2024 sees Henfield Birdwatch celebrating its 25th anniversary and is planning a great programme of events throughout the year, which all tie in with it also being the designated ‘Year of Biodiversity’ in the parish.We are delighted to kick off our year of celebrations with a celebrity lecture by local professional wildlife photographer David Plummer. The talk is entitled ‘Home and Away – 25 Years of Photographing Wildlife Around the World’. More information about the talk and how to obtain tickets can be found on the attached link on the right-hand side.
David lives in Small Dole and made a decision to try and forge a life and career in wildlife photography at the end of the last century and with this proximity to Woods Mill, he began running photography courses for the Sussex Wildlife Trust. Within a few years, he expanded his range by buying a small piece of woodland in the north of Sussex where he set up a badger-watching hide and for many years, people experienced very close views of these wonderful creatures.
As his experience and expertise grew as a photographer, so did his horizons and over the next few years he organised safaris to the Pantanal in Brazil to photograph Jaguars and to Africa where again he specialised in the big cats but also Gorillas in Uganda. Alongside this, David began to develop experiences for photographers to capture close views of Tawny Owls in his own garden and at the Knepp Re-wilding Project, particularly focusing on Little Owls and Kingfishers.
Fifteen years ago, David was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease which is devastating for anyone but when your career is in photography that has particular consequences but he has continued to adapt the way he took photographs and has still managed to carry on and develop his work. In 2017, he wrote a book ‘7 Years of Camera Shake’ which highlighted the fantastic pictures he has taken over the years and also described how he adapted his life and work to coping with the disease. For a few weeks, the book topped the non-fiction best seller’s chart.
In all this time his media profile grew, with a number of appearances on the ‘One Show’ and more recently he appeared on Hamza Yassin’s ‘Strictly Birds of Prey’ that featured the Tawny Owls in his garden and the same owls were filmed for David Attenborough’s series ‘the Wild Isles’. Before Christmas, he found out that a film made about him called ’15 Years’ has been nominated for a best film award at the Cannes Film Festival 2024. If all this wasn’t enough, for a number of years now, David has been a wildlife and conservation advisor to Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas.
Throughout the last 25 years, David has maintained a close association with Henfield Birdwatch, providing many photographs for our survey books, being a member of the committee and doing previous talks for us. He also undertook a survey of Tawny Owls breeding in the parish during the winter of 2013/14 and estimated there were 37 territories across the parish.
Mike Russell, Henfield Birdwatch