Percy Stewart's education included two of the top universities in the world, but his roots were in rural poverty. For his first two years the toilet was a bucket in a shed across the yard.

'All through childhood and my teens, I had very few books, because my father's income was very low and there was no money to spend in bookshops.  The books I did have made a huge impression, reading them cover-to-cover many times over several years.'

'One of my aunts married an American airforce pilot and had one child, who immediately became my favourite cousin.  In 1968 they came back from Texas to live with us for a while and she knew exactly what to give me for Christmas and birthday presents: a beautiful book on the American Indians, and a lovely little guide to the South-West, with rattlesnakes, desert rocks, mountain lions and eagles.

'Seeing how much I loved these two, she followed them with a succession of other wildlife books over subsequent years. I still have one of those, on British butterflies, and it features in Tunesmith, tinsmith.'

'After reading the book on Indians, top of my wish-list was a collection of feathers, which came from poached pheasants donated by my grandmother. That is how I leaned to pluck a pheasant, sitting with it on my lap by an open fire which conveniently disposed of surplus parts.

'I can still remember the feeling of regret at having to throw away thousands of stunningly-beautiful wing-coverts, and the iridescent neck and breast feathers of a cock bird. So much miraculous beauty burned up in seconds, turned to nothing but smoke!'

'It gave me a welcome sense of purpose to turn the primaries and tail-feathers into the head-dress for an Indian chief. At least these wouldn't be wasted! Strutting around the playing-field at the bottom of our garden, I thought I looked like Sitting Bull. Someone once said to me that I had no imagination or sense of humour, but they must have had their eyes closed.'

'If their heads aren't filled with trashy, habit-forming merchandise, children can naturally be very concerned and caring with regard to the rest of the life on our planet...I've seen it countless times. Little children with ladybirds on a British school playing-field, Gerald Durrell in Corfu with his matchbox full of baby scorpions...that says it all!'

'After all of the mindless materialism of the last four decades, this year in the Pyrenees I met a lot of remarkable young people, whose community spirit seems close to what we had in my childhood and teens.

'They are questioning the consumerist mentality by taking their own independent directions and helping others along the way. The strangest thing was that at sixty-seven, I felt only a few years older than most of them...because we shared so many ideas and feelings.

'On a long walk around my favourite hill, by the footpath I found the huge primary feather of a griffon vulture. It was so magnificent that I gave it to a beautiful young woman who was walking from the south of Spain to Assisi in central Italy, on her own long and thoughtful pilgrimage. She will be in the next book, obviously...just the kind of brave and adventurous young woman who would have been my heroine fifty or sixty years ago!'

'In 1967 or 1968 my aunt posted me a book on the volcanic island Surtsey, whose formation they had witnessed when they were living in Iceland. Hearing from her about Iceland, I was captivated by the creative and destructive power of Nature, and many years later I went to an earthquake zone in Italy, to take a caravan to shelter a family of survivors.

'Most of this fascination came from books and first-hand experience. Later we had BBC Two with the World About Us series, and Jacques Cousteau's voyages on the Calypso. These both came long before David Attenborough wrote Life on Earth, but they were equally enthralling in their variety.'

'Years before seeing Cousteau's fantastic underwater films, a book which my great-grandmother showed me when I was only five or six years old was entirely responsible for my love of cetaceans. Over half a century later, I saw a female dolphin toss her newborn calf in the air, here from the lighthouse on Berwick Pier.

'These non-fiction books, full of pictures and memorable information, turned me into a traveller, an explorer in my own small way...which is now finally coming to the surface in Feeding the vultures, nearly sixty years later.

'What tipped things in the right direction was our local library, and two or three school libraries with books which set my imagination alight.  To round this all off nicely, from sixteen to eighteen I worked as a volunteer usher in a lovely new theatre, where I saw some excellent drama and some of the world's greatest musicians.'

'If I do ever feel the need to write an autobiography, it will be filled with many of the characters I have known since my eyes first opened in 1957.  Some of those people were family, but most of them were strangers who became friends, often in the most unlikely situations.

'My own life has been complicated by external factors, but in essence I am a very simple person...an observer of the world around us.

'That fascination probably originated in a tiny back yard, where my mother would leave me for hours in the pram, entertained by the song of our local blackbirds.  It seems that I was pretty self-contained, always watching the world go by.  There is therefore no need whatever to paint a picture of this man known to some of his friends as 'Percy', but every need to preserve memories of many wonderful people who have made his life so rewarding!'