LLOYD Buck has been interested in birds for as long as he can remember. He got his first, a budgerigar, aged six. When he was eleven, he got his first buzzard.

It was a childhood fascination that turned into a career.

Today, he can look back over forty years of flying raptors. And as well as being a bird handler, he and his wife Rosie have become world leaders in filming birds – working with everyone from Sir David Attenborough to Chris Packham, Bear Grylls to Steve Backshall.

Chances are that if you’ve watched a BBC nature programme in the past twenty years, you’ll have seen some of their work.

This Friday, Lloyd and Rosie are appearing at Salisbury Arts Centre for a nature show with a difference.

Our Life With Birds, as you might imagine, will take the audience through some of the remarkable footage and in-flight filming they’ve captured over the years.

What is more unusual is that they’ll be bringing a menagerie of birds with them to show the audience. These will include golden eagles, peregrine falcons and hawks, as well as owls, starlings and ravens.

Rather than just having the birds on stage, Lloyd promises that some of them will be flying over the audience: ‘low’, he told me, with a chuckle, when I caught up him earlier this week. Brad the raven, fresh from appearing on BBC Winterwatch’s Game of Crows feature, will be giving examples of his problem-solving skills. All in all, it promises to be quite a unique spectacle.

Lloyd’s love of birds is infectious. He described how filming of wildlife has changed immeasurably over the years, as technology has improved. ‘When I started out, it was all 16mm filming. Stock was expensive, so you were conservative with what you shot’.

The advent of digital filming has changed all that. Filming a bird taking off was once a struggle with the camera taking a few seconds to get to speed. Now such is the technology that it can capture images in the seconds before you press record.

Slow motion also allows you to see what you couldn’t take in before. Lloyd described how a barn owl pouncing on a mouse can be over in under two seconds. But slow the footage down forty times, and you can really appreciate nature in motion, in a way the naked eye can’t take in.

We’re lucky in Salisbury when it comes to birds: the peregrine falcons returning to Salisbury Cathedral; the reintroduction of the Great Bustard on Salisbury Plain. Then there’s having the Hawk Conservancy Trust near Andover on our doorstep. For anyone interested in bird handling, Lloyd said, this is the perfect place to start.