, Steller’s eider – a round-trip of nearly 2,000 miles. Later, when watching a black-winged pratincole in Berkshire, he incurred the fury of the local farmer, who proceeded to spray him with liquid manure. He was one of the last people to see the now-extinct Atitlán grebe, in Guatemala in 1981.
Clive was born in Dublin to Irish parents, and brought up in Epsom, Surrey. His father, Walter, ran a business, and his mother, Martha (nee Bowden), was a retail worker.
Clive’s passion for birds began when, aged eight, he noticed a woodpecker in his garden. In the 1990s I made a film about him for the BBC1 series The Eleventh Hour, in which his nephew Nicholas played him as a child.
He became an artist by pure chance when, while watching a rare bird on the Isles of Scilly, he drew a quick sketch in his field notebook. A fellow birder offered him a tenner for the artwork, launching his career.
Clive also worked as a bird guide, accompanying completist “world listers” to far-flung locations to find the handful of species they were desperate to see. He likened them to heroin addicts: having got their “fix” of a new bird, they would immediately crave the next one. I asked him if he was paid well. “Yes,” he replied, before sardonically adding, “but not well enough.”
He was a guest lecturer on cruises to Antarctica and the Falkland Islands, his fellow speakers including the islands’ wartime governor, Sir Rex Hunt, and the former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, both of whom were captivated by Clive’s twitcher’s tales. During the late 1980s, while visiting Kenya, he played a transvestite in a now long-forgotten TV movie, The Lion of Africa.
Clive was a well-known fixture at the British Birdwatching Fair, where he and his fellow artists would paint a huge mural promoting the project for which that year’s event was raising funds.
A mischievous, inventive Peter Pan of a man, Clive had a quirky sense of humour that sometimes ruffled feathers. But with his kind and generous nature, he really was one of a kind.
He is survived by his sister Roslyn, and four nephews. Another sister, Audrey, predeceased him.
