News, West Midlands
A photographer has spent a decade carrying out “garden safaris” in order to capture the diversity and beauty of Britain’s back garden wildlife.
The images, including battling birds and squabbling squirrels, showed just what could be found “under our noses”, said Andrew Fusek Peters.
“I wanted to celebrate the everyday stories and reveal the beauty of our birds, mammals and insects that live alongside us,” the Shropshire photographer added.
Hundreds of his images feature in a new book.
The majority of the photographs were taken in his “modest” garden, and local village of Lydbury.
“You don’t have to travel to nature reserves or mountains,” he said.
“I sometimes get snobbery from the big photographers who go to Africa and do the lions and tigers, or Greenland for the Polar bears,” he explained.
“And they think I’m somehow inferior because I do blue tits in the garden.”
But, he added, capturing rare images such as a hare feeding her leveret on someone’s back lawn was “just amazing”.
“At the time I took it, that had been photographed maybe less than 10 times in the world,” he said.
“It was sheer gold on my memory card.”
He had also travelled to other parts of the UK in order to capture other “extraordinary moments,” including a fox family playing in Clapham, south London, and a pair of red squirrels on the Isle of Wight.
Mr Fusek Peters started concentrating on his own garden wildlife after a diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2018, perfecting a technique to “make time stop” to get shots of birds and butterflies taking off and in mid flight.
Using his kitchen as a hide, he has also taken rare pictures of birds – showing the effect of diffraction on their wings, giving a rainbow effect.
“This winter I got a woodpecker and a nuthatch” he said, adding the images were “extraordinary”.
“Everyone’s going to accuse me of using AI, but it’s not – it’s actually scientific.”
He added he was “one of the few in the world” to have taken such images.
“I just seem to have this blessed luck when I concentrate on what’s out of the kitchen window.”
The book was also a “rallying cry” to transform “over-manicured spaces into more wildlife friendly havens,” he said.
“These places are important, I think they really are,” he added.
“As we know with climate change and with what’s happening with habitat a lot of species are really suffering, and that includes our garden visitors so it’s important to showcase them.
“They are just as important as all the wonderful creatures of the jungle and the desert,” he added.
Springwatch presenter Iolo Williams said of the book, Garden Safari: “Andrew makes the ordinary look extraordinary – stunning photography which helps to emphasise the importance of our gardens for wildlife.”
“I think this is the best compliment I’ve ever had,” the photographer commented.
Garden Safari is published by Graffeg Books
