DRAWN to Far North Queensland by the dazzling variety of life in our ancient rainforests, Cliff and his wife Dawn have spent decades researching and writing about Australia's magnificent birds.

At school I picked up a very large colourful book that featured a major article about bowerbirds and birds of paradise. It discussed these birds in Darwinian terms, about how their complex behaviours evolved through sexual selections, and I was immediatly intrigued. That was it, I was hooked for life.

My parents brought me to Australia when I was 15, and I worked a Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Back in England I was a keeper at London Zoo, before joining the British Museum of Natural History as an ornithologist. I was sent to a tiny dot in the Indian Ocean called Aldabra Atoll, and there I met the love of my life Dawn, who was studying insects.

After four wonderful years in Thailand we came to North Queensland to study bowerbirds at Paluma. As our funds ran low we decided to write a little book about animal life in the rainforest to supplement our income, and we’ve never looked back.

For a very, very long time the bowerbirds were considered to be the most intelligent birds, because of these extraordinary structures. We know a little better now, that basicllay it’s a complex set of instincts. Nevertheless, these instincts have resulted in incredibly artistic bowers that symbolise the quality of the individual males. The female can get a measure of the fitness of the male, even in his absence.

The satin bowerbird can build a bower in a day. But also living here in the forests near Cairns is the golden bowerbird, which builds a bower that survives 20 years, carefully maintained by generations of birds.

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