Diedert Koppenol

Diedert Koppenol now lives in Lancashire, England and is a Travel Manager with Birdquest. Diedert also has an important role on our social media side and leads some of our tours. He originally hails from The Netherlands where he was living in Utrecht before moving to the United Kingdom.

Diedert has been birding since he was a young boy, alongside his grandfather, in the meadows of Friesland in the northern Netherlands. Northern Lapwings and Black-tailed Godwits were the first birds he saw, but soon his birding world expanded to the country’s borders. After high school, he studied Biology at the State University of Groningen. After his bachelor’s degree in Biology was obtained, with a Major in Ecology & Evolution, Diedert obtained a Master’s degree in Biology. After his studies, he started working in the birding travel world soon and as a natural evolution, he has now moved to the UK to join the Birdquest team.

Diedert has travelled through many countries on the quest for birds, visiting almost every single country in Europe, including even Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia, as well as Morocco, Cyprus and Turkey. His interest in bird specialities later took him to less-visited places such as Azerbaijan, Algeria, Madeira and Western Sahara. His explorations have since widened to the countries of West Africa, India and Central America. He has a keen interest in mammals as well as birds, including some of the world’s rarest like the Iberian Lynx in Andalucia and even the increasingly rare European Wildcat which he has observed in a tiny forest in Limburg in the Netherlands. Diedert is also an enthusiastic bird and mammal photographer.