Chris Balchin

Chris Balchin was part of the launch committee of the NBC in 1993, and has been involved with the Club ever since, including long stints as Secretary, and he has also served as Chairman. During the 1980s Chris evolved from being a feverish British twitcher into a dedicated world birder who would spend every hour of holiday entitlement in the tropics. Chris’s passion for seeing rare and unusual species took him to places that often lay off the regular birding routes in those days and enabled him to contribute regularly to BirdLife International publications. An electronics engineer by trade, Chris lives in Essex, UK. Chris’s favourite Neotropical bird is the White-plumed Antbird, a tattoo of which is on his arm. One of  his favourite Neotropical birding memories was watching a Black-fronted Piping-guan that perched above his tent whose amazed occupants were rather tipsy on a stout bottle of malbec…