2014: my year as a wildlife photographer in 12 images

January. Red deer stags on a winter twilight - Abruzzo, Italy

Although this image has been actually taken on the last day of the year 2013, the great situation of that evening and its unique atmosphere have convinced me to visit that area almost every day since for the whole January. My hope then was to photograph wolves in the same weather conditions... but this had to wait much longer than expected and I had to be content "just" with red deer and wild boars instead. Nevertheless, I knew this would have been a great year anyway!

February. Sun rising behind frozen forest - Abruzzo, Italy

On a frosty February morning, while exploring with my camera an old beechwood in the Abruzzo National Park I got struck by the marvelous fringe the rising sun was creating behind some old trees living on a ridge. I stopped and started taking pictures of the situation. One hour quickly went by and I started realizing I was freezing. Yet, I had "metabolized" the situation and changed perspective. Eventually my persistence paid off when the sun poke through the trunks and its rays appeared as glowing stars. I am working on a long-term project for a book on beech forests in the Central Apennines and this was a nice image to put aside.

March. Mount Velino at sunset - Abruzzo, Italy.

A sudden drop in temperatures and atmospheric pressure. together with an unexpected spring snowfall created the conditions for a unique light. I chose Mount Velino, the mountain that is closest to my place and to my heart, as a subject; picked a high viewpoint and set up my camera to witness one of the most memorable sunsets of my whole life. A reminder that knowledge of a subject or a place and understanding of light might allow us to get the most out of an unexpected opportunity.

April. Slender-horned gazelles browsing a Retam shrub - Great Eastern Erg, Tunisia

Last spring, after a short trip to Georgia, I listened again to my desert "call" and went to Tunisia to pursue one of my wildest dreams: to search for and photograph one of the rarest mammals of Africa, the beautiful slender-horned gazelle, also known as "Rhim". Once widespread across the sandy habitats of the Sahara, this species is now critically endangered and its numbers unknown. Look well at this image, one of the few out there depicting the Rhim in the wild: increasing illegal hunting and ongoing habitat destruction in fact might cause this graceful and amazing species to vanish in just a few years! In April, I have also had the honor to receive the 1st place award in the "Nature" category of the World Press Photo contest for an image depicting a sad fennec fox illegally kept in captivity. Now, more than ever, it is important to draw attention towards the issue of the conservation of the Sahara species and habitats!

May. Fog and beech trees  in Campo Felice - Abruzzo, Italy

2014 has marked also the launch of "L'Altro Versante" (www.laltroversante.com), an ambitious long-term photographic project which I am sharing with two friends and great nature photographers, Maurizio Biancarelli and Luciano Gaudenzio, and which is entirely devoted to document the last wild corners of our country in the pursue of the "true Italian landscape". We will cover hundreds of locations across the whole Peninsula, but actually working close home and in places often overlooked, such as the Campo Felice plateau, does represent the real challenge and can deliver the greatest satisfactions.

June. Roe deer. Abruzzo, Italy

Returning home from the desert, I was involved in a filming production focusing on the nature of the Abruzzo National Park. It has been a pleasure to spend so much time in one of the places I love the most in the entire world. During the weeks of work, I have watched and photographed bears and wolves, wildcats and woodpeckers. Still, one of the most pleasant memories comes from an early morning encounter with two roe deer. I was laying down in the wet grass to remain concealed. The animals were grazing the fresh spring grass covered in dew and raised their heads every now and then to check a third deer which was moving at the forest rim. 

July. Apennine chamois - Abruzzo, Italy

Last July, I have headed for the altitude plateau of the Majella National Park, in Eastern Abruzzo, on a mission for "L'Altro Versante" project. I had expected flowers and summer, but instead I found myself in a true Mediterranean tundra, with a grey sky, strong chilly winds and extensive snow patches. I liked the almost monochromatic patterns of bright limestone rocks and the dark tones of the clouds. I did not expect any wildlife at this altitude nor was I prepared to photograph it. So, when I stumbled across this lonely Apennine chamois along a ridge I was climbing, all I could do was to frame and photograph it with the wide-angle lens I had in my hands. The resulting picture is one of my ever-favorites of this subject and reminds me of the saying that "the best lens for the situation is the one you have in your hands at that moment!"

August. Wild boar in summer pasture. Abruzzo, Italy

I have spent the whole months of August and September looking for wolves in the mountains of western Abruzzo, where on the previous years I had collected enough information to know the movements of at least two packs. I expected to find a pack with the pups of the year, but it has unfortunately taken me weeks and more than 35 excursions with no outcomes to finally be able to locate them. In the meantime, of course I have encountered many other animals, last but not least this big wild boar male. On a warm evening it was crossing a summer pasture that showed the typical nitrogen-tolerant vegetation of grazed areas: a humble subject in a humble context, yet a pleasant scene to witness and a even nicer memory to have frozen with my camera.

September. Wild Italian wolf - Abruzzo, Italy

Things cannot always go wrong! Last September, in fact, after so many weeks of nothing, I have finally located "my" pack of wolves and could follow and photograph them over a few days. The many images taken don't give justice to the emotions I experienced in those moments. Wolves are addictive: once you get some, you want more and more of them! I would like to know where are they now and what are they doing, but I can only gather some sparse information and get an incomplete scenario. Nevertheless, it is an enriching activity and thus my work that started five years ago goes still on and I hope to be able to show you the results of it already in 2015!

October. Red fox in old beechwood - Abruzzo, Italy

In Italy wildlife is usually skittish and I am used to patiently stalk and photograph animals just from a certain distance. Sometimes, though, things turn around and it is the animal to stalk and approach me. Like this awesome and very curious red fox male, which simply appeared out of nowhere as I was walking through a nice beechwood with some friends on a grey October day. He first sniffed us, then our backpacks and eventually it hung around a little bit allowing us to take some truly memorable images. These are really magic moments, when somehow the barrier between us and them animals feels temporarily vanishing. Always in October, but with a different fox this time (another threatened fennec from the Sahara), I walked on stage in London to receive an award as category winner at the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition and be able, once more, to raise awareness about the pet-trade and the critical issues affecting the desert wildlife.

November. Juvenile Parson's chamaeleon - Eastern Madagascar

November has seen me working on a long assignment for the National Geographic Magazine together with my friend and amazing photojournalist, Christian Ziegler, to document chameleons, their biology, their habitats and the issue menacing their conservation. Madagascar is the center of diversity of this animal group and home to almost one hundred species: the range of characteristics and the variety of adaptations is simply astonishing. Nevertheless, the future of these animals is far from being secure. In fact, due to deforestation and land exploitation, just 7% of the original forested surface is now left on this island.

December. Mainarde mountain range and the Matese massif - Molise, Italy

This is the last image I want to share with you here. It has been taken from a ridge in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park and spans over the mysterious Mainarde mountain range in the foreground and down until the Matese massif. It has been taken on a mission for the project "L'Altro Versante" (the "other side") and I picked it for this blog as it includes many "other sides" in itself. With it, I would like to wish you a happy, healthy, peaceful, successful and wild 2015, with the invitation to always look on the "other side" of things and to nurture that curiosity that keeps us discovering and learning.

Wilderness book of the month #4 - July 2014

The abstract wild*

by Jack Turner, University of Arizona Press (1996)

From the back cover: "If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature--gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget."

Well, this is an easy one... I wanted, in fact, to preserve this title for a future post, when I would have maybe lacked of time or ideas, and not "burn" it so quickly... But after reading it for the third time, I couldn't wait any longer. I say this because if there is a truly good wilderness book out there, then it is surely this one, and the fact that it now comes in its fourth edition proves I am right. I will never be thankful enough to my friend A. Antonucci, who first introduced me to Turner's writings (besides many other great books...) and let me thus discover this gem of nature literature. 

But beware, this is not just a nice book and a pleasant reading. In his eight provocative essays, Jack Turner - philosopher turned mountain guide, confronts us with a crude reality. Wildness (a more complex term than wilderness), through management, definition and abstraction is almost ceasing to exist in our contemporary world. With a book that more than a series of essays, sounds like a manifesto, the writer casts a passionate invitation to reflect on the disappearance of first-hand experience (contact) between humans and the wild as the main weakness in the conservation movement. And he manages to argument this with a highly stimulating writing, which are extremely well articulated and always supported by a rich bibliography. The prose is never boring, as one might expect but, on the contrary, eloquent, passionate, gripping and sometimes even moving. Such kind of writing is rare nowadays.

"The easiest way to experience a bit of what the wild was like is to go into a great forest a night alone. Sit quietly for awhile. Something very old will return."

If you have never experienced "the wild", I am afraid this is a difficult book to understand. But if you have the heart for these things, these words will make you thirsty for some real nature experience and wanting to get out and walk immediately. Turner's words spoke to me with an eloquence I had rarely found before and, if, only here and there (Leopold, Abbey, Peacock, Bass, Snyder, Lopez, Meloy, Hainard) in the vast sea of wilderness literature. Never before I had found so much truth in just one title. There is material to reflect on anything. On conservation biology, on wilderness management, on language, even on nature photography! It made me reflect on my conservation fundamentalism; on my personal spiritualism; on my devotion to certain wildlife species or mountains; on my need for the unpredictable and ever-changing; on my political choices; on my vegetarianism...

Besides being so beautiful, this book is therefore somehow also disturbing, since it will stir all your beliefs. Now, more than ever, one sees the mistakes and short perspective the environmentalist movement has been until now partly guilty of. There is a need for a new language and deeper interaction, if we want to save the "Other". The answer might seem revolutionary, but it is already in our genes, since it is as old as we are.

"To construct a new conservation ethic, we need first to understand why we impose a human order on no human orders. We do so for gain, the gain being in prediction, efficiency and, hence, control. (...) So we fight to preserve ecosystems and species, and we accept their diminished wildness. This wins the fight but loses the war, and in the process we simply stop talking about wildness."

Turner's message is so true that I am very glad he wrote this book. Surely, it would be worth taking the time to translate it also in other languages. So, once again,  don't get discouraged by this American-centered book: you will find some universal food for thought in it!

*Linking to Amazon is only for practical purposes... you'd better look where to purchase these books elsewhere!;-)

Wilderness book of the Month #3 - June 2014

I know I am terribly guilty: it has been in fact more than ninety days since my last "wilderness book" post and it feels bad not having been able to keep up with the promise of a title/month. Still, as you know, the life of a wilderness photographer is a highly unpredictable one and, sometimes, good intentions should be those that count... ;-)
Anyway, here we go again and, to make up for the long absence, I present you a very, very good book!

Wild Ones: A sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America*
by Jon Mooallem, The Penguin Press HC (May 2013)

From the back cover: "Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual world she’s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.

The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Lange’s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it’s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear’s image while Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.

With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world."

Once again, my partner L. Pater has to be considered responsible for this reading, as "Wild Ones" had been her great present for my 2013's birthday. She bought the book even before it had been released!
As the title says, this is an American-centered book, but the observations and reflections in it have the broadest validity. With a gripping prose that surely grows from a vast and serious research and first-hand journalism, this book is one of the greatest reportages on the environmentalist world that I know. Articulating important concepts such as the shifting baseline syndrome or other aspects of the behavior of humans devoting their life to the environmental cause, this book truly deserved the award of New York Times Notable Book of 2013. I now like to quote their review: "Ambitious and fascinating... [Mooallem] seamlessly blends reportage from the front lines of wildlife conservation with a lively cultural history of animals in America... This is not a book about wilderness; it’s a book about us." --New York Times Book Review
Yes, this is not a book (just) about wilderness; it's a book about us. And if you want to understand what motivates some people to fight unrelentingly for the environment or what makes some abandon their cause for a pessimistic vision, this text will surely help.

*Linking to Amazon is only for practical purposes... you'd better look where to purchase these books elsewhere!;-)