The Great Big Book of Irish Wildlife

Juanita Browne, a Zoology graduate with an MA in Media Studies, has almost 20 years’ experience across television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers. She works on natural history documentaries for television, including the multi-award-winning ‘Secret Life of the Shannon’ and ‘On a River in Ireland’, ‘Wild Cities’ and ‘Wild Ireland’. She has also worked on children’s wildlife television shows for RTE, including ‘Shutterbugs’ and ‘Wild Things.’ Juanita has produced two radio documentary series for RTE Radio 1, titled ‘Nature on One’, consisting of 16 half-hour documentaries. Juanita’s books include ‘Ireland’s Mammals’ (2005); ‘Kildare’s Natural Heritage’ (2008), ‘Put the Kettle On – the Irish love affair with tea’ (2013); and ‘My First Book of Irish Animals’ (2014), which was shortlisted for the Literacy Association of Ireland Children’s Book Award 2015. Juanita also edits Biodiversity Ireland, the magazine of the National Biodiversity Data Centre. Her latest job involves working with the National Biodiversity Data Centre, on a project called the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan – conserving bees, bumblebees and the wildflowers, hedgerows they depend on.

Dubliner Barry Reynolds is a character designer/concept/visual development artist and illustrator who has worked on the Oscar-nominated, animated movie The Secret of Kells, on Aardman and Sony Pictures Animation’s Arthur Christmas, and on Irish language graphic novels, An Táin and Deirdre agus Mic Uisnigh, where his artwork helped these Irish legends to a new readership. As a child, Barry saw The Jungle Book and announced then that he intended to be an artist, and he has realised that dream, apart from a few brief flirtations with wanting to be an astronaut, a dinosaur hunter and a zoologist … the last of which came in handy when working on The Great Big Book of Irish Wildlife.