Chris Breen's Approach

Summed up here by Simon Barnes of the Times

If you watch wildlife on television, you see one wonder followed by another. On wildlife television the currency is the extraordinary, for the ordinary is untelevisable. This is not a complaint: it is, as those of us who like to look at wildlife would say, an observation.

I have been musing, as you do at this time of year, about the wildlife high spots of my own year: the jaguar I saw in Belize with the World Land Trust, the families of elephants in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, the flamingos at the Coto de Donana in Spain, the dolphins of Cardigan Bay, the foghorn bittern and the jugjugging nightingale in the dawn at Minsmere in Suffolk. But although these things certainly were the highlights, they weren't entirely the best bits: or for that matter, the reason why I went looking in the first place.

So much of the enjoyment of wildlife is in the looking rather than the finding, the hearing rather than the seeing: that wonderful feeling that they're out there and so are you. That is often more than enough. To be where lions are is as good as seeing lions; to see a massive unclawed footprint or to hear that savage booming belch of a real lion roar - so different from the embarrassed snarl you hear before an MGM film - is far more wonderful than an hour-long documentary on co-operative hunting with never-seen-before footage of bone-crunching and quarrels. The high spots of all good wildlife experiences are absolutely everything. It's like a balloon: it has no real meaning without totality.

Simon Barnes - by kind permission of The Times.