Call of the wild After two decades of wildlife adventures all over the world, award-winning cinema-tographer Colin Stafford-Johnson is now settled in Mayo The Interview Áine Ryan HE talks of tigers like the rest of us refer to our pet cats. Their roar is a mere miaow for him. Hardly surprising. For almost two decades he has tracked them for days on end. Watched their every move. Been privy to their most intimate moments. Recorded their domestic spats. Sunbathed and snoozed while they slept in the shadow of his jeep.
Don’t take it at face-value when Emmy award-winning cinematographer, Colin Johnson-Stafford blithely says that tigers are his ‘bread-and-butter’. Just ask him about Machhli or Broken Tail.
The Roost pub on Main Street, Maynooth may be thousands of miles from Rajasthan’s, Ranthambhore National Park. But it was in the popular student bar, in the Spring of 1984 – between pint-drinking competitions and pool games – that Dubliner, Colin Stafford-Johnson made a decision that would influence his life.
“One day while I was watching a David Attenborough film in The Roost – instead of going to my Science lectures – I suddenly thought ‘What the hell am I doing here?’. So I took the concept of ‘early retirement’ to an extreme and took the next seven years off to travel,” recalls Stafford-Johnson.
His lecturers, student friends and family, didn’t see his heels for dust.
“I had always been fascinated by Australian wildlife and decided to go off to Papua New Guinea to see the Birds of Paradise. Ironically, the reason was that I’d seen this plate of one in a really old encyclopaedia. Fifteen years later I heard David Attenborough recount that he had gone in search of the beautiful birds because of the same drawing. Ironically, the drawing turned out to be quite inaccurate.”
Colin Stafford-Johnson got out of a sick bed (some kind of virus) to carry out our interview. He should have been in Dublin putting the final touches to the RTÉ series he will present from April 1 next. Instead, his rather croaky voice slowly softens with the medicinal aid of a second coffee in the civilised surroundings of Westport’s Wyatt Hotel.
“Gillian [Marsh, of Crossmolina-based GMTV Productions and Vets on Call fame] just ‘phoned me up one day. We discussed the possibility of a wildlife series and agreed there was a need for such programming for Irish television. There are lots of people doing great work with wildlife around the country.”
He cites Westport ornithologist, Derek McLoughlin, and his ongoing study of Twites, as well as Louisburgh farmer and corncrake enthusiast, John Tiernan, as typical examples. Both men appear in the first series of ‘Living the Wildlife’ during which Colin takes to the roads across Ireland in his camper van and discovers all sorts of wildlife – including the human species!
“We started filming the first series last summer, five days before the rain began. It was May 1. I always wanted a camper van and we had loads of plans for the following two months. The bad weather meant we couldn’t have been more stuffed, scuppered. We didn’t get near breeding birds, and animals like foxes and badgers simply don’t come out to play when there’s incessant rain. Like us, they like to party when we’re lighting up our barbecues.
“Despite the bad conditions, we managed to film a colourful and eclectic series, from following an urban fox family to taking my camera underwater to film sea lampreys which are really bizarre-looking prehistoric vampire fish.”
The fact that RTÉ was so impressed by the programmes that it has already commissioned a second series speaks for itself. Moreover, the fact that it is almost 45 years since Éamon de Buitléar and Gerrit Van Gelderen first broadcast the signature and popular series ‘Amuigh Faoin Spéir’ affirms the rationale of a return to a traditional-stye wildlife series.
Back in the mid- to late-1970s, Colin Stafford-Johnson’s late father, Barney Johnson presented RTÉ’s first gardening programme. Double-barreled names still had a certain connotation 30 years ago, so Barney was urged by RTÉ to dispense with the ‘Stafford’ adjunct.
Colin was reared in the leafy south-Dublin suburb of Cabinteely where his parents, Barney and Dorothy, ran a garden centre. They also held a strong appreciation for and love of the natural world which meant their son’s wildlife reveries and passions were always indulged and encouraged.
“Growing up in those days you could fish for trout at the back of the house, there were barn owls in the shed and newts in the marsh. Me and my brothers would be on adventures from dawn until dusk. In springtime you would be out to find birds nesting, and then recording them. We always got up for the dawn chorus.”
Then, when Colin was aged about nine, his parents bought a cottage in Wicklow and, he vividly recalls, when you opened the side-door, there was paradise, the Devil’s Glen. “It was the Amazon as far as I was concerned. It was an endless place of adventure.”
While the Irish ‘Huckleberry Finn’ led an idyllic lifestyle in the suburban jungle of Dublin and the hilly crevices and crannies of the Garden County, his fertile imagination was further stimulated by a gift from his grandfather.
“I used to read a lot on the wildlife of the world as well and my grandfather bought me a subscription for a magazine called World of Wildlife. I’m sure all the copies are still in a dusty attic somewhere.”
When Stafford-Johnson finally returned from his world travels in 1991, he studied Biological Imaging in the University of Darby. “Essentially it trained me to be a wildlife producer but then I got a job with a wildlife cameraman in Wales. My big break was when somebody ‘phoned me up and asked would I like to go to India filming for a year. Back then I could easily spend six months in the bush but that was before I had children.”
These days the intrepid traveller is in the process of moving to Mayo. Two of his children, Sylvie (8) and Annabelle (6), are already happily ensconced in Carrowholly National School, near Westport. “It’s just the kind of school I’ve been always looking for. And the baby, Finian, is eight months old and he’s just the best little boy.”
Stafford-Johnson confides that – all going well – Mayo will be his permanent home. Of course, it isn’t the first time he settled near the Atlantic shores of the western county.
“I first came to County Mayo in 1989 and later bought a little cottage for €10,000 in Ballycastle, near the Céide Fields. I’d been travelling around the world a lot and really loved the idea of having a base in Ireland. So anytime I came back to Ireland – for some down time – I would come to north Mayo for some fishing and walking.”
Almost two decades later and Stafford-Johnson is looking for a new retreat near Westport. He is also awaiting a phone call to go to India. Just for a month. Then filming starts back here for the second series of Living the Wildlife. (Fingers’ crossed about the weather.)
“The first tiger cub I met, it was in 2000, we called him Broken Tail. He was killed by a train a couple of hundred miles from where he was born in Ranthambhore National Park. I am going to investigate what happened to him, try to reconstruct his life, with Crossing The Line films, they’re an Irish company.”
He has already made several films for the BBC about Machhli, Broken Tail’s mother, and her daily travails in the often treacherous pursuit of survival.
“I spent 600 days – literally from dawn until dusk – every day following her. I watched her grow up, meet her first mate, which was on a Christmas Day. I called her son Broken Tail because I noticed he had a distinctive kink in his tail.”
When Broken Tail was killed by the train, Stafford-Johnson heard about the accident and later identified him by the kink in the tail. The young male tiger had travelled hundreds of miles from Ranthambhore National Park and, apparently, was sleeping on train tracks when killed.
Colin is ‘hugely concerned’ about the increased threat to the survival of the tiger due primarily to poaching and habitat loss.
“Essentially the forests in India are being gradually degraded by wood-cutting and grazing. The prey animals – pigs and deer – are disappearing also. If conditions aren’t right, animals won’t breed,” he explains.
It has been widely documented that tribal peoples – which are traditional hunters – are being exploited by middle-men, who then sell the skin and bones on to China. While the hunter might get the equivalent of €100, the rich buyer could pay €10,000, or multiples of it, for the hide and bones. It’s hard to put a figure on it, he says.
“The Chinese believe the ground-up bones of the tiger is an aphrodisiac, if they only knew, from my observations, tigers, are lousy lovers. The males don’t exactly stick around!”
“Machhli has got two big cubs now I have never seen. Her name is Machhli [Indian for fish], because someone said she had a fish-like mark on her face. She won’t remember me now because the gap has been too long. But when I was there for long periods she would let me come close-up. She’d sleep in the shadow of my little Suzuki jeep that was stripped right back. She’d accept me as long as I was not filming while I was walking.”
Reportedly, Machhli is the most photographed tiger in the world. Bet she’s one of the most loved tigers too. Ask Colin Stafford-Johnson.
