Nicolas Day (born 1955) is an Australian

wildlife art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

ist,

illustrator An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicat ...

and

teacher A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...

. Day was born in Surrey, England, and moved to Australia at the age of ten. Having acquired an early interest in natural history, he worked as a keeper at the

Melbourne Zoo Melbourne Zoo is a zoo in Melbourne, Australia. It is located within Royal Park in Parkville, approximately north of the centre of Melbourne. It is the primary zoo serving Melbourne. The zoo contains more than 320 animal species from Austra ...

before turning to wildlife illustration as a career in 1977. He joined a 1997 expedition to

Raine Island Raine Island is a vegetated coral cay in total area situated on the outer edges of the Great Barrier Reef off north-eastern Australia. It lies approximately north-northwest of Cairns in Queensland, about east-north-east of Cape Grenville on t ...

as the natural history artist, as well as participating in field trips to the

Outer Hebrides The Outer Hebrides () or Western Isles ( gd, Na h-Eileanan Siar or or ("islands of the strangers"); sco, Waster Isles), sometimes known as the Long Isle/Long Island ( gd, An t-Eilean Fada, links=no), is an island chain off the west coast ...

and

subantarctic The sub-Antarctic zone is a region in the Southern Hemisphere, located immediately north of the Antarctic region. This translates roughly to a latitude of between 46° and 60° south of the Equator. The subantarctic region includes many islands ...

Macquarie Island Macquarie Island is an island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, about halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. Regionally part of Oceania and politically a part of Tasmania, Australia, since 1900, it became a Tasmanian State Reserve in 197 ...

. He has been the principal artist of the popular '' Field Guide to the Birds of Australia'', coauthored with

Ken Simpson Kenneth (Ken) Nigel Graham Simpson (1938 – 9 July 2014) was an Australian ornithologist and ornithological writer best known as the coauthor, with artist Nicolas Day, of the Simpson & Day field guide to Australian birds. Simpson was born in Sy ...

and commonly referred to as “Simpson & Day”, which has been published in eight editions from 1984 to 2010, selling over 500,000 copies.

Publications

As well as the “Simpson & Day”

field guide A field guide is a book designed to help the reader identify wildlife (flora or fauna) or other objects of natural occurrence (e.g. rocks and minerals). It is generally designed to be brought into the "field" or local area where such objects exi ...

, books featuring Day's illustrations include: * 1993 – ''Field Guide to the Birds of the ACT'' (with McComas Taylor) * 1996–2006 – ''

Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds The ''Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds'', known as ''HANZAB'', is the pre-eminent scientific reference on birds in the region, which includes Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, and the surrounding ocean and subantarctic i ...

'' * 2000 – ''Birds of the Solomons, Vanuatu and New Caledonia'' (with Chris Doughty and Andrew Plant)

References

* * 1955 births Living people Australian illustrators Australian bird artists {{Illustrator-stub