Garner moved with his wife Sharon to Luton, Bedfordshire, where they began a new Christian community sometimes referred to as a church plant, meeting in a local primary school.
After two years the more traditional incumbent closed the work down and the church plant was unable to continue.
Having been offered several jobs the Garners moved to Northern Ireland to take a position with Lisburn Cathedral.
[5][6] In 1997, with David Quinn and Bob Glover, Garner published a two-part paper in British Birds covering the identification of yellow-legged and Caspian gulls,[7] which covered the former in far greater detail than any previous published work,[citation needed] and contained the first detailed English-language descriptions of the latter.
[citation needed] His first bird-related book, Frontiers in Birding (ISBN 9781898110477), was published by BirdGuides Ltd. in 2008.