Over the years exploring coastal British Columbia I’ve been lucky enough to very occasionally run into coastal wolves. As an ecologist, nature enthusiast and photographer these encounters rank amongst the most thrilling wildlife encounters I’ve experienced.
I recently won the lottery of wildlife photography (in my mind anyway!) when I came across a coastal wolf foraging at low tide in beautiful morning light. As I floated nearby in my kayak, excitedly photographing the wolf on shore, it meandered down to the water’s edge and started to bark and howl. I eventually clued in that this might make interesting video and managed to capture some shaky footage which I’ve assembled into the video below.
The video is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek but is my attempt to encapsulate some thoughts about wildlife photography in general that have been rumbling around in my head for a while.
Why Watch Wildlife?
I suspect most of us have a certain degree of curiosity about the other creatures with whom we share this amazing planet. For some this curiosity is intense, leading to spending thousands on trips to view and photograph wildlife. Once a person has spent all that time, effort, and money to get in front of wildlife, who wouldn’t want to “get their money’s worth” spending as much time as possible as close as possible to maximize the experience and potentially get that award winning shot? Indeed, I’ve witnessed many wildlife “guides” do just this for their clients on multiple continents.
Another big motivator are the emotional responses wildlife encounters evoke within us. I challenge anyone not to feel something when coming face to face with an apex predator!
Feeling like prey not doing it for you? What about the cute factor? The popularity of cute pet videos online is a testament to how we enjoy these types of interactions. Whether born from some deep seated genetic memory of when we too roamed the land with nothing but our wits to help us survive or perhaps from some cultural inculcation such as Disney cartoons, we bring an awful lot of emotional baggage with us to wildlife encounters that affects our attitudes and behaviours in the moment.
Negative Impacts
Whatever the motivation, unfortunately when humans interact with wildlife it’s often the wildlife that suffers as a direct result. Forcing animals to take time away from foraging to meet basic energy needs, hide or even abandon their young, interfering with finding a mate or resting, or creating stress responses that negatively impact all of these behaviours, are all well documented consequences of humans’ wildlife watching – especially when done on an industrial scale.
What Can Be Done?
I’m just as guilty as the next nature photographer of having burned plenty of carbon to travel the world over in pursuit of amazing wildlife encounters. I don’t think we’ll ever squash humanity’s desire to see wildlife in its natural home and nor should we! These profound experiences stay with us and may inform our thinking about how we choose to vote and spend our money for the benefit of earth’s ecosystems. Mitigating the cumulative impact of these encounters on both individual animals and their homes is where we should put our energies. Countries can (and should) enact laws (staying 400m from orca is a local example) and industries should be regulated to protect wildlife from over-exploitation, but what should we do as individuals?
Taking Responsibility For Our Own Behaviour
Our photographic subjects don’t care about local laws and regulations, social media, nature documentaries or glossy magazines, only the behaviour of the person with the camera in front of them at that moment. If collectively we were better at this, perhaps we wouldn’t even need regulations! The trouble is, the times we should be on our best behaviour are those when it’s most tempting not to be.
Imagine you’re alone in some remote place far from law enforcement, photographing an animal that’s been on your bucket list for years and you’ll likely never get the opportunity to see again. Visions of massive, conversation evoking prints hanging in your dining room and social media fame dance in your head…Maybe you could get people to pay you to bring them here…What’s the harm in getting a bit closer?…What about a quick whistle to get it to look your way?…Does it really hurt to block the path for a bit longer to get more shots?…It’s not moving, that must mean it likes me…
Floating around offshore watching a wolf forage at low tide seemed to me to be a reasonable compromise. The wolf clearly knew I was there but continued to forage and get on with its day while I got some shots with a telephoto lens.
Things changed when it approached and began to bark however. I backed my kayak further away from shore and even behind a rocky outcrop but it didn’t seem to matter; the wolf would alternate between barking and foraging. Ultimately another wolf appeared (“Jerry” in the video) and I wondered whether it wasn’t about me at all but I just happened to be in between two wolves communicating.
When the same thing happened the following day in the middle of a raging storm however it certainly got me thinking. The wolf was definitely not being aggressive, if anything it appeared more curious and unsure. Almost as if it was trying to provoke a response to better gage what this strange thing was floating around. Probably the best thing I could’ve done other than simply paddling away was to act terrifying to teach the wolf not to approach humans! In the end I decided to act as much like a floating log as possible. Entirely neutral, unthreatening and non-reactive and let the wolf make its choices from there.
In A Word: Empathy
I think the best we can hope for as wildlife photographers is to be treated as just another inhabitant of an animal’s ecosystem. Noticed? Sure. Impacting the animal’s day to day? Surely not. Understanding it’s not about us “working the animal” to get what we want but instead behaving as guests in the animal’s home, cognizant of its needs and always placing them far ahead of our own photographic goals should be what we all strive towards.
