In Search of the Unexpected Trogon.

Far away and long ago I was filming wildlife close by the small community of Portal in southern Arizona, travelling daily across the border to New Mexico; what I remember most vividly is having to get up an hour earlier each day to be in good time crossing into a later time zone... Getting up early has always been painful to me, especially if I'm missing breakfast! I remember this minor inconvenience better than almost anything about Portal; certainly it wasn't over developed - but maybe now, things have changed... I hope not, because out of the way places are…

Between the Tides – Photographing Waders.

It is the first afternoon of 2016 and I'm standing in the tidal zone of a very beautiful place - Boundary Bay, which sits on the border between Canada and the United States on the north western coastline of North America. The bay extends into both countries - geology doesn't care about our version of the World - or it didn't the other evening when a magnitude 4.2 earth tremour spilled piles of books and pictures across my home office floor. There is something very special about the tidal zone, it is one of only a few natural environments that…

Into the Woods – Wildlife Photography as a Surrealist Nightmare.

In Search of the Varied Thrush. The varied thrush is not a rare bird where I live on the Lower Mainland. B.C.. Usually it overwinters in lowland forest and scrubland, but with ever increasing urbanisation many of its natural habitats are disappearing. Worldwide, woodland birds are under pressure as our numbers continue to rise and many natural areas are given over to agriculture, industry and housing. Once, when a student, I went for a jog in Central London. Setting out from my hall of residence in South Kensington at 5.00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon I ran diagonally across Hyde…

So Long New Zealand and Thanks For All the Sheep. Part 2.

Any European botanist arriving in New Zealand for the first time might just as well be landing on a different planet - so extraordinarily is the plant life on these South Pacific islands. It took four or five years to see any positive results when trying to establish our native New Zealand garden. The one thing that grew easily was flax, and this was encouraging, because I'd seen nectar feeding birds visiting flax flowers elsewhere - so, it wasn't difficult to join up the dots... soon I was dividing and planting out as many locally grown flax as I could…