Career
He is best known for his role as the host of Jonathan Bird"s Blue World, a family-friendly underwater exploration program on Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. His work is largely underwater in nature. Bird learned to scuba dive while in college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and combined his interest in photography with diving.
His first underwater photographs were made in the waters of Massachusetts.
He worked as an electrical engineer for several years until leaving his position to pursue underwater photography full-time in 1993. He became a freelance underwater photographer, working for magazines including Sport Diver and Skin Diver.
His first book, Beneath the North Atlantic, a collection of his favorite images from the waters of New England, was published in 1997 by Tide-mark Press. He is the author of 7 books and his images have appeared in top nature publications including National Geographic Magazine, National Wildlife Magazine and British Broadcasting Corporation Wildlife Magazine.
The pilot for Jonathan Bird"s Blue World was completed in 2001 and shopped around without success for several years.
The project was dropped while Bird worked on several broadcast documentaries. In 2007, without a television buyer, the first few episodes were put on the web. After gaining a fan base there, NETA offered distribution to United States. public television
The fourth season began airing in 2014.
The series is distributed internationally as well. Each episode is broken up into individual segments for release on the Internet.