The jump from ADB lead education specialist to amateur wildlife photographer is not as big a leap as one might think. True, my 35-year career, which I enjoyed tremendously, was built around education development in countries ranging from Somalia and Guyana to Indonesia and Uzbekistan.
My interest in ecology and wildlife photography predates that career, but had to be put on the back burner all those years. Now that I am happily retired and living in Hua Hin, a resort town on the Gulf of Thailand 250 kilometers south of Bangkok, I can indulge in my lifelong interests. My garden, the fields around my house, and nearby national parks at Pala-U waterfall in the mountains and Sam Roi Yot on the coast provide plenty of interesting subjects to photograph.
All it takes is a camera (in my case, a Canon EOS 350 digital with a macrolens and a telephoto zoom), a lot of patience, and willingness to crawl through bushes and tall grass to sneak up on the target. An extensive collection of guidebooks complemented by a lot of Internet searching allows me to identify most of the birds, reptiles, wildflowers, butterflies, and various other insects. My ever-growing collection now includes images of well over 200 species, with more added almost every week. It’s educational, too—a self-conducted course in the ecology of southern Thailand.
The images here are a few examples.
