Dr Lee Raye, tutor at the Academy for Distance Learning, has been awarded the 2018 Alwyne Wheeler Bursary by the Society for the History of Natural History.

The Alwyne Wheeler Bursary is intended to facilitate original contributions to the study of the history of natural history by scholars under the age of 30. The Bursary includes a £100 prize, free entry to the conference and an invitation to the scholar to submit their paper for publication in the society’s journal Archives of Natural History.

Lee Raye won the 2018 prize with their paper ‘Urban ravens, red kites and voyagers to Britain’. The paper is being presented at the Society for the History of Natural History’s annual conference at the World Museum in Liverpool on the 14th June this year.

Dr Raye said, ‘I am very honoured to have won this exclusive prize. My paper aims to highlight some of the biases that travellers’ accounts tend to have, whilst simultaneously revealing the important role ravens and red kites have had in the history of urban Britain.’