Alexander Lees is a Senior Lecturer in Biodiversity at Manchester Metropolitan University, a Lab Associate of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and serves on both the British Ornithologists' Union Records Committee (BOURC) and the Brazilian Ornithological Records Committee (CBRO). Alex has written over one hundred academic papers in addition to many popular ornithology articles, and his research focuses primarily on understanding how birds respond to environmental change, particularly in the Amazon where he has been working for the last 17 years. Alex now lives in the Derbyshire Peak District, arguably not the finest place to find vagrants, but hasn't given up hope yet.

James Gilroy is a Lecturer in Ecology at the University of East Anglia. His childhood fascination with bird migration led him into a career studying the long-distance movements of animals, and how these movements are changing in in response to human impacts. Since completing his PhD in the UK, he has worked in many countries around the world, including spending several years at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Oslo, as well as long spells in the tropics. He remains an obsessive birder and vagrant-hunter (when time allows!), and still pores religiously over weather charts in an effort to predict the arrival of interesting species in his local area.