Parry-Jones, as Jemima Glasier, was born and lived in Salisbury, Wiltshire, until the age of five before moving to Barford St Martin. After one year, the family moved again this time to North Kessock on the Black Isle in Scotland. She lived there for three years and then moved again with family to Melbury Osmond in Dorset where the family stayed until they bought Boulsdon House in Newent, Gloucestershire, in 1966 and moved there to establish a centre for breeding raptors and teaching falconry.

Parry-Jones attended Bellairs Drama School in Guildford for a two-year musical theatre Course and then three years at the Royal Academy of Music, where singing was her first study, and the piano her second study (although she usually describes it as her 95th study!).

She has always had an abiding passion for wildlife and animals in general, with music, reading and Labrador dogs coming a close second. She always wanted to be an opera singer, but had a voice more suited to oratorio, and constantly her nerves let her down in public performance. Moreover wherever she went she collected livestock, so in the end she gave up the unequal struggle and took to a life with birds of prey.

She worked with the family to start the Falconry Centre and continued to worked there for her parents for some 13 years at which point she moved away to Brookwood in Surrey to marry Joylon Parry-Jones.

In 1982 the couple moved back to Newent to take over and run the Falconry Centre. Her husband left around 1990 but Jemima stayed on and continued to run what was by then the National Birds of Prey Centre.

After some 22 years of running the centre Parry-Jones decided to sell the centre and move the its 189 birds and 6 dogs, lock, stock and barrel to the USA.

She left the UK in November 2004 with 189 birds of prey belonging to her, to merge with another group of raptor specialists in South Carolina. She went believing that she was to jointly head up a new bright and forward-moving centre that would lead the world in all aspects of raptor management and conservation and give her more to work on in terms of her career.

Unfortunately over the intervening period of her arrival with the birds, the Executive Director and the Board reneged on the agreement of a merger, not allowing her to share the leadership but instead giving her a subordinate role, leaving her no choice but to return to the UK. Consequently in June 2007 JPJ with 169 of her birds and her beloved dogs returned to the UK.

At the end of 2008 when facing the loss of everything she had ever worked for, she managed with help from the Chenevix-Trench family and Lloyds Bank to buy back her old Centre and the family house with the aim of getting it back to its proper status as the best known, and most important birds of prey centre world wide, to be called the International Centre for Birds of Prey.

The ICBP opened its gates to the public on 1 February 2009 with a skeleton staff and a bird collection that had gone through some traumas during the moves to and from the USA — many of the birds had lost flying condition — but since the opening, the centre (and the birds) has gone from strength to strength.