The Swallowtail and Birdwing Butterfly Trust benefits from the voluntary support of a number of Honorary Advisors and Coordinators. Learn more below.
Jonathan Barzdo
Jonathan Barzdo is an independent consultant and the Trust’s Honorary Advisor on CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. He is also Vice-President (and founder) of the Association of British Wild Animal Keepers, and a member of the UK Government’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Advisory Group. A former Deputy Secretary General of the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention) and former Chief of Governing Bodies of the CITES Secretariat as well as a Special Adviser on CITES Implementation, Jonathan lives near Geneva in Switzerland.
Richard Bennett MA, MSc
Richard is the Trust’s Honorary Advisor on Captive Breeding. He is a lifelong enthusiast who has bred butterflies for over 55 years, starting in West Yorkshire and currently on the Kenyan coast in Watamu. Trained as a zoologist and molecular biologist at Oxford University, he has variously worked as a snake farmer, tour guide and scuba diver, and for the past 30 years has owned a butterfly farm supplying Kenyan pupae for the live exhibition market, exporting mainly to the U.S and U.K. As a result he has a good practical grounding in breeding difficult butterfly species.
Sara Oldfield OBE
Sara is the Trust’s Honorary Advisor on Botany. Sara is a botanist and plant conservation expert. She is Co-Chair of the IUCN/SSC Global Tree Specialist Group, responsible for promoting and implementing projects to identify and conserve globally Red Listed tree species. Until February 2015, Sara was Secretary General of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), leading this organisation for ten years. Prior to joining BGCI, Sara worked for a range of other conservation organisations. In 2016, Sara was awarded an OBE for the conservation of tree species worldwide. Sara lives in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK
Richard Markham PhD
Richard is the Trust’s Honorary Coordinator for Natewa Swallowtail Studies in Fiji, where he is closely involved with our project there to study, conserve and breed Papilio natewa, a very rare species discovered only in 2017. Richard is currently the Director of Kokomana Pte Ltd., a cocoa plantation and chocolate company based on the Natewa Peninsula itself, in Vanua Levu. Richard’s career has principally been as a research scientist and entomologist working on tropical crops, most recently as the Research Programme Manager on Pacific Crops at the Australian Centre for International Research.
John R. Parnell PhD
John is the Trust’s Honorary Coordinator for Homerus Swallowtail Studies. He attended Imperial College, London, obtaining a B.Sc and a Ph.D. in Applied Entomology. His interest in the Homerus Swallowtail began as a Senior Lecturer in Entomology at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Later, he was Environmental Coordinator for the City of St. Petersburg, Florida. John has published several papers and videos on the Homerus Swallowtail. He is now retired, lives near Launceston, Cornwall, UK, and continues to visit Jamaica for butterfly research.
Prof. Dick Vane-Wright, Dr. scient. h.c, Hon FRES
Dick is the Trust’s Honorary Advisor on Butterfly Taxonomy. He became interested in butterflies on his 7th birthday. He joined London’s Natural History Museum as an assistant in 1961. From 1967 to 1984 he was in charge of the Museum’s world-famous butterfly collection. Following retirement in 2004 he has continued to publish original work on the history of entomology, evolutionary biology and butterfly taxonomy, and also studies worldviews, attitudes to nature and the conservation of biological diversity. Dick holds honorary positions at the Museum and both main universities where he lives, in Canterbury, Kent.
