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Some adventures of former Natura Environmental Consultants team members.  BEN PHALAN worked for Natura Environmental Consultants in 2000 and 2001.
He grew up in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow and worked as a summer warden with BirdWatch Ireland at the Little Tern colony in Kilcoole. Birds were always his main interest and he obtained a first class honours degree in Zoology from Trinity College Dublin. While with Natura, he undertook some original work on disturbance to water birds in south Dublin Bay, which was later published in the journal Irish Birds (2007).
In 2001, Ben joined the British Antarctic Survey, and spent three summers and two winters on Bird Island, South Georgia working as a Zoological Field Assistant. He was involved with collecting data at long-term study colonies of three species of albatross, as well as satellite and geolocator tracking studies and work on other seabirds on the island. Returning to the UK in 2004, he continued working at BAS for some months before spending part of the next summer as a volunteer on a warbler project in Cyprus, and travelling to Uganda for a field course with the Tropical Biology Association.
He started a PhD with the Conservation Science Group at Cambridge University in 2005, looking at the merits of wildlife-friendly farming and land-sparing in the forest zone of Ghana. He submitted his PhD in September 2009, and is now a junior research fellow at Churchill College, working on a two-year joint project with RSPB, BirdLife International and UNEP-WCMC on tropical agriculture and bird conservation.
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