Michael Watkins is a shipbroker who mainly concentrated on the tanker oil and chemical markets and worked in London for 45 years. No longer active in the business, he is still associated with it as a tutor and part of the examining process for the industry's professional body, the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers. Since retiring from the City, he has had more time for birding, travelling and grandchildren-minding, but never quite enough.

Richard Crombet-Beolens is known to all as Bo Beolens or as his online personae, the Grumpy Old Birder and the Fatbirder. While much of his career was in community work and as the CEO of various charities, all his free time has been spent birding or otherwise pursuing his life-long interest in the natural world. Since the late 1990s he has had articles published in a variety of birding magazines in the UK and USA. He is co-author of five other Eponym Dictionaries and recently authored a book of anecdotes, The A Z of Birds: A Birder s Tales from Around the World. He has also written for several disability publications.