Anne Marie McAleese Author

Anne Marie McAleese knows that birds fly and that there are a lot of them. When she was only wee, her dad took her to see the gulls flocking at Landsdowne in Portrush and she’s loved them ever since. Dot has taken her under her expert wing and tried hard to impart some of her extensive knowledge to this willing, albeit challenging, student. In pursuit of these birds, between them, Anne Marie and Dot have, between them, been to hundreds of places in Tyrone, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Antrim and Londonderry. Dot has demonstrated how to hand feed the birds, how to identify them by sight and sound and provided incredible insights into how birds think and why they behave as they do. Anne Marie continues to be an enthusiastic birding beginner and peppers their unique conversations with weird and wonderful facts about the places they visit. She now knows that ‘bins’ are not just what you put outside the house to be collected and that Dot is right … our homebirds are a source of constant wonder and entertainment, and that when we get to know them better they can only enrich our lives.   

Dot Blakely has been fascinated and in awe of birds since she was knee-high to a daisy in her has home town of Bangor in County Down. As a child, she remembers her dad taking her round the castle grounds, pointing out a robin's nest in a tree trunk and telling her never to look in or disturb a nesting bird. That was the start of it. Since then she has been transfixed by the behaviour, habits, spectacle, colour and antics of our feathered friends in the variety of landscapes on offer in every county in Northern Ireland. From long-legged waders in our rivers and loughs, cheeky robins in parks and gardens and majestic whooper swans and geese in sheltered ponds and flood plains, Dot knows them all by name. For the last thirty years she has shared her extensive knowledge with eager birders and novices alike through classes, walks and talks and on her hugely popular regular radio appearances on BBC Radio Ulster’s Your Place and Mine with presenter Anne Marie McAleese.