Annette Fayet

Seabird Biologist

Birds have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. When I began writing a personal diary at the age of 6 my first entry was about how I had managed to get very close to a Great Tit by climbing into a tree and spending hours sitting motionless on a branch. At age 10, after spending holidays spying on pink flamingos in the wet marshes of the French Camargue on the Mediterranean Sea, I declared to my parents that I would become an ornithologist. To which they replied that it wasn’t a real job. It’s was only after studying physics, chemistry and engineering for 5 years at a Parisian university that I realised they were wrong. After convincing a researcher in bird (ironically, Great Tits) breeding behaviour at Cambridge University to take me under her wing for a couple of terms, I went on to do a Masters at Oxford. After a year studying birds on remote islands in New-Zealand and Wales, during which my interest in avian migration and seabirds grew, I returned to Oxford to do my DPhil, where I studied the migratory behaviour of Manx shearwaters and Atlantic puffins. I am now starting a Junior Research Fellowship at Queen’s College, Oxford, to pursue my research in this field.