Anthony Cheke was born in 1945. He began his ornithological career during his gap year, when he worked as a field assistant at the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford. He studied botany at Cambridge University, before moving back to Oxford to research sparrows, later becoming the librarian of the Edward Grey Institute. He has also worked in plant and animal ecology in Thailand and Mauritius, where he led a British Ornithological Union expedition in 1973 and he acquired an interest in the degradation of the Mascarene Islands and in the dodo. He has also been on visits and expeditions to Japan, Corsica, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast. After time in a different career, he returned to wildife and eco-historical travel and writing in the 1990s. In 2008 he published The Lost Land of the Dodo: The Ecological History of Mauritius, Reunion, and Rodrigues, which was illustrated by Julian Hume.