This morning it was announced that I have received a Highly Commended in the Animal Behaviour Mammals section of the BBC Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition with the image that you see below. It is a very special award as it is my 9th award in 7 consecutive years, a feat which has not been achieved by any UK wildlife photographer before. Predictably I am quite pleased!



You can buy a print or a canvas of this image by clicking this button

The Story Behind the Shot.....

The silverback in question, Akarevuro, is the son of the wonderful Kwitonda, who leads the group of the same name. Usually young silverbacks adopt a watching brief until they are old enough to challenge the dominant silverback or leave the group to establish their own group. Akarevuro however had not read the script.

We arrived early in the morning to find him sitting in a clearing with several females around him; his father was a few hundred metres away with more females. Since Akarevuro was in a very nice area we decided to stay with him, a very good decision! After a few minutes he started to make gentle sounds through pursed lips; they started to increase in intensity and my guide said "Andy, he’s going to charge". Seconds later 250KG of muscle came bounding straight at us, arms pounding against his enormous chest and bushes being flattened in his wake.....

It was an incredible moment, a demonstration of nature’s raw power right in front of us. His power was just awesome. In a second it was over, one instant he was charging towards us, the next he stopped dead a few metres away and sat on all fours sideways to us; he was a really big guy!

The charge was over and I could hear the collective sighs of relief all around me as my clients had shared this wonderful experience too. I knew that we were NEVER in any danger, Silverbacks are gentle giants, and are never aggressive to humans. But there had to be a reason for the charge, we had not doing anything and soon it became apparent why - in fact the oldest reason the book....

We witnessed a wonderful mating between Akarevuro and a female, so tender and loving it was a very special time to watch. He had charged us to impress her and it had clearly worked!

Photographer Notes

The image was taken on a Nikon D3s with a 70-200mm F2.8VR lens. The ISO was set to 800 giving a shutter speed of 1/3200th second at f4. Continuous AF was in use throughout and I kept the autofocus point right over the head for the whole sequence.

Prints and Books

To purchase a print of this award winning image, in either art print or canvas format, or any of the other gorilla images on this page please click here.

To purchase a personally signed copy of my stunning gorilla book Living on the Edge, which donates profits from its sales to gorilla conservation, please click here. Please note that I am leaving for the Arctic tmrw and no books will be dispatched before my return in September as all books are personally signed.

To see Andy’s other award winning images in the BBC and other competitions then please click here.

Ok so yesterday many of you would have read on my Facebook Fan Page that I spent 16 long hours in a hide without revealing what I was doing. Well now I can. I was working at the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust’s Dyfi Osprey Project in mid Wales, trying to nail some exciting images of these history making Ospreys. For the first time in 400 years ospreys have nested in the Dyfi Valley in mid Wales and I have been waiting for the right time to get them some images that they can use to advertise their success. Ospreys are covered by the schedule 1 license scheme and we did not want to do anything that would jeopardise them raising their chicks successfully. In the past week the monitoring team there has noticed that the ospreys are venturing further and further from the nest and now they regularly visit a couple of posts about 1km from the nest. This means that we are not disturbing the ospreys and so it was time to make a visit. The results, I think you will agree, are something else, all comments are below their respective pictures:



Beautiful backlight as Nora, the female, takes the remains of the previous night’s fish and brings it right into the perch. It almost caught me by surprise as the sun was barely up and I did not expect any action that early. Luckily the red light was just high enough to highlight her wings.



Amazing how just a few feet makes a huge difference, this is taken a fraction of a second later but Nora had almost flown though the shaft of red light. The whole image looks slightly colder, still lovely wings though.

The man himself! Magnificent. Of course the story here is really of the three youngsters, Leri, Einion and Dulas who have all fledged and have now been tagged with satellite transmitters.



Here you can see Einion with his transmitter.





And two of them flying together. Very soon they will fly like this for real, making the long migration to Africa without their parents (Nora will leave before and likely Monty last). Only 1 in 3 youngsters survive to make the return journey, which is one reason for the tracking equipment as we want to know more about where they go and what happens to them. The BBC and the supporters of the project paid for these transmitters.

For everyone concerned at the project it has been a great year and there will be a lot of sadness when the ospreys leave in a couple of weeks. Hopefully they will return next year and I will be there to hopefully bring you some more images. Yesterday I had a lot of help, not only from Emyr Evans the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust Osprey Project Manager but also from Al, Hugh and my radio team who kept me awake and always let me know when an osprey left the nest and headed in my direction. Too many wildlife photographers pretend that they are the world’s greatest and don’t thank the people that help them, let this be a lesson to all that I could not have done this without great help on the ground.

You can follow the Dyfi Osprey Project by clicking here.

I hope that you enjoy these images, this will be my last major blog before I leave for the Arctic next week. One thing you will notice is that this BLOG has no technical information about taking the shots. This is deliberate as I am working on a new section of the website that will deal with this specifically, more details when I get back! Those of you coming from Facebook, please return there to post a comment or two and those from Twitter please spread the link! Ospreys are cool!

So over the weekend the story has come out more about the attack. Thankfully everyone involved is ok and stable, physically at least, and hopefully now we can just move on from this story. I am sure that there are questions to answer and that the authorities in Svalbard will be asking them, but now is not the time and the place to discuss them. We can just be thankful that we did not have more fatalities and the quick response of the authorities ensured that those injured were treated as quickly as could be achieved in such circumstances. It seems to me that no one has commented on how quickly they scrambled the helicopter and got a medical team to those that needed it. I always know that should we get into difficulties, the Svalbard authorities will do everything in their power to get help.

On Friday I gave an interview to a newspaper and journalist that I trusted, it is so nice to see how my comments are misquoted and taken completely out of context to sensationalize the story. Unbelievable, guess I should have not expected any different. It’s just annoying as I have taken great pains to deliver a really balanced view on this whole story, so that you would see both sides. To have my comments being used to misrepresent our views on polar bears just pisses me off!!! We live and learn.

Anyway moving on, as we all must. Svalbard will continue to be one of the most wonderful and protected wilderness areas on this earth. It will continue to be home to a globally important population of the highly endangered polar bear and man will continue to live, with sensible precautions, alongside the bears. My hope is that for the future, the only headlines about my beloved Svalbard will be ones about its beauty and wonderful experiences from the tourists that visit its shores every year. To celebrate this I have fixed the link (apologies for bad link and thanks for emails) on the Svalbard landscapes gallery, click here and select the Svalbard gallery, to see what a truly wonderful place it is.