Adventures in Photographing England's Urban Wildlife | Nat Geo Live

I'm always trying to look for flagship species, talismans to represent whole ecosystems. If you wanna photograph the Arctic, you photograph polar bears. If you wanna photograph Africa, you photograph lions. Well, you can have a wildlife experience in a city, in the urban jungle that is just as wild, just as crazy as anywhere else. (applause)

So my job is basically to dress up like this. I guess some of you are sitting there wondering why on earth National Geographic has got some young whippersnapper who can barely grow facial hair to come give you a talk. And that is a perfectly valid question. The state of my facial hair is, quite frankly, embarrassing. So I guess I'll start from the beginning to kind of set things into context.

This is me when I was two, with my older brother Tom, and as you can see, I wasn't always interested in wildlife. Tom is holding an alligator in his hand, and I wasn't that fussed. My mum used to make me and my three brothers wear matching outfits on days out. The outfits didn't get much better. (audience laughs)

Ten years after this picture was taken, I was still up to no good; the only difference was, now I had a camera in my hand. And everyone at high school thought I was a total freak because, in any moment of spare time, I'd run down away from class or sports practice or whatever to jump in the little river that ran past my school and take pictures of the friendly swans or the not so friendly pike. Now they're awesome animals, and this whole time, I was teaching myself by trial and error how to get close to these animals.

Once I thought I'd mastered getting close to one animal, I'd apply that to a new one. I was just totally obsessed. Now I got my first break when I was 17. I was selected to be part of this project, the 2020 Vision project. Now, put simply, this project brought together the UK's top 20 wildlife photographers and 20 young photographers. I was lucky enough to get selected as one of those young guys, and our job was basically to go around the UK and prove that British wildlife is not (bleep). That was our job.

Now, I thought I'd drawn the short straw because while some of my colleagues were getting to dive with seals off the coast of Devon, this is Alex Mustard. He was actually my mentor on the project. While Andy Rouse was getting to sneak up on wild boar in the Forest of Dean, Pete Cairns was getting to photograph ospreys diving into the lochs of the Highlands of Scotland, while I was tasked with urban wildlife. So I thought I was stuck with pigeons and rats.

But I was wrong. I found out that you can have a wildlife experience in a city in the urban jungle that is just as wild, just as crazy as anywhere else. And I found that the closer you look, the more you see. So everything down to the small stuff; this is a great tit. You can see that green thing in its mouth, that's a caterpillar. Well, in that little hole it has three chicks inside a nest. You know, the closer you look, the more you find.

And, you know, I'm always trying to look for flagship species, talismans to represent whole ecosystems. If you wanna photograph the Arctic, well, you photograph polar bears. If you wanna photograph Africa, to represent Africa, you photograph lions. Well, in the city, you just have to look a little closer. If you get close enough to the grey squirrel, you find out it's got buckets full of charisma.

But it's not just the small stuff; it's the big stuff too. Now these are two rutting red deer, similar to your North American elk, and every year in October during the annual rut, they basically fight each other for breeding rights. It's this crazy, wild thing. And you might think that red deer, you only see them fight in the wildest corner of the UK or in the wilder parts of Europe. Well, these two are rutting three miles from the very center of London. It's pretty crazy.

So where are we? Okay, we're gonna zoom in. This is London. Now I was in Richmond Park for that rutting episode down at the bottom left. And just like I would with a wilder place, I built up a map of all the different places that I could find and photograph wildlife, and there's just wildlife absolutely everywhere. It was really, really cool.

Now I'm particularly grateful for this project because I discovered what is now my favorite animal: the peregrine falcon. Now, there's a few reasons why peregrines are my favorite animal. Firstly, they're the fastest animal on earth. That's pretty cool. They can dive at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour. But that's nothing. What really gets me is that they are a pigeon killing machine. (audience laughs) It's just epic to watch.

So here you can see an adult female with a pigeon that is just nailed, and the browner bird is a juvenile. They start off brown and then get the adult plumage after a year or so. Peregrines are a real good news story in the UK, because when I was born in 1993, seeing a peregrine was a really rare event. A fleeting glimpse at an estuary in Devon or something was about as good as it got. Whereas now they're doing really well all across the UK, particularly in cities.

Now the reason they do well in cities is because, firstly, there's lots of food, as you all know. Cities are packed full of pigeons. So this is a female having a stretch of her tail feathers before she goes off and smashes another pigeon. Just limbering up. Now the other reason that they do really well in cities is because the ledges and knobbles, particularly of the older buildings, are very similar to their natural cliff homes. So these two chicks are in a nest 25 stories up, a really ominous looking concrete tower block. Again, right in the center of London. These aren't migrants; they're not temporary visitors; they are resident. They are urban birds.

Now Cannon saw some of the pictures that I was taking on this project and very kindly lent me some gear, so I was getting to play with some big boys' toys. Now it's amazing the amount of trouble you can get in walking around a city with a lens like that. I had one episode that wasn't my finest moment. I had this position, this location where I'd stand on a main road on the pavement, on the sidewalk, to photograph this nest, peregrine nest.

And miles in the distance, in the background, was this huge tower block. It was an apartment block. And one day, this woman in a car came screeching up, stopped next to me, got out of her car, marched over to me, and said, "Can you please stop taking pictures of me getting changed through my bedroom window?" (audience laughs) Now how do you react to that? Back then, I wasn't very good at dealing with these awkward situations. So I said, "Don't flatter yourself." (audience laughs) Just a teenage kid trying to photograph some peregrines, leave me alone. As you can imagine, that didn't go down particularly well.

So I followed one particular pair of peregrines that live in Bristol, which is a city in the southwest of England. And I'm not normally one to name wild animals but when something like this happens, it's quite difficult not to. (audience laughs) So this is the chick on the right; the browner bird, he's called Sam. And this is the female on the left, and you can see the female is about a third bigger than Sam. And that's not because she's an adult and he's a chick; it's because she's a female and he's a male. Female peregrines are about a third bigger than the males.

Now things were looking really good for Sam because his parents were awesome hunters. They were catching pigeons like there's no tomorrow. They'd bring 'em in, he'd then wolf it down and screech at them to go and get another one. He was also exercising and stretching his wings, ready for his maiden voyage, his first flight. His voyage into the sky.

Now this is where things went a little bit pear-shaped. This is where the fairy tale ends, I'm afraid. So Sam took his first flight; he jumped off that building, and some gulls saw him, and they mobbed him down into the river which ran below the nest building. Now this was a city. If it had been in a normal river in a wilder place, peregrines are actually quite good swimmers. They can kinda flap their wings and get them over to the edge. But this was a city, so either bank was a six-foot high vertical concrete bank, so there was absolutely no way he was gonna get out of the river. He'd also, being a wild animal, chosen the one day in an entire month when I wasn't standing on the main road, on the bridge there to see him.

Fortunately though, spending all that time on the bridge had attracted quite a lot of attention, particularly from two builders who worked on a building site next door to the nest building, and they saw Sam get mobbed down into the river, and they grabbed an umbrella and they ran over to help. And they climbed down on the ladder on the concrete river bank and leaned off the ladder into the river and tried to scoop Sam up out the river with an umbrella. Unfortunately, Sam was a little bit too far away.

So one of the builders had the idea of taking bricks. You know, it's a building site; lots of bricks. And they threw them over the top of Sam's head to create a wave, a splash that would wash Sam back towards him. Now when they told me this story afterwards, I was like, "Guys, I don't know if this is genius or crazy." "You threw bricks over a protected species." But it worked, they got Sam out. Yeah, but no. By the time they got Sam out, it wasn't looking good; he was pretty much dead, he wasn't moving, and the Bristol peregrine expert Ed Drewitt was called to the scene, and he decided the best plan of action would be to dry Sam off, take him home, and see what happened. Both Ed and I thought Sam wasn't gonna survive the night.

But Sam is no ordinary peregrine. Oh no. Oh no. In the morning, he was fighting fit. And we decided to release him. Now on that month I had on that road had also attracted attention from a couple of lawyers. They had an office building really close to the nest building, and they said that we could release Sam on their roof. So walking into an office, lawyer's office, full of suited and booted lawyers with a bird of prey in a towel in your hands does get you some funny looks, but it had to be done.

We got Sam up onto the roof, and you can see that blue band and the metal silver band on his ankle. We put them on so that we can track his movements. What scientists are finding is that these urban peregrines aren't tied to the city. The chicks disperse all over the place. And vice versa. If a chick is born in a wilder place like on the coast, they can come back into the city. Shows how adaptable they are. It's not genetic; it's a behavioral thing, which is really cool they can adapt.

Three minutes later, he took flight. And bearing in mind how his first flight had gone, our hearts were in our mouths. What was gonna happen? But he made it back to the nest building, woo hoo. And just two days after this near drowning experience, I saw him flying high alongside here the adult female who again has got a pigeon. Now this is how the adults teach the youngsters to hunt. They'll kill or disable a pigeon and then let the youngster come up from underneath, take it off of him so they can practice flying with weight.

Only problem was, Sam was just rubbish at flying with pigeons. It's like, come on, dude, up your game. Now just after I took this picture, Sam dropped the pigeon, of course he did. He's an idiot. (audience laughs)

Now the problem with dropping a pigeon in a city is that it tends to land on someone's head. And of all the places he could have dropped that pigeon, he dropped it in between two tables in the outside restaurant of the Marriott Hotel. So you can imagine the look on these people's faces when they're halfway through their main course, and this blood-covered, beheaded pigeon lands next to them.

This was a really cool wildlife experience, but the thing that I love most about it was how it brought together so many people from so many different backgrounds. We had the builders, the suited and booted lawyers, and all these passersby that would walk on this main road that showed such a keen interest in these peregrines. Perhaps most promising was that parents, who they themselves admitted to having little interest in nature, were bringing their kids down to watch Sam and his mom and dad in action, and I think that's the power of urban wildlife.

Most of us will never see a polar bear, will never see a lion. Modern-day society is so disconnected from nature. Urban wildlife provides a bit of a bridge to that gap, so please get out and see what wildlife you can find if you live in a city.