The Story of One Photograph - by Elizabeth Kay

Hunted cover by Elizabeth Kay

I often use photographs I have taken myself for artwork in books because there are no copyright issues, and I do watercolours of them. For my reluctant reader, Hunted, I used my own illustrations for the cover and to head every chapter. I have a strong interest in wildlife, and most of my holidays have been booked with this in mind. But what a difference the right camera makes.

A week before I was due to go to the Pantanal, in Brazil, I went into our local camera shop to try and find out why I was not getting the quality I wanted with my Panasonic. I am not techie with cameras, and had always bought ones with good automatic settings. The shop owner, who knew me well, handed me a Nikon Coolpix P900 and said, “Go for a walk up the High street with this, take a few photos, and tell me what you think.” I returned with one word: Sold. It has an 83X zoom, and is very easy to use. That was seven years ago, and I have never wanted another camera. It is still on sale at Amazon at the same price I paid seven years ago, and it takes good videos as well. The shop owner used my photograph of a peregrine falcon eyeing up a fly at the top of a local water tower as an advert for the camera. That was taken at full zoom, as it was a long way away.

A peregrine eyes up a fly

As I’d spent twenty years trying to see a leopard, without success, I told everyone I was going to Brazil to not see jaguars. But on the very first morning we had the most amazing sighting, from a boat, and the camera lived up to expectations. Since then I have seen leopards – and far more elusive creatures, such as the Iberian lynx, the mountain gorilla, the proboscis monkey and the hoatzin. And the camera has been with me every step of the way. In September 2023 I went back to Madagascar, to try and see everything I’d missed first time round in 2011 because I was so ill. And yes, I was ill again, but managed to see the animals I wanted. The most elusive of all is the fossa, Madagascar’s own predator, as different from every other predator as the lemur is different from every other primate. That’s what years of isolation does for you, as Madagascar split from the Indian sub-continent 90 million years ago. There has been a lot of argument about the ancestry of the fossa; civets, mongooses and cats have been suggested, but no one really knows. It’s the size of a small cougar, which it most closely resembles, although its tail is extremely long enabling it to hunt very successfully in trees. It feeds principally on lemurs, is unashamedly aggressive, and not in the slightest bit intimidated by human beings.

An unintimidated fossa

I didn’t expect to see one. I went to the west of Madagascar, and stayed in the Kirindy Forest Lodge, a rustic camp in the middle of the Kirindy Forest Reserve, sleeping in one of the wooden chalets which are dotted around the site. And as usual, I went out early with my camera to do some birdwatching and saw the hindquarters of something with a very long tail disappearing behind the kitchen. There was only one thing it could be – a fossa. I summoned husband Bob, and we watched it from a  safe distance. We had a wonderful young guide, Theo, who overheard us and came rushing over. That one was a female, but that afternoon a male popped up, once again scavenging behind the kitchen, and I managed to get a lucky photo of him snarling. Theo, no mean photographer himself, was impressed, and asked me to email him the picture. Since then, that photo has had several different incarnations. I was given it as a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. It’s featuring in this blog post. But most impressive of all is Theo’s new safari jacket, to be worn when guiding people round the Kirindy Forest. Wow. I am still in touch with him, and he sends me amazing photographs of snakes which are a bit too graphic to post here!

Theo, my guide

Sometimes a photograph can act as inspiration for a character. In Mongolia, we met an eleven-year-old girl who was herding goats on horseback, and was determined to prove herself as accomplished as the men. She was a magnificent rider, and I used her in my book Lost in the Desert. Her name was Atontos – which means the last baby rabbit. I’m off to Svalbard in June, in the vain hope of seeing polar bear. I know several people who’ve gone there and not seen any, so I’m not getting my hopes up. I didn’t see one in Greenland, although they do pop up occasionally. Apparently a previous trip encountered two of them by the side of the road! But I will have my trusty camera with me, so fingers crossed…

Snarling fossa jigsaw