John Warham was born 1919 in Halifax, Yorkshire. At age 18 he began his first job as a laboratory assistant in a textile plant. He served in the army in the Second World War, leaving as a Captain, and on being demobilised he returned to his previous job. In 1951 he published his first natural history work Bird Watcher's Delight. He moved to Australia in 1953, where he studied, wrote about and photographed the birds of Australia. In 1961 he returned to England, undertaking a BSc, and then an MSc at Durham University. Warham then moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he took up a post as Lecturer in Zoology at the University of Canterbury and began working towards his PhD on the breeding biology of the crested penguins, which he obtained in 1973. In the mid 1970s he began concentrating his research onto seabirds, especially petrels. He retired in 1985, but continued to write and publish, including The Petrels: Their Ecology and Breeding Systems (1990) and The Behaviour, Population Biology and Physiology of the Petrels (1996).

Warham joined the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) in 1963 and in 1992 was elected a Fellow and was awarded the RAOU's D.L. Serventy Medal. In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand and in 2001 he was awarded an MNZM for services to ornithology in the New Zealand Honours List. He died in 2010.