Professor Peter Dwyer often walked into class barefoot, his wild grey hair and beard echoing the jungles of his Papua New Guinea field sites. He not so much taught as shared, and his enthusiasm and philosophy helped me see the natural world through a prism far broader than any textbook.
Sir David Attenborough’s influence on my life path probably began early in life. As a jaw-dropped seven year old I was enchanted by his epic TV series Life on Earth, and the power of visual storytelling has stuck with me ever since.
After completing my science degree at UQ, I headed off to Africa on safari with some classmates. We camped out under Serengeti stars with the thunderous roar of lions nearby and bribed our way into Zaire to meet mountain gorillas face-to-face, an encounter that laid the seed of my obsession to study big-brained social animals. It was with Professor Dwyer’s encouragement I returned to St. Lucia to begin an Honours degree. After the adrenalin and awe of African wildlife, satin bowerbirds felt like a comedown, but I quickly settled into a meditative groove of observational research. A UQ Toyota 4x4 became my office and bedroom as I camped out in the Bunya Mountains feeding my blood to ticks and waiting for the curious indigo birds to drop down to their bowers with fresh blue feathers and bottle-top lids stolen from their neighbours.
But the African itch remained strong and I later headed to Liverpool, UK to begin a PhD on the behavioural ecology of primates. For the next three years my home was a mud hut in the remote Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia where I conducted a long term field study on a large troop of golden-maned, lion-fanged gelada baboons. The locals knew me as ‘Monkey Man’, and naturally thought I was crazy to spend long days in the company of a species they considered vermin and were petitioning the government to kill. My early studies were interrupted when I contracted a blood-worm parasite that lodged in my brain and started causing epileptic seizures. For six months I had no idea about the fits. The locals were positive I was exorcising monkey demons and kindly spared me further embarrassment by saying nothing. All I had was the groggy feeling of waking up and wondering where all the monkeys had gone.
Parasites successfully treated, my research permit was only renewed when I agreed, as the ‘world gelada expert’, to help eradicate my own study animals. As I bluffed my way through the final plans to massacre my monkeys, a border war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea and the bullets were tragically deployed on humans instead.
My field research went on through the dark years of the war with sporadic shoot-outs at the field site, but yielded frustratingly little that could help save the gelada. A change of fortune and first hint of career change came when I was able to show a few minutes of badly-filmed monkey footage on Ethiopian television and explained, in broken Amharic, that gelada were unique to Ethiopia and something to be proud of. The response was extraordinary and I realised I had done more for gelada in three minutes of film than I had in three years of clipboard and field notes. For the gelada it was a stay of execution, for me the power of media outreach to conserve endangered wildlife was a revelation.
Sir David Attenborough visited my field site for his series Life of Mammals and as his scientific consultant I drifted from academia into media.Video cameras were fast replacing my clipboards and I was given the chance to head further afield, filming snow leopards on the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and becoming known in the Caves episode of Planet Earth as ‘the guy covered in bat poop’.
After three years in New York working for the National Geographic Society I’m now full time with the BBC Natural History Unit. Although I miss the intellectual stimulation of the science community, documentary filmmaking allows me to interact with wildlife biologists all over the world. I never lose sight of how privileged we are as journalists to dip into stories unearthed by the blood, sweat and tears (and parasites) of field biology.
A few years ago I leapt at the chance to push further out of my comfort zone by joining the BBC series Frozen Planet. An incredible opportunity to see and film areas of the world most humans never get to. Despite my tropical blood you won’t hear me complain about man-hauling camera equipment through -40C blizzards in order to scuba dive under the sea ice with emperor penguins and leopard seals. It’s also an honour to still be working with Sir David two decades after I first watched him on television. He’s in fine form for his 83 years, delivering powerful narration for our series on the effects of climate change, in a polar region that might change dramatically by the time our grandchildren get to see it.
After four months on the frozen white continent I recently enjoyed a long overdue Queensland thaw out. The colours, sounds and smells of tropical life were overwhelming. I feasted on mangos and visited the grounds at St. Lucia for the first time in years, soaking in the sandstone grandeur of the Great Court with a sentimentality impossible when I was 19. I wandered around like an excited tourist snapping photos and gasping at the colours of rainbow lorikeets. All the while getting quizzical looks from biology students who were sprawled on the grass and, quite rightfully, taking it all for granted.
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