Thirty years of caring for injured seabirds has landed Teignmouth wildlife lover Jean Bradford an MBE in the New Year Honours.

In 1983 Mrs Bradford, then a finance officer at Teignbridge Council, established the Teignmouth and District Seabird Unit which later became the South Devon Seabird Trust.

Without any formal training, and often at odds with accepted practice, she developed techniques now recognised internationally as head and shoulders above the rest for treating oiled birds.

She and the trust's five volunteers have a 74 per cent success rate when returning the beleaguered creatures to the wild, an achievement not bettered by any wildlife organisation anywhere in the world.