This video shows timelapse images of tigers at a watering hole, bathing and taking sips from the water over a series of days and nights. Video courtesy National Geographic/Steve Winter
Wildlife photographer Steve Winter tells Linda Herrick about cheating death, and the images he wished he didn’t have to take.
When Steve Winter first started shooting big cats with a camera, he was dangerously naive. He was in Brazil, on the trail of the elusive jaguar, the third largest feline predator in the world. His Brazilian guide had worked with the cats for years and knew their behaviour but Winter made a potentially fatal mistake. He probably didn't know the word "jaguar" means "the killer which overcomes its prey in a single bound".
"We were following a cat and all of a sudden we weren't paying attention for a few seconds and it doubled back on us," says the National Geographic photographer, on the phone from his home in New Jersey. "We lost it. Then I turned to my left and there he was, 4m away from me, looking at me through the grass. The grass was in the way of his eyes. You have to have an animal's eyes in the photo so I walked towards him. That guide let me know that what I was doing was wrong and told me to get back."
Winter's instinct was to turn and run like hell, but he walked backwards, shooting his camera. "I couldn't breathe, the camera was shaking so bad I thought all the pictures would be blurry. But that short little situation with that animal produced the opener of the first jaguar story ever in National Geographic history."
Then there was the time Winter was shooting the giant brown bears in Siberia, which stand up to 3m high on their hind legs but rarely attack humans - unless they come near their cubs. "They were hunting spawning salmon," recalls Winter. "You could be photographing bears and all of a sudden, you're surrounded by them because you're on a bank and there's water behind you. I had this female come in with her three cubs, she didn't even see me, she smelled me. They can run up to 50km an hour and she came barrelling at me. I had a brain freeze and I waited till the last minute to stand up and when she saw me she moved to the left. Then a guy walked up that I didn't know was behind me with a double-barrel shotgun and he turned to me and said, 'One second dead.' I never knew whether he meant me or the bear."
Named BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2008 for his pictures of a rare snow leopard high up in the mountains of north-east India, Winter is coming to Auckland and Wellington next month to deliver an illustrated talk called My Nine Lives, documenting his adventures and raising awareness of global efforts to save endangered species.
Over the years, Winter, 59, has learned that often the best way, or sometimes the only way, to shoot solitary breeds of cats, like jaguars, snow leopards and tigers, is to set up a remote system of cameras. "My goal is to get an eye-to-eye view of these animals using these remotes but finding a spot where I would take a photo anyway," he says. "So you set up the shot and compose it without the animal in it, using a stand-in like my assistant so I can figure out where to put the infra-red beam. I get to see the shot I would want if I was lying on the ground taking the picture. But if I was lying on the ground the animal would never come by and if it did, it would kill me, probably," he adds with a laugh.
Winter describes his award-winning picture of the snow leopard looking straight at the camera as his "birthday shot" which involved working from a 13,000-foot base camp in temperatures which could drop to minus-40 degrees celsius at night.
Canon Professional Services lent Winter a 1200mm lens - the biggest the company makes and worth at least $100,000 - and he got some silhouettes of the animals walking along a mountain ridge. But he wanted to get face-to-face, so to speak. Through locals in his team, he worked out where a lone snow leopard walked each day and set up 14 relatively cheap cameras with three flashguns each. The camera fired whenever a cat broke the beam of infra-red trigger wired to the shutter.
An endangered snow leopard. This image won Steve winter the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award in 2008. Photo / Steve Winter/National Geographic
Mother and cub in Bandhavgarh National Park, India. Photo / Steve Winter/National Geographic
The sequence of photos he eventually got reveal a handsome cat with an enormous tail walking amidst some rocks. "The cat always places his left paw on that rock to mark its territory," says Winter. "He uses a scent gland to tell other males, 'This is my territory', or to tell females, 'Do you come to this rock often?' I guess it was seven weeks before I got a picture and then, boom!, at 10am one day we got the images. What we got was absolutely incredible and every image was a gift."
Remote cameras also gave him some extraordinary pictures of a lone collared cougar wandering around Griffith Park in Los Angeles at night, with the Hollywood sign lit up behind it. The positions of those cameras were carefully set up as well, with Winter collaborating with a biologist who had collared cougars from the Santa Monica National Recreation Area 20km away so he could track them.
"In the beginning I used to think that many wildlife photographers sit in a blind or hide with a photo-lens so you are focused on a point in the distance where you think an animal might come out," says Winter. "Then I thought, why should I waste all my time when I can set a remote camera in that location, compose it exactly how I want it and the animal is going to break the beam where I want it, in the frame?
"So those cameras are working 24 hours a day and I am out shooting the rest of the story. I can't sit in a blind for weeks or a month. Economically it is the best way for me to produce a story on animals that are very rare. Can you imagine waiting that long then walking away to tell your editor that in a month or two months, you got one photo? Uh-uh. I need to produce a story in that amount of time."
Last year Winter was on the ground or, rather, a couple of metres above it. He was sitting on an elephant when he got a shot of a tiger languidly lying down with her cub in Bandhavgarh National Park in north-east India. Mother and cub are staring straight at the camera. It took just over three weeks to get the picture.
"I was on an elephant with the anti-poaching patrol. We'd get on the elephant at 5.45am and travel until it got to be about 42 degrees and then I'd mostly read books. We were tracking this female with her cub but she'd be below you, sleeping in the jungle, hidden. It was the 23rd day and I saw an ear and then I saw there was a cub nursing. I did not make a sound. After 23 days the cubs must have been watching us and knew we weren't coming any closer. As soon as I saw the ear, I put my face up to the camera, I had the long 600mm lens on it, and I got five or six pictures and I didn't even know if I got the cub. You are focusing and composing on the mum's face. I looked up and the cub was gone. I asked the driver, 'Did that cub come out?'
"I could have looked at the back of the camera but after 23 days I was so stressed out. I had four days to go before I had to go home. It took me two hours to look at the camera and that's what I saw: I had just one frame."
There are photos Winter wishes he didn't have to take. His portfolio includes awful images from 2011 of a little girl holding up a large photo of Sheila, a tiger that had been killed two days earlier by a poacher. Sheila should have been safe in Jambi Zoo in Indonesia, but she was killed in her cage during the night, her bones and pelt removed and her entrails left behind. The little girl is standing in front of the cage with her school mates, who hadn't heard what had happened and had all come to the zoo to see Sheila, their favourite. The cage is empty, apart from a flood of blood on the floor.
Winter told American National Public Radio's The Picture Show, "The picture illustrates what's worth more dead than alive ... that was one of the most disgusting representations of humanity that I've ever seen", adding that the police caught the poacher on a bus.
"He got 100 bucks for the job. If you take a tiger apart, you can get $50,000 to $150,000 to sell his bones."
Winter and his wife, writer Sharon Guynup, collaborated on a book published by National Geographic in 2013 called Tigers Forever: Saving the World's Most Endangered Big Cat. In it, and through media interviews and public talks, they have highlighted the grim fact that the wild tiger population has shrunk from 100,000 roaming across Asia a century ago to about 3000 today and going down fast.
Aside from deforestation and the loss of habitat, the key issue for tigers is the insatiable Chinese appetite for body parts which are used in traditional but totally ineffective medicines. Winter and Guynup, along with many others, have also brought to light a shadowy industry in China, that of legal tiger farms, which not only harvest tigers as products, but also launder poached body parts from wild cats from across Africa, Asia and South America.
"I think changing attitudes is vitally important to the future of many of these predators," says Winter. "Campaigns are being run by places like National Geographic and WildAid whose line is, 'Stop the demand and the killing can too.' They are doing public service announcements in Chinese in China, targeting everyone but primarily people who either use the products and, the most important thing, the young people with access to the internet. Then they guilt-out their parents or grandparents who are using rhino horns or drinking tiger bone wine or elephant ivory because it's been said in China that elephants lose their tusks like deer lose their antlers. What a ridiculous notion.
"Young people are watching TV and see an ad or on the internet they see a famous basketball player or Jackie Chan or some pop star do a public service announcement or a billboard. They go home and see Grandpa or Grandma grinding up rhino horn, and they tell them to quit killing all these rhinos for something that doesn't work.
"You are affecting a whole new generation to have a great amount of respect for these animals. We first started on shark fin soup. Well, that has dropped almost 80% in the last two years. But in Vietnam, there was some dude in the Government who said he was cured of cancer by rhino horn. South Africa was devastated last year - it was 1254 rhinos killed in one year, I think."
Winter's talks and the work done by conservation groups are all about "hoping to get the conversation started", he says. "The people find out that places like tiger farms exist because in many instances they don't know. Right now there is a loop hole in the law that you can't sell tiger bone but you can use the skeleton. So they soak the skeleton in rice wine and make this 'tiger bone wine', which is sold for astronomical prices. But they are also using snow leopards, leopards, lions and now jaguars as tiger bone because the Chinese are everywhere. They are building palm oil and soy bean plantations all over Latin America and a new canal in Nicaragua. The workers are from China and these are people who know they can make a fast buck by bringing endangered species for this trade."
Wildlife photographer Steve Winter. Photo / Steve Winter/National Geographic
Along with his peers, Winter is a tough, determined fighter on behalf of the animals he has observed so closely for nearly three decades. But it's heart-breaking that the day could come, sooner than we think, when photos may be the only trace of their existence.
"I am of the opinion, from what I have learned from scientists, is that if you save the top predator in the eco-system, you save everything underneath it, including the habitat," he says. "All these big cats are vitally important to their eco-system. Stop using these products and start having a greater respect for the wildlife."
Snap happy
Steve Winter grew up in Indiana where his father gave him his first camera when he was 7.
Trained in photography at the Academy of Art and the University of San Francisco, he worked as an assistant for National Geographic editor-at-large Michael Nichols, then as a freelancer in San Francisco for five years.
Winter became interested in wildlife photography 25 years ago when he was freelancing with the New York-based Black Star agency and was sent on assignment to work with scientists in the Costa Rican rain forests. "I was absolutely blown away by what I saw and by the scientists I worked with for six weeks," he says. "That assignment changed my life."
He has been a National Geographic contributing photographer since 1995 and was named BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 and winner of the Global Vision Award from Pictures of the Year International 2011 and 2012.
Now based in New Jersey, he is a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers and media director for Panthera, founded to conserve the world's 36 species of wild cats.
Winter will give an illustrated talk at the Aotea Centre in Auckland on August 5 and Te Papa in Wellington on August 6. He will also visit Auckland Zoo to check out its new Big Cat Experience.
