When I was young, just like many other children, I was obsessed with dinosaurs… but there were other creatures that seemed more real to me, probably because they were still around… and also living in the same house. Other children kept guinea pigs and hamsters, but my preference was for the cold blooded killers — mostly reptiles and amphibians, and then there were the spiders… I really liked spiders. A friendly neighbour told my mother that it was a phase I was going through and I’d get over it… but I never did.

Beyond all the beastliness indoors, there was the garden where the extraordinary appearance and behaviour of one group of insects in particular grabbed my attention, and although I didn’t know it at the time, little changed from those to be found in the early fossil record. These wonderful creatures were dragonflies — the Odonata, an order of insects that predate dinosaurs by around 70 million years. Isn’t that something?… And it’s almost true.

Homo sapiens have been around for perhaps 30,000 years. It isn’t comparable anymore than it’s a competition, but a palaeontologist will tell you that to claim dragonflies have been around for 300 million years is pushing things a bit, because the ‘dragonflies’ of the distant past appear less developed than the ones we see today, and how closely related they are is open to question. In consequence they have been classified into a separate order: the Meganisoptera, formerly known as the Protodonata. Pro meaning prior (Pro-Odonata) and this makes sense, because no representatives of this order have survived to the present day — they have been seen off by chance and evolution and long ago superseded.

When I sketched the above image from a fossil, it was obvious that this creature had eyes smaller than those of modern dragonflies where they take up most of the head. There are also differences in the structure of the wings, but making comparisons from a fossil embedded in a rock that is millions of years old isn’t easy, and probably best left to the taxonomists.

The answer is that rhinoceros beetles evolved horns to enable males to achieve dominance over other males, giving them a better chance of mating with attendant females — in evolutionary terms this is sexual selection. Interestingly, the development of horns on these beetles has been ebbing and flowing for millions of years.

Beetles began their evolutionary journey around the same time as dragonflies, but meandered a very different path to the future. Trychogomphus beetles, despite their tough tank-like appearance are herbivores, whereas dragonflies are fierce predators and during the Jurassic Period were the top predators of their time, although back then, they had not been honed by predation to the complexity we see today. Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to take flight in the late Jurassic; the dentition of some smaller species indicate that they fed on insects, and dragonflies would certainly have been on their menu.

Later, in the Lower Cretaceous a branch of theropod dinosaur took to the air as birds, and were soon competing with the pterosaurs for food, although by this time many of the pterosaurs had evolved into far larger forms and taken up fishing.

Imagine a world before birds evolved — there would have been no birdsong and the most impressive creatures of the air would have been dragonflies; but when birds joined the foodfest they would have put pressure on ‘early dragonflies’ to adapt or disappear.

Suddenly, dragonflies were no longer the apex predator of the time, they were now being preyed upon, and the evolutionary arms race to follow would put them on the road to the complexity we see today.

As some dinosaurs evolved to greater size, I imagine dragonflies perching upon them in much the same way they do today on crocodiles and photographers. I won’t make further comparisons — T. rex would have been hopeless at photography, what with those tiny little arms and a couple of spindly fingers at their ends.

Only recently has the evolutionary history of dragonflies been more fully understood. It is now accepted that dragonflies ‘proper’ made their appearance around 200 million years ago. Throughout their development there have been pronounced differences between taxonomic groups and this has taken some unravelling.

It might seem extreme to concern ourselves with evolutionary change in the distant past, but it is important — there is much to be gained by understanding how things change. If we could time-travel back to see members of the long extinct Meganisoptera, most of us would say, ‘Those are dragonflyies’ and it is only with the precision common to scientists that this would be a hanging offence. Most of us have more pressing issues to consider, nevertheless, the past is the foundation of the future and we ignore it at our peril. If the evolution of dragonflies tells us anything, it is that nothing stays the same forever; although most of us are content to leave the detail to experts… and then get annoyed with their irritating precision when our preference is for broad generalisations — but getting small things right is the foundation for sorting out many of the bigger issues we all must face.

How easy it is to identify a specimen depends on the availability of evidence and this traditionally comes from the geological record.

Today there are many other ways to glean information — there may be chemical remnants that can sometimes provide extra information; and in recent time cladistics — the science of judging relatedness by comparing shared characteristics amongst different species has become increasingly important; add to this DNA evidence that can links species still around and half a dozen another techniques that include computer modelling, and it is clear, things are better now than they were for Victorian naturalists who relied entirely on the fossil record.

Fossil evidence can be very thin. Imagine, on a Thursday afternoon two hundred million years ago, it rained heavily and a flood swept large numbers of animals away, covered them in sediment, and preserved some as fossils. Much latter a palaeontologist stumbles across them and begins to make value judgements about the past. Such happy accidents of mass preservation (as with the previously mentioned Solnhofen limestone beds) are unusual. Add further geological upheavals and erosion, and it is no wonder there are huge gaps in the geological record. Everything we know about the plants and animals of the past has been hard won, and the importance of this all should not be underestimated.

Some people think the next great human endeavour will be to visit Mars — a strange priority when our own planet is facing a potential mass extinction. It is as if when we get through wrecking the complex systems that presently support us, we can just get on a spaceship and move to another planet, when the priority should be to conserve the diversity of life on Earth — there is plenty of talk about this but very little action, and no shortage of wealthy old men prioritising their dreams to touch the edge of space.

Mars will be a disappointment: nothing as remotely interesting as a dragonfly will be discovered, and there won’t be any rhinoceros beetles. There is nothing quite so alien as the strange life forms to be found on Earth, which sounds ridiculous, but the most terrifying creatures are usually small and we barely notice them. If a colourful predatory insect was discovered on the Red Planet, it would make headlines on the Blue Planet in exactly the same way that a dragonfly showing up in your garden would not.

Out in the garden there are probably more natural wonders to be found than anywhere else in our solar system. Other planets are interesting, but biologically it is Earth that has hit the jack-pot. Without doubt, we should be exploring space, but with our present limitations, should be doing so with robots. allowing us to spend the big money on preserving the natural biodiversity of our planet. Sadly, our minds are programmed to appreciate novelty — a trip to another world would certainly provide the ultimate social media selfie… and what could be more important than that? Tiring of the familiar, we hardly notice the small creatures in passing as we wander down the garden path… we think we know them, but really we do not.

When I see a dragonfly I can hardly believe my luck – it is as if I am still 7 years old. Those around me are moving on and I’m thinking, “Wow… That’s incredible!” Then I take a photograph, which always leads to more questions than answers — looking at the natural world in detail always increases our awareness of how little we know.

For example, the general complexity to dragonfly wings is noticeable — look carefully and it is not too difficult to appreciate that the incredibly ornate vein patterns exist for entirely practical reasons.

Consider those marks on the leading edge of the front wings of dragonflies. Darker, and usually coloured in appearance they are the pterostigma — a thickening that improves efficiency when a dragonfly is gliding. Similar species that were around when dinosaurs roamed the Earth didn’t have them; and that’s a big deal — the thickening would have provided a distinct advantage to forms that developed them, outcompeting others that did not. Once you know this, it is difficult not to notice other things about dragonflies that need explaining.

The leading edge of a cardinal meadow hawk’s wing — pictured below — shows a clear pattern of venation and it’s difficult not to wonder why. Look closely and it is obvious that the dragonfly wing is corrugated to increase rigidity, but that’s only part of a bigger story, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the hows and the whys of such complexity.

When such puzzles are answered, we may incorporate the information into structures that we build for ourselves. Aerodynamic flight is about gaining optimal strength without over-engineering structures that need to be light. But there is a lot more to consider — flexing for example. A dragonfly wing looks rigid when the insect is perched waiting for a meal to go by, but when flying, the wings need to flex to increase stability. From our perspective the developmental work has been done and our thoughts can take flight by simply observing — dragonfly wings have been millions of years in the making and are tried and tested blueprints for our own endeavours. Currently a new generation of agile tiny drones with insect like wings are in development with dragonflies the basic plan.

Photography reveals that when in flight dragonfly wings do not simply move up and down in relation to their bodies — the movement more closely follows a figure of eight. It is much the same with hummingbirds where this motion has evolved independently, and allows both insect and bird to be more maneuverable.

When the adult form emerges from its larval encasement it takes a few hours for the body and wings to pump up — during the drying and hardening of the outer body parts the creature is unable to fly and remains vulnerable. If things get really bad and it rains hard, the impact can prove entirely disabling. Yet the process of becoming an extraordinary maneuverable air ace with millions of air miles on the clock has worked well for the Odonata — they have managed to exist for a very long time without major changes in form, perhaps because evolution operates on the simple maxim: if it an’t broke, don’t fix it!

There was at times during the Carboniferous Period when atmospheric Oxygen levels were twice what they are today because there were a greater numbers of plants photosynthesizing. If we were able to travel back to this earlier time, we’d be in trouble, because despite Oxygen’s essential role in life on Earth, at high concentrations it is poisonous to a great many life forms. Nevertheless, dragonflies were able to grow bigger (as was the case for Meganeura mentioned previously), but there are limits as how big an animal with an externally supportive skeleton can get — it is the case for all insect; they have air tubes carrying oxygen to body parts rather than the more efficient lungs that help drive mammalian activity. Dragonflies have soft abdomens which allows them to pump a little air, but size is always limited by structure. There is a theory that in order to cope with higher Oxygen levels dragonflies of the period would have developed narrower breathing tubes and increased body size.

Some scientists have questioned whether this is accurate, but laboratory experiment with developing dragonfly larvae still around today has demonstrated that this is exactly what happens, although not to the same degree as it did for Carboniferous species. The general rule seems to be — supply more oxygen and the ‘breathing “tubes become narrower and the body size increases; give the larvae less oxygen and the ‘breathing’ tubes become wider and the insects that emerge are smaller, which suggests the Oxygen theory isn’t pie in the sky ridiculous.

And what about those eyes? Dragonflies and bees have the largest eyes in the insect world with about 30,000 facets in each compound eye. We have a reasonable idea of how much information this kind of eye provides, but how the brain interprets input is open to question, although by observing how insects react it is clear that almost any stimulus elicits and an immediate reaction, and is to be expected with any efficient predator.

For most of their lives dragonflies are not dragonflies at all — they are underwater larval forms that breathe through gills and although small, might best be described as monstrous. If today they grew to the size of similar species during the Carboniferous, we might think twice about going into the water where they lived.

The larval forms of dragonflies (nymhs) spend from one to several years underwater, living as fierce submersible predators shedding exoskeletons as they grow, until one day they are ready to emerge from the water. Once into what we consider ‘our world’, they climb upwards, then grasp whatever they have climbed to emerge from their capsule.

One day they are deadly aquatic assassins, the next, fierce aerial predators driven now by the priority to reproduce. Most dragonflies have shorter lives above than they do under water, and although some take time away from the ponds lakes and rivers to feed, at the top of their ‘to do list’ is mate and lay eggs successfully before they die. On more than one occasion when taking pictures, I have lost my subject to a hungry bird — over millions of years nothing about this appears to have changed; but this is an illusion, as both birds and dragonflies are continually improving their chances by the process of natural selection in what has become a rather one sided flight to the death.

The sex life of dragonflies is rather unusual. The males store sperm up near their thorax, transferring this from the end of their abdomens by curling these under and forward along their bodies. When females link up, the two bodies loop together in the wheel position that allows for the transfer of sperm to the female for the fertilization of her eggs.

In some species males can remove sperm previously deposited by a rival male, or reposition it so there is less likelihood of fertilising the female’s eggs — the process relies on anatomical adaptions of the males reproductive system. How long pairs remain in tandem is dependent upon which strategy is operating; in some species the couple remain linked when egg laying commences, preventing other males from engaging with the female ensuring the accompanying males’ genetic line, although in some cases the female will break free to lay eggs independently and is them subjected to the attentions of other suitors. How long and whether females remains linked to a male depends on both circumstances and species. There is a lot more to be understood about the processes, particularly in relation to natural selection — with the Odonata providing the best examples so far observed of anatomical traits that relate to sperm competition.

By any standards dragonflies have been successful for millions of years and this isn’t over. Impressively, Britain has gained eight new dragonfly species since 1985 — in a country where many other plants and animals are rapidly disappearing. It is too early to say if this move northwards due to global climate change is permanent, and there could be other problems on the horizon if weather patterns continue to become more extreme.

The order of dragonflies has already survived several mass extinction events including the one that took out the dinosaurs; and if I was a gambler I’d bet they’d probably survive the next one, but there is a no denying the possibility that our species may not… Whether I might win such a bet would depend on the urgent need for us to deal with both climate change and the continuing reduction of species diversity, because if nothing changes, making a killing will inevitably take on a broader and more devastating meaning.

You know how it is, you’re having a perfectly normal conversation with somebody you think you know, and suddenly they say, ‘That’s just not like me, I’m a Capricorn’, and you’re thinking, ‘I hadn’t realised you were as daft as a brush’…

The great thing about owls is they aren’t like that — millions of years of evolution have honed them into ultra-efficient killing machines and none will make a judgement based on your star signs. Probably what they’re thinking when looking at you is, ‘I’m sure that thing’s too big to eat; but I’ll keep watching in case it’s dangerous?’

All that owls need to do is catch and kill prey on a regular basis; find a mate, then a suitable place to nest and rear offspring successfully; and for all of these things natural selection has adapted them well… otherwise they’d be extinct. Survival doesn’t require cleverness in the way that we think of it; no owl will be entering a pub quiz any time soon, because that’s not what ‘wise owls’ do.

Here’s ‘a wise owl’. Certainly this one’s fairly cute for a killing machine, but clever?…That’s a different story.

The impression we have is that owls are thoughtful, because unlike most birds they have flat faces and as predators need to judge distance using binocular vision; consequently, their eyes are located at the front of their heads, and these organs of vision are usually so big and adorable they are a super stimulus for our brains and this encourages us to like them. Add to this, beaks that look a bit like noses and suddenly we’re thinking, these creatures look a bit like us, so they must think like us… but that’s really stretching it.

Various animals seem to grab our attention — mostly mammals; but frogs, toads, parrots, owls and even snails have their fans. Owl enthusiasts will surround themselves with imagery relating to their favourite subject — pictures on the wall, place mats on the table and cuddly toys in the bedroom.

For the love of owls...

I don’t see myself as a rabid owl enthusiast and yet after a head count I’ve noticed quite a few dotted around the house. Rooted somewhere deep in our psyche these unusual looking bird are just waiting to come to mind, but over the years my relationship with them has been mostly practical: every now and again I’ve been required to film one, and suddenly they’re part of making a living.

The first owl I filmed for television was for a documentary on the wildlife of churchyards — it was a barn owl… or to be precise, it was three barn owls, and they taught me something… These are beautiful birds but have a habit of making their surroundings surprisingly dirty for all their hauntingly pristine whiteness. Clearly, the magic hold that owls have over our minds turns almost everything that they do into a positive.

Owls push out waste material from both ends, which you really start to notice when you spend long hours working with them. Most creatures excrete from their rear ends, but owls also regularly throw up pellets — waste materials of digestion that attract flies and other small creatures to feed and lay eggs upon these macabre little parcels.

During the spring of the project I was suddenly looking after three young captive barn owls, converting my Victorian outhouse into a film set, and constructing a window from which they would hopefully emerge as if from a church tower.

In reality churches haven’t had owls or even bats in their belfries for a very long time, because those responsible for maintaining the interiors of churches prefer to avoid accumulating bat poo, bird droppings and owl pellets.

For years now, the chances of finding owls spending their days hiding away in church towers has been reduced to almost zero, as most windows have been meshed to prevent birds from entering.

However, if owls had still been living a church going lifestyle, the only other option would have been to build a scaffold next to a church tower from which I need to film a single shot, and that wasn’t very cost effective. Back in the 1980s, it was easier for me to build a church window set and film captive owls coming and going, even if in reality they’d be unlikely to do so.

Wildlife film-makers rarely admit to deception, but we all have to own up to the realities of what is possible in a world that is rapidly disappearing. I don’t think it matters one hoot whether an owl exits a real window, or a fake one, because nothing about the bird’s behaviour changes. Nobody questions an edit in a natural history film, because if an audience wanted to experience natural events in real-time they’d be waiting for days. However, as soon as you tighten up the progress of events the result is a story; and the real problem with telling a story is the disappointment of the viewer should they discover the deception.

So, there I was… faking it; building a facade on the front of my outhouse and using the outdoor toilet next to it as a hide to film from, essentially by knocking a small hole in the wall. On the outside of the set window was an outdoor enclosure into which the owls could emerge, but they never did. Even sitting in the window would have been helpful; and if flying was beyond them, just hopping out of frame would have been enough, but they wouldn’t do any of these things. It was a complete waste of time, and I ended up feeding the birds inside the little room they’d adopted as their home, a home that I never managed to persuade them to leave.

The outhouse was next to the kitchen, and the flies coming to visit the mess the bird’s created was disagreeable. The owls weren’t equipped to fly any distance; and after a couple of months I returned them to the person who had reared them in preparation for release into the wild. I am aware that most owl enthusiasts would be singing the praises of experiencing such wonderful birds first hand, but I couldn’t wait to see the back of them. They whole thing had been a time consuming failure. I’d been unintentionally mislead about what these owls would do, and was a long way past the point where I was going to train them to fly through my phoney window. They were the wrong birds for the job and never again did I make such an expensive mistake.

Soon after my year of filming in graveyards, I moved onto another film project for the BBC in the backwoods of Maine where I would meet a great horned owl destined to become one of the most famous owls in natural history writing. I returned to Maine on several occasions over the course of the next year and a half, spending much of my time high on a wooded hill at the camp of scientist and writer Professor Bernd Heinrich. The thing about Bernd is that he is not only an exceptional naturalists but one of the most impressive zoologists of his generation. He’d rescued a fledgling great horned owl from the snow and the bird was always somewhere close to his cabin, either sitting on a log, or in a tree close by. He had been named Bubo: if you can name a hobbit Bilbo, then why not an owl Bubo, after all it is latin for his Genus — the New World horned owls and Old World eagle owls make up the genus Bubo.

Eventually, after many hours of observation, Bernd wrote ‘One Man’s Owl‘ which like most of his books became a classic of natural history writing. The bird was semi-wild, and would come to Bernd without much trouble; better than that, he would fly to food in a manner that was entirely predictable. One day Bernd dangled something dead and unpleasant just behind my head and young Bubo came swooping in to take it, providing a shot I could never have achieved in the wild. We repeated this several times, the owl on each occasion dropping from it’s perch just a little way off and then gliding towards the lens, dipping low enough to appear as if he might be about to crash into me, but rising at the last moment to a position just above my head — each time I felt claws brushing through my hair, but they didn’t close until locked onto the free lunch that I couldn’t exactly feel behind my head, but could faintly smell. When a bird of prey’s talons touch prey, they usually snap closed as a reflex action and my hair got pulled, but it was nothing personal. If an owl really flies at you with intent… then you certainly know about it.

A great horned owl has a pounds per square inch (psi) grip of around 300 — 500, whereas most humans manage a grip of just a few pounds per square inch.

A few years later I found myself in the high mountain woodlands of New Mexico filming the small nocturnal flammulated owl. It was a surprise when the scientist working with the birds told me he could chainsaw out the back of the tree they were nesting in and they would remain entirely undisturbed. If you needed to observe or weight young birds this was perhaps an effective way of doing it, but I was sceptical. Chainsawing a tree before the owls started nesting seemed a better option, but how many trees would you need to cut into to guarantee a nest being present later in the year? Predicting such events is very hit and miss.

The section removed from the back of the nest could be taken out when filming, then set back and wired into place very quickly. There are probably a dozen good reasons why this wouldn’t be done today, one of which is that flammulated owls are now endangered in some areas of their range. For the most part this has been down to habitat loss. After being set up by the bird biologist, I filmed the owls both during the day and at night using artificial light — but standing at the top of a ladder tied almost perpendicular to what remained of an old conifer miles from anywhere, in otherwise total darkness, was rather spooky.

The filming occurred more than 35 years ago when a great many species were far less threatened than they are today; but even back then if I hadn’t been confident about what I was doing, I wouldn’t have been filming; and in this case, certainly not without the supervision of a scientific advisor who had been working closely with the birds. I haven’t named him because many will consider this kind of intrusiveness unacceptable; but as none of his birds ever seemed disturbed and the information gleaned went into conserving the species, I didn’t have a problem with it. Nevertheless, I am not sure we need to see every wild bird on the nest just for a television programme, although there is no doubt that this kind of media exposure is the best way to get a general audience informed and proactive in conservation… But don’t try this at home… you might lose an eye! The alternative is to film captive birds on sets and there are many people who are equally disturbed by this alternative dishonesty.

Using artificial light attracted more moths that I have ever seen at any one time outside of the tropics. The owls were easy going, but there was always the potential danger that an adult bird arriving back at the nest might get spooked and launch into my face. Owls have inflicted serious damage to people who have worked this closely with them in the wild, causing facial damage and even the loss of an eye.

I was filming less than a foot from the bird, and couldn’t believe how tolerant the flammulated owls were, although I only worked with birds for very short periods, never more than 20 minutes a night before leaving them to get on with their lives. The success of the project was mostly in the planning; followed by working quickly without any sudden movements that might disturb them. I used a variety of techniques to minimise disturbance: a light source that could be turned up rather than one that could only be turned on, and dark gloves to prevent sudden glare from my hands. Simple things but very effective.

Unless a hide has been set up and birds are entirely unaware of your presence, the 20 minute rule is a good one. I’ve worked in this way with several bat species including vampire bats at their roost as well as variety of nesting birds, but you can’t do this with every species.

Some birds are not troubled by this kind of exposure, but many will be, unless you have almost unlimited time to get them used to a new experience; most importantly you can’t just try it out to see, and that is why such filming endeavours work best if they are associated with a research project that has already clearly defined the ground rules.

It would be impossible to list every owl I’ve filmed or photographed because there have been so many — some have been captive, but most have been truly wild.

I have in the past been fairly mean when using film stock and there are many occasions when I didn’t wind on far enough before taking pictures, resulting in a light leak that affected the first frame of the roll. For some reason when I photographed owls this happened rather a lot, but I often quite liked the results. I could claim that these were artful pictures, but I won’t go that far — although the random nature of what turned out was often quite interesting.

‘Tawny in Red’ was a resident at the Hawk Conservancy Trust at Weyhill, Hampshire and it was an extraordinary bird. This owl would fly to wherever was required and land to order; and rather usefully could fly slowly alongside a moving vehicle so that it might be easily tracked by a camera. Straight away I must admit that owls are capable of remarkable things, but in fairness this birds super abilities were to some degree down to handler and Trust Founder Ashley Smith, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was a very special bird.

This wild burrowing owl was photographed on open grassland, and had the habit of standing tall, stretching itself up to gain a little extra height when it was trying to make out anything that was moving, often at some distance. This was accompanied by complicated head movements, giving the bird a comic demeanour. The behaviour however was strictly functional, allowing the bird to judge distance. The owl would react this way when anything new came into view: this might be an old bag blowing in the wind, a coyote, or just a human who hadn’t yet noticed the owl was there — in the reverse situation the observations were seldom as acute: people just don’t notice as much as an owl does; certainly any owl that takes the trouble to monitor its surroundings is more likely to survive than one that doesn’t.

Everybody has favourites, but more often than not, mine are functional. Burrowing owls are high on my list because they are active during the day which gives a film-maker at least a chance. In the mid 1980s I worked with these delightful birds on a site in New Mexico and became quite enamoured by their behaviour.

They would sit outside of their burrows during the day, or on top of a dead tree stump or power line pole, but unlike most owls, were more inclined to present more interesting daytime behaviour. Many species remain at rest during daylight hours, giving you little more to film than a rotating head and the occasional blink; but burrowing owls are different — they are generally more dynamic, even if sometimes this involves little more than moving in and out of their burrows. Movement is essential to a television audience’s experience; and usefully the most dramatic activity these owls would perform was to dive-bomb walkers and joggers; joggers being the preferential targets, perhaps because they were moving faster and considered more of a threat.

Several years after filming the flammulated owls, I took a road trip with my wife Jen across Route 66 and made a slight detour to re-visit my old favourites. Unlike so many animals I have returned to see, the owls had not been swamped by development or disturbance. They were living their lives pretty much the way they had been on my previous visit when I’d had the luxury of being paid to be in their presence and could give them far more time.

Good telephoto lenses are expensive, and increasingly photographers are getting far too close to wildlife trying to get a better shot, and they are often doing so using mobile phones. As a group, photographers are becoming a nuisance and it’s way past the time when we need to be thinking about our priorities, because no matter how hard we try, somebody will always have a better picture of the animals we are trying to photograph than we are ever going to get on the inappropriate cameras and lenses many of us are using. Clearly it’s time for all of us to ease off a bit and give what remains of the natural world a bit more space.

When working with animals I’ve always attempt two styles of photography. The first and most essential is to record events at a specific moment in time: it is rewarding to take a great picture but on occasions this isn’t the point. The second kind of picture is taken with a view to getting an attractive image, usually playing with framing and exposure to create a mood, and this isn’t as difficult as it sounds, and most of us can manage it with a bit of practice. However, now and again something special comes together — an animal is in the right place at the right time and suddenly the lighting comes good and you grab the moment, which is about as authentic as it gets for a photographer.

I presently live in a Canadian suburb, which isn’t the best place to take pictures of wildlife, but even developed areas have something to offer, especially if you can find a bit of woodland that hasn’t been felled somewhere between all of that housing. In my case, ‘a river runs through it’ with natural woodland on either side: this is a byway for many animal species, and there is no telling what might show up. Recently a beaver took up residence and started chewing down small trees. Now and again I see a barred owl that likes to sit in a particular stand of trees. My son walks a different route and he sees a different owl. Yesterday his owl was sat in its usual place, but on this occasion it was being mobbed from above by a heron. The owl on my walk seldom has anything that interesting going on, but a couple of years ago the owl was sitting unusually low in a tree close to the path. The sun was going down and I could see the light would come good in just a few minutes and all I needed to do was photograph it, but I wasn’t carrying a long lens. The question was, could I jog home, pick one up and get back in time? It took fifteen minutes to turn that around, and when I got back the owl was still there, and suddenly looking at me wondering what all the fuss was about.

The sun was casting its rays through the branches and there was very little life left in them, but there was enough. The owl bobbed her head at me, trying to work out what I was doing. I imagined she was thinking, ‘What are you up to you fool?’… but that’s just the’ psych bending power of the owl’ driving me to put human thoughts into her skull. She soon lost interest and turned her head to one side and I took my picture. My preference was to think that she’d worked it all out — the meaning of life and all that goes with it, but that of course was preposterous. Everything that was clever about this owl was inside my head. But never mind that — there before me was the most extraordinary creature… and that should have been enough, because this was as good as it was ever going to get.

In memory of my father — Elliott Keith Bolwell. 22/8/22 – 22/1/21.

The Story of a Picture.

The writer Lawrence Durrell once told his younger brother Gerald, that an interesting experience should never be wasted and should always find its way into his work; and the advice proved useful because Gerald Durrell would become one of the most popular writers of his generation. Certainly, he knew how to tell a good story, which encouraged me at an early age to read his travel books. Years later though there would be disappointment when I heard him say that what he had written had only been loosely based upon the truth. Naively I had thought that if a book was supposed to be factual then it should glide as close as is possible to the truth, otherwise we might just as well all be reading novels.

Nevertheless, as a child, Durrell’s descriptions of exotic places was inspirational, and pretty soon I began considering that maybe I too might become a naturalist, travelling to interesting places to watch interesting plants and animals do interesting things. But that was little more than wishful thinking, because I couldn’t imagine ever being able to raise enough money to fulfil such lofty ambitions. If I was going to get there I’d need to think creatively, because I knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade other people to pay for my lifestyle choices. Whatever I did, it should at least look like a job. Given my interests, perhaps the most obvious approach was to work overseas as a wildlife film-maker and get television companies not only to pay for my experiences, but also to take care of the necessary expenses… But that would be easier said than done, and a completely different story.

My career as a wildlife film-maker was slow to start, but eventually things began to fall into place; and it wasn’t long before I began waking up in hotel rooms wondering quite literally, where on Earth I was. Then it occurred to me that to do this job properly I’d most likely have to get up very early and most likely miss breakfast – a desperate state of affairs. Then, later in the day, if plants and animals started doing interesting things I’d have to focus lenses and press camera buttons. It was devastating – I was quickly learning that not only was breakfast looking sketchy, but there was also no such thing as a free lunch.

When filming for the BBC everything I shot belonged to the Corporation, but my contracts arrived so late I hardly ever signed them, so maybe everything I filmed still belongs to me, even the stuff that has long since gone to the tip. Certainly, I owned all of the still photographs that were taken at the time, but these were usually grabbed and secondary to the filming –  I had no illusions about my priorities.

As a freelancer I owned all my own gear, along with all the accumulated experiences that the job had to offer, and looking back, some were more extraordinary than I had realised at the time; unlike many other jobs the same thing rarely happened twice, and events were often difficult to predict. Retrospectively, apart from getting paid there was nothing about my working life that seemed normal, and in consequence I ended up with a great many of pictures and almost as many stories, but for years remained far too busy to put the two together.

My stills pictures were often requested for inclusion in books that related to whatever series I was working on at the time, but as the published work was separate from the filming I wasn’t obliged to offer up any of my stills; and as I never came across a publisher willing to pay a fair price for reproducing my images, I didn’t waste too much time searching out whatever they were asking for. But when I did relent, and send off transparencies (as the format was back then) they would usually get lost, or at the very least damaged –  one was even returned to me cut in half and all were reproduced by being laid onto a sticky roller, so that if by some freak of circumstance any did get returned, they were invariably covered in goo. Nevertheless, I did search out a picture for the book based on the Durrell T.V. series ‘Ourselves and Other Animals’, because given how much Gerald Durrell’s early work had shaped my childhood it would have been churlish not to have given up a single picture.

As soon as I got my first stills camera, holding onto it became second nature – I rarely put the thing down. For some people photography is like a disease that never goes away: a bit like malaria: you get over it for a while but it keeps coming back. And now I’m discovering images that I barely glanced at when they first came back from the laboratory: most were immediately  stacked away in boxes, and many have remained unseen from the day they were put away, in some cases decades ago. They are history now, but each one reminds me of an event that relates to a particular story.

And just as I was thinking about this I came to a box that said ‘Potoo in Brazil’ and as I began going through the various colour slides, the story and the pictures suddenly came together:

I was in South Brazil carrying my gear across a wide expanse of cerrado (natural grassland) just as the sun was coming up; which was nice because it had been cold: there where termite mounds dotting the landscape away into the distance and I was making my way towards them. Then up ahead, I saw something odd sitting on a weedy old broken stump – the only bit of wood for miles. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but I could see that the top of this broken off tree was sharp and lacking the decrepit woodiness of the weathered base below, it looked altogether rather odd.

I made my way towards what had once been a small tree that had probably been struck by lightening some years before, and was close before realising quite what I was looking at. On the top was an unusual bird doing a great impression of being something other than a potoo, which is the rather odd name this strange animal has been given.

I’d never seen one before, but by its general form it was clear this was a primitive looking creature related to birds called frog mouths, and also to nightjars, birds that I would occasionally see on ‘the New Forest’ heaths, close to my home when living in England – they would fly low at dusk to catch insects… but that was almost half a world away from where I was standing now.

The potoo is in the family Nyctibiidae, but this bird didn’t know it had a proper name and would have been just as much at home in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ doing absolutely nothing, whilst trying to appear more vegetable than animal; and the way the head was pointing vertically up, it was clear that this strange bird was taking being the top of a dead tree stump very seriously indeed.

Clearly the first thing I needed to do was to photograph it, because the bird’s cryptic form was obviously a behavioural adaptation that allowed it to avoid being seen by both predators and prey. That in itself was interesting, but not really the stuff of movies. It occurred to me the potoo was totally confident that I couldn’t see it and was determined to sit tight, at least for the time being. So, I  decided that the next thing to do was run the camera and walk straight up to the tree stump and see what it would do next. In no other circumstance would I walk straight up to a wild bird – to do so would certainly cause a disturbance, but this was a potoo and its behaviour suggested that it might just sit tight rather than take flight… and as it turned out, moving was the very last thing on its mind.

I was fairly steady back then and could hand-hold a camera without jiggling it about, the secret is to relax and keep everything moving and once close to your subject, avoid stepping forward, or over compensating for any instability – you should just lean in; but when a camera has a wide angle lens up front, it is surprising how much of a bird’s head will remain in frame when you do. I ended up very close, but kept looking through the view finder… and still the bird didn’t react. This was a bit of an anti-climax;  clearly something would need to change if things were going to become interesting; presently, as a movie shot it was totally pointless – I should perhaps have though this through more thoroughly.  There was nothing here that would make this work unless the bird reacted, and in one sense I was pleased the bird hadn’t been disturbed, but way out in the middle of nowhere, this potoo probably wasn’t going to see another human being for months, and if it did decide to fly to another perch I doubted it would be a tremendous drain on its resources. Probably the bird would simply glide a short distance to a termite mound and sit tight again, but the potoo wasn’t about to do that, and now I was almost touching it….

I was aware the potoo knew I was there, because even with its eyes closed the lids allowed enough light through for the bird to see – it was important for the creature to keep its eyes hidden because once revealed they were all too obvious.

And just when I thought I might be about to break the most important rule of wildlife film-making, and bump into a bird, the potoo finally reacted, turning it’s broad head towards me and quite suddenly flashing open the two delicate lids to reveal a pair of starling greenish-yellow eyes; then it gaped its beak as wide as it could manage to display a startling pinkish-purple mouth interior, which even through the viewfinder appeared quite shocking. For a moment the whole lens seemed to be going down the bird’s throat as the potoo held its beak at maximum aperture for what seemed an eternity. Then having exhausted the full shock value of doing this, it suddenly snapped its bill shut – and did so without scratching the front element of my camera lens, or catching my fingers. This was a bonus to what had been a wonderful display. I gently pulled back and the potoo returned to invisible mode, once again certain that I could not see it.

Now, I’d managed this startling shot, it occurred to me I didn’t have the faintest idea how it might be used. I’d already done some wide shots, but hadn’t established any context to tell a story – there was no natural reason for the bird to behave in this way. If I was to play a predator instigating a second line of defence, how could this be used successfully in a natural history film if in terms of the story telling, I wasn’t supposed to be there and there was no obvious predator. The shot was just a curiosity that would never make it into a programme…. and as I carried on doing the many other things I had to do, this interesting event dropped to the back my mind. But, when much later the producer and editor saw the shot, they weren’t expecting the gape any more than I was, and were determined to use it… the only way to do this, was in a ‘making of the series’ programme: it would become a ‘See what happened to our cameraman moment, when he approached this odd looking stick’ in David Attenborough’s ‘The Making of the Living Planet’ which was transmitted at the end of the ‘Living Planet’ series. I didn’t need to appear on screen because the story was all in the telling of the bird’s odd behaviour from the perspective of the viewer. As for the potoo… The bird had become famous for 15 seconds, but wouldn’t have known anything about it, and I got the feeling that if it had, this strange creature wouldn’t have been the least bit bothered. Potoos just do what potoos have to do  – no more, no less. They’re fabulous when they’re doing absolutely nothing, then suddenly extraordinary when doing quite a lot more – and usually when you’re least expecting it.

Dedicated to John Gordon who takes lovely pictures of birds.