The hippo is not one of my favourite animals. I just want to get that out of the way right at the start.
They spend most of their time submerged up to their snouts in water, and it’s very difficult to get a decent picture of any of them.
The animals that do make it on to my list are the ones are rare and beautiful and have given me the best photographic experiences.
As you’ll discover, this list is heavily weighted towards Africa, but that’s just because I’ve spent so much time over there.
I’ve actually taken pictures in 26 countries on all seven continents, so there are a few contenders from South America and the polar regions that have made the shortlist.
Here we go…
10: Leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx)
The Antarctic is a very costly and difficult place to get to, and it’s very easy to get ‘weathered out’.
I was very fortunate when I went there in 2016 because we were able to make just about all our landings, and the swell never rose above nine metres - which is not as high as it sounds!
The one problem I had when viewing the wildlife is that I spent most of my time watching penguins and Antarctic fur seals, which means there weren’t many true predators.
Predators are generally the animals I love because they offer the excitement of seeing a kill. Sadly, the only real predators in the Southern Ocean are the killer whale (orca) and the leopard seal, but on one Zodiac cruise I was lucky enough to see a leopard seal tearing apart a penguin.
I didn’t quite see it catch its prey, but I did spend the next 25 minutes watching the leopard seal throwing it around like a rag doll until its skin was turned inside out!
It’s always hard to follow a kill when you’re in a Zodiac, but we did manage to get very close at times, and there’s nothing quite like the rush of seeing one animal kill another right in front of you.
I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, but for me it’s the epitome of wildlife photography. The leopard seal is not rare, and it’s certainly not beautiful, but it makes the list because of those 25 minutes I spent in the Zodiac…
9: African bush or African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana)
You might be surprised that elephants don’t make it a bit higher up my list, but there are two factors that work against them: firstly, they’re not predators (see above), and secondly, they don’t have human-enough faces, so it’s hard to anthropomorphise them.
I like to take wildlife close-ups, and that works well with mammals such as lions or leopards because they have a face that reflects their emotions in a similar way to a human face, but the elephant’s face is so dominated by its trunk that that’s impossible.
Having said all that, it’s worth taking pictures of baby elephants, which somehow still manage to be ‘cute’, and an elephant taking a dust bath is a spectacular photo opportunity.
In fact, I have an enormous print of the shot below up on my wall in the kitchen. I took it on a boat trip on the Chobe river.
I saw the elephant making its way along the bank, and as the driver beached our boat, I waited for it to pass in front of us. After a few seconds, it walked straight past us only a few yards away and proceeded to give itself a dust bath right in front of me.
This is one of my favourite shots of all time, and it was even chosen as Photo of the Day on National Geographic, where it earned over 25,000 likes!
8: Polar bear (Ursus maritimus)
Anyway, back to predators. Seven of my top 10 animals are predators, and the polar bear is obviously one of them.
I saw my first polar bear in Spitsbergen (Svalbard) on an Exodus trip with Paul Goldstein. I’ve been on a few trips with Paul, and he always guarantees that you’ll get the best sightings.
In fact, he warned us in his opening speech on board ship that he’d quite happily wake us all up at three in the morning if there was a bear on the horizon. That suited me just fine, and we were lucky enough to have 13 bear sightings on the trip.
The only problem I had was with my lens. I was using a Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM, and the images I was getting were just too soft.
On one particular day, we had a great sighting of a mother bear with two cubs, and they really put on a show for us.
It lasted all of 40 minutes, and some of it was comedy gold. The cubs lagged behind the mother, so the mother barked at them to hurry up, then she lay down and the cubs played with each other.
At one point, it even seemed like one of the cubs was waving at us!
Paul was in his element, and I remember he photographed the mother lying back and lifting her leg in a shot he called ‘Yoga Bear’! He likes his puns, does old Paul.
However, after all that, when I got back to the bar and went through all my pictures, I didn’t have a single one I was happy with. They just weren’t sharp enough. It was gutting.
Everyone else was on cloud nine, but I just couldn’t get over my disappointment. I even ended up having an argument about it with a girl I liked on the staff. She was on a high like everyone else - even though she’d just been watching through binoculars - so she couldn’t understand why I hadn’t appreciated it.
The fact is, though, that I can only enjoy a photographic trip once I’m happy with my pictures, and that’s why I decided then and there to swap my Sigma lens for a Nikon one and get all my lenses calibrated.
Problem solved…!
7: Jaguar (Panthera onca)
The jaguar is the third largest naturally occurring cat in the world after the tiger and the lion, and they have the coldest eyes that I’ve ever seen in the animal kingdom.
They look similar to the leopard (although bigger and heavier), but you can easily tell them apart by the ‘rosettes’ on their flanks. Cheetahs have individual spots, leopards have circles of spots, but jaguars also have one spot in the middle of every circle.
They can be found in large parts of South America, but the best place to go to see them is the Brazilian Pantanal.
I went there on a Naturetrek trip led by Andy Skillen in 2016. Overall, we had 16 sightings and saw seven individual jaguars.
They name their jaguars down there, and they give that privilege to anyone who sees one that’s new to the area and hasn’t yet been catalogued. The ones we saw were called Geoff, Estela, Peter Schmidt, Marley, Ruth and - inevitably - Mick Jaguar!
Andy was a great guide, and we got along very well, which helped, but it was also good to be taking pictures of a different animal.
It was the first time I’d ever been to South America, so jaguars made a change from the never-ending procession of lions, leopards and cheetahs I’d seen in Africa.
We were even lucky enough to see a kill. Marley was a young male jaguar around two years old, and he ended up killing a caiman, which is the South American version of a crocodile or alligator.
The only problem was that he’d grabbed it the wrong way round, from underneath the throat rather than from the back of the neck.
That’s actually the way lions kill their prey, but jaguars do it differently, and Marley somehow ‘knew’ that he’d screwed up.
He could’ve just changed his grip, but he was obviously worried that he’d have to let go of the caiman and therefore risk losing his prey. In the end, it took him 10 whole minutes...!
The next job was to find a place to drag the caiman under a bush to hide it from the other jaguars. A lot of cats do this, but Marley’s job was made a lot harder by the sheer, 10-foot sand cliffs all along the banks of the river.
He dragged the carcase of the caiman up and down the river, desperately searching for a way up, but he couldn’t find one. By this stage, there were about 15 boatloads of photographers all watching the action, and when he eventually scrambled to the top of the cliff, everyone gave him a round of applause!
6: Pangolin (Manidae)
Seeing a pangolin was one of the highlights of my month at Cottar’s in Kenya in 2019.
I was on a game drive with a couple of guests when one of them said he’d seen something. The driver stopped and reversed back a few yards, and then the other guest cried, “Oh, look! It’s a pangolin!”
It was a truly amazing moment. Pangolins are very rare - particularly in that part of Kenya - so we were very lucky to see it, so lucky, in fact, that an announcement was made at dinner that night!
Anyway, when we got out to take pictures, the pangolin unfortunately walked off into the bushes and curled itself into a ball. (They’re like scaly anteaters, so that’s just a defence mechanism.)
Our guide then told us the Masai belief that whoever saw a pangolin would have ‘many cows’ - but only if they built a grass ‘boma’ around it, in other words, a miniature model of a Masai village.
That was going to be hard to do when the pangolin was in the trees, so the guide carefully picked it up (I know!), carried it out and put it down on the grass by our jeep. The two Masai then piled up some grass in a circle around it and opened a little ‘gate’ on one side. Cue lots of jokes about cows…
There are certain moments in life that remain with you forever, and that was one of them for me. Of course, if you don’t know what a pangolin is, then this story won’t mean anything to you.
As I explained to a guest later that evening, it’s like a Chicago Bulls fan telling someone who’s never watched basketball that he’s just seen Michael Jordan. “Michael Who?”
Oh, well…
5: Lion (Panthera leo)
Lions can look magnificent in the right light - particularly the full-grown males with their extraordinary manes - but they can be quite tricky to photograph.
The problem is that they sleep for up to 20 hours a day, so nine times out of ten you’ll see then when they’re lying down.
The other problem is that they generally hunt at night, which means it’s nigh on impossible to get the ‘money shot’.
When I spent a few months in Africa in 2019, I was fortunate in two respects.
First of all, a coalition of five nomadic males had recently taken over the Kuka (or Black Hills) pride, driving out the existing males and killing all the cubs they could find.
That meant that all the lionesses came on heat, so I was treated to an orgy of mating. In total, I saw lions mating 29 times on that trip, and that gave me 29 opportunities to capture the moment.
When lions mate, it’s over in just a few seconds, and it isn’t really very interesting. The lioness simply walks away, lies down somewhere and ‘presents herself’ to the male, who then mates with her for around 10 seconds.
When the male withdraws, though, there’s usually a lot of snarling and growling, and that’s what you have to try and capture.
To do that, it’s essential that you’re either in front of the lions or to one side, but it all happens so fast that I needed to coordinate with the driver so that he could get me in the right position as fast as possible.
Fortunately, all our efforts paid off with this shot.
“No means no!”
The second piece of luck came when I went on a game drive from Klein’s Camp into the Serengeti National Park. Our driver stopped at one point to scan for wildlife with his binoculars, and after a couple of minutes he suddenly turned round to me.
“There’s a lion fighting with a buffalo!”
I told him to take us there, and he tore off into the Serengeti, bouncing around like crazy as we headed towards the action - ignoring the park rules by going off-road!
He was driving so fast that my bean bag flew up into the air. Thank goodness I was holding on to my cameras, or I might’ve lost them both!
I couldn’t see what was going on, but our driver kept up a running commentary until we eventually got close. He asked me where he should position the car, but it didn’t matter as we could plainly see a lion grabbing the haunches of a buffalo only 10 yards away!
My heart racing, I immediately started taking pictures. I took so many, in fact, that my camera couldn’t cope and started to slow down!
Fortunately, I managed to get a few shots of the takedown, and this was my favourite. Three male lions taking down a Cape buffalo: now that’s a genuine once-in-a-lifetime experience…!
Three’s A Crowd
4: Leopard (Panthera pardus)
Ask any guests on safari what their favourite animal is, and they’ll almost certainly say the leopard.
It’s certainly a beautiful creature, with a spotted coat that raises it above the run-of-the-mill appearance of lions and none of the coldness that you find in the face of the cheetah or the jaguar.
It’s also rare. They say there are as many as 700,000 leopards in Africa and only 20,000 lions, but leopards are shy and skittish, and they like to climb trees, so it’s much harder to see them.
It’s certainly more exciting to see a leopard than a lion (unless the lions are mating or taking down a buffalo!), but there are couple of things that stop it from taking first place in my list.
The first is that you very rarely see a leopard kill. The leopard is an ambush predator, which means you don’t generally see much of a ‘chase’, and that in turn means that it’s much less spectacular and exciting.
The only leopard kill I ever saw took place in such long grass that I didn’t even see the actual takedown, just the ‘before’ and ‘after’.
That’s frustrating, and what’s also frustrating is that you hardly ever see the leopard’s cubs. I’ve been on more than 250 game drives, but I’ve never seen a baby leopard!
Unbelievable, and that’s a major reason why the leopard only makes it to third place. Close, but no cigar…
“Is this close enough…?”
3: Black and white rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis and Ceratotherium simum)
Like the pangolin, the rhino gets on this list because of its rarity. It’s not the most attractive of animals, and it’s very ‘grumpy’ - which is just another word for dangerous.
The head guide at Cottar’s once told me a story about two elderly ladies who were desperate to see a rhino.
Ken told them he’d do his best on their game drive, but they had the bad luck to see one that was in a very bad mood indeed. He happened to stop at a T-junction, only to find a rhino staring at him from only a dozen yards away.
The guests started shrieking with excitement, but that just provoked the rhino, which charged the jeep and managed to stick its horn right through the driver’s door before Ken had a chance to get away!
All he could do was throw his body towards the passenger seat while the rhino shook the jeep with his horn, which then got stuck in the door!
In the end, it got so angry and frustrated that it actually ripped the door off before trotting away. When Ken reported the incident to the Kenya Wildlife Service, he had to tell them to ‘look out for a rhino with a car door on its head’!
When I went to Cottar’s, I was desperate to see a rhino.
I’d seen them before, of course, but I’d spent three months in areas of the Serengeti in Tanzania where they were very rare, so I was champing at the bit.
It was getting very frustrating, but I did eventually get one sighting. It was only very brief, but it at least broke my duck.
I was on a game drive, and we were driving along a track through some bushes when, up ahead on the plain, we could suddenly see a black rhino.
Unfortunately, the black rhino is very ‘shy’ - more so even than the white rhino - so it started galloping off as soon as it saw us.
We tried to keep pace with it, but the ground eventually became too rocky, and I only managed a couple of blurred shots.
Fortunately, I have a better one that I took in Kenya on my very first safari.
Madonna and Child
2: Brown or grizzly bear (Ursus arctos)
When I left university, I stayed with a friend of mine in north London. Mark wasn’t home, so I ended up making polite conversation with his mother.
“Been anywhere nice on holiday recently,” I asked.
“Well, I’ve actually just come back from watching the bears catching salmon in Alaska…”
That’ll teach me!
For the next 25 years, I dreamed of doing the same thing myself.
The salmon run takes place every year in late July, and the best place to see the action is at Brooks Falls, which is the first waterfall the salmon hit as they make their way up the Brooks River.
A million salmon make the journey every year, and the bears are always there to meet them! The whole thing was made famous by ‘Catch of the Day’, Thomas D Mangelsen’s iconic 1988 photo of a bear on the falls with a salmon in mid-air between its jaws.
To me, going to Brooks Falls is one of the ultimate wildlife photography experiences, but it’s very expensive, and Brooks Lodge gets booked up a year in advance, so it was only in 2015 that I finally managed to make it there.
The journey took 37 hours door-to-door, and I had to spend a week taking a floatplane to work every morning just to end up queuing in the rain for a lot of the time, but it was all worth it in the end.
It’s not often that I go on a photographic trip with a particular shot in mind and actually succeed in getting that shot, but my Alaskan expedition was one of those.
I only managed to get two shots of the bear with its mouth open grabbing at a fish in mid-air, but this one still rates as probably the best shot I’ve ever taken. And for that reason alone, I love bears!
Bear Gills
1: Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)
And the winner is…the cheetah!
Not for its beauty - I think the leopard has a far more attractive face and coat - and not for its rarity, but for its ability to deliver one of the most exciting experiences in wildlife photography: the cheetah kill.
I’d been on five safaris before I went to Kicheche Bush Camp with Paul Goldstein (again), and I’d never seen a kill. I was getting very frustrated - especially when people airily told me all about the kills they’d just seen or how easy it had been for them!
Not helping.
However, that week with Paul, I ended up seeing FIVE cheetah kills! It was one of the best weeks of my life.
Not only was Paul a part-owner of Kicheche, but he also took an approach to game drives that was very different from what I was used to.
Normally, I’d drive around with the rest of the group, stop if we saw any animals, take a few pictures and then drive off again. Rinse and repeat.
Paul’s method was very different in that it prioritised time spent with the cats.
In the morning, that meant trying to find a leopard in the trees and then spending as long as possible with it.
During the day, that meant trying to find a cheetah and staying with it until it eventually hunted.
Now, that did often mean a lot of time spent watching the cheetah sleep or yawn or scratch itself, but at least when it did start to chase a Thomson’s gazelle, we were right there in the middle of the action.
And I’m happy to give Paul most of the credit for that. Not only did he know where to position the jeeps, but he also paid a spotter out of his own pocket to find the cats for us.
And that’s one of the reasons why I keep going on trips with him…
The first kill I saw was the most memorable.
We’d found a cheetah lying near to a lone Thomson’s gazelle, and Paul warned us what was about to happen. In the final few seconds, I checked my settings and prayed - PRAYED!!! - that I wouldn’t screw up the shot. It was nerve-racking stuff.
In the end, the cheetah exploded into action, chasing the gazelle at speeds of up to 60mph until it finally completed the kill. The whole thing took only a few seconds, and I was in such a panic that I only managed one half-decent shot of the action. But that was enough…!
