ABOUT ME
As a boy, I was always out in the fields, streams and ponds collecting ‘samples’ and bringing them home to scrutinise under the plastic microscope given to me one year by Father Christmas. I think my mother got fed up with the mess I created with my ‘samples’, and my inability to attend mealtimes with anything vaguely approaching punctuality, when off splashing around in local ponds. Persuading me to apply for a job in a fisheries research laboratory, twenty miles away, was probably a good plan on her part and greatly reduced the mud on her carpets. From then on, I spent most of my life as an environmental scientist investigating the impact of all manner of substances on the marine and freshwater environments.
Another of my passions was photography, my father was a keen photographer when I was young and I remember spending ages in his 'darkroom' developing film photos that he had taken. I never wanted to become a professional photographer but I was rarely out without a camera in my backpack. As I got older, my interest in photography became a passion which has now become focussed on the nature I see around me in Corfu every day.
This website is dedicated to my two grandchildren, Sophie and Theo, and began as a portfolio of some of my best photography from around the world and included a section about Corfu butterflies. I had become awed by the amazing variety of butterflies that I saw while doing photo sessions in Corfu, and began taking photos of every species that I discovered. Eventually, I had so many species recorded that I decided to create a butterfly book so that visitors to the island could also enjoy and identify them. The book, 'The Butterflies of North Corfu' has been one of my proudest creations and I'm grateful to those who helped and supported it.
Along with butterflies, I became more and more interested in ALL the nature in Corfu and was soon photographing everything I saw. Insects, lizards, fungi, flowers etc. all fell victim to my Nikon cameras and my nature photography databases got bigger and bigger until I had accumulated over 20,000 photos of Corfu species. I decided that the website should reflect my interest in nature and not just be a photographers website and, over a period of many months, I completely restructured the website and created the complex databases underlying the wildlife pages now on here. All the landscape and other photos were hidden from the main website (see HERE if you're interested) and the completely new databases were populated with over 4,000 photos of 900 separate species. The result is the website as it is now, I have tried to make it as user-friendly as possible and have allowed users to add their own photo records for species not included in my original databases. This is the start of what I hope will become a valuable resource for nature enthusiasts in Corfu.
Please visit my Arillas Area Wildlife Facebook group to see more of my day-to-day wildlife photography and also my photos on Instagram .
If you have any questions or comments about the website and its underlying database, please use the CONTACT page.