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Two of the largest names in wildlife conservation, Jonathan and Angela Scott have written and illustrated over 40 books.
The couple turned family names via engaged on the favored BBC TV collection Big Cat Diary between 1996 and 2008, the place Jonathan was co-presenter and Angela the sport spotter and stills photographer.
Most just lately they introduced Big Cat Tales (seasons 1 and a pair of) for Animal Planet, 2017-18) and featured within the BBC 2 Documentary Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride (2022).
Based in East Africa, the Scotts work tirelessly to lift consciousness of the menace to wild animals as people undermine their habitats.
As Jonathan places it: “Eight billion people are driving wildlife off the planet”.
One of the couple’s signature initiatives is the Sacred Nature Initiative, which has produced two books to date, with a 3rd one deliberate.
The Sacred Nature Initiative is built on three pillars, explains Jonathan: “‘Inspire’, which we hope we can do with our books and television programmes; ‘Educate’, which is working with young people, getting the message across about how sacred nature is; and ‘Conserving’.
“The first book, Sacred Nature: Life’s Eternal Dance, is a eulogy to the area that we know best, East Africa’s Mara-Serengeti, a wildlife and photographer’s paradise.
“Sacred Nature 2: Reconnecting People to our Planet takes a global, landscape approach, focusing on savannas, forests and plants, deserts, mountains, water and the polar regions.”
“In the next couple of years, we’re hoping to publish the final part of the trilogy, Sacred Nature 3: Life’s Incredible Journey.
“And that will be, in a sense, about us and our personal journey, what we learned and what we hope we can share with other people to help keep them engaged with nature, and the state of the Planet.”
Another strand of the Sacred Nature Initiative is the Scotts’ Safari Etiquette e-book, conceived to raise awareness of the aggressive tourism fueled by photography for the sake of social media – where the relentless pursuit of getting a selfie is putting animals, and sometimes the phone user, in danger.
Wildlife photography is often more about prioritizing the self-aggrandisement of the photographer – the “look at me” effect, rather than prioritizing the well-being of the subject.
This trend has appeared in the news lately, in another hotspot for safaris. Two of India’s major tiger reserves – Ranthambore National Park and Sariska Tiger Reserve, both in the state of Rajasthan – now force tourists to hand their smartphones over to guides or drivers, who lock them away with no exceptions.
Safari Etiquette doesn’t take a hectoring tone, though; the Scotts are making a reasoned case for respecting the habitats and environments of wildlife, and they want people to understand the damaging impact that a herd mentality can have when it comes to photography.
We caught up with Jonathan and Angela to discuss their Sacred Nature Initiative – and Safari Etiquette…
How do the two Sacred Nature books differ?
Jonathan: Sacred Nature: Life’s Eternal Dance is a eulogy to the area that we know best, East Africa’s Mara-Serengeti, a wildlife and photographer’s paradise.
Angela was brought up in Tanzania as a child. I first experienced the wonders of the area while travelling overland from London to Johannesburg in 1974 with the dream of doing something in Africa, and I chose Kenya as my home.
So, for the past 50 years, this has been the epicentre of our work. The book celebrates what we consider to be the last great place on Earth, the Mara-Serengeti, and at the same time, we decided to found the Sacred Nature Initiative.
Sacred Nature: Life’s Eternal Dance focuses on the great wildebeest and zebra migration and individual big cats – in the same way that the Remembering Wildlife series, which we have contributed to from the outset, features individual species, amplifying the message and getting people’s attention.
But Angela rightly said that the best way to save these creatures is to preserve their habitat; give them somewhere to live and they will do just fine.
There is no time to waste with eight billion people driving wildlife off the planet: 96% of all mammal mass is livestock (62%) and humans (34%).
Wild mammals are 4% (less than that of domestic dogs alone). So for our second book, Sacred Nature 2: Reconnecting People to our Planet, we took a global, landscape approach, focusing on the habitat: savannas, forests and plants, deserts, mountains, water and the polar regions.
Angela: Saying things like “I like lions but hate crocodiles” is irrelevant. It’s about the land, and if we don’t focus on the environment and how we can protect it, then the species will vanish.
The wildlife ecosystem is so interconnected. Species cannot live alone. All life needs other life to survive.
You have to have a matrix of multiple environments. If you take one piece out, it can have unforeseen and catastrophic consequences.
Tell us about your Safari Etiquette e-book.
Jonathan: This is a project that is dear to our hearts and it is an 80-page e-book.
Our greatest concern is the rampage of aggressive tourism, which is going worldwide, driven by social media and the plague of the selfie.
This makes people want to get close to things with their smartphone, without being aware of the wonder of what they’re seeing.
They’re simply saying, “Hey Mum, look where I am today!” But the next day, they will have forgotten the name of the location.
People aren’t absorbing the privilege of what they are seeing and this is what’s crucial: we have to get people to reconnect to the awe of being in the natural world.
Sacred Nature shouldn’t just be about a place where there are big cats or big charismatic animals. Everybody has their own ‘sacred nature’, even my mother with her little potted plant in her kitchen.
It’s their link to that ethereal, wonderful sense of other life with which we share the planet. We say to people that loving nature is not a choice; it’s essential, life cannot survive without it.
Because if you don’t love nature, you don’t love yourself, the air you breathe, the food you eat, all those truisms… we have to get people back to being concerned enough not to see nature and land simply as a commodity to be exploited.
George Schaller, the great field biologist and conservationist, says he gets frustrated when he hears people talking about natural resources as if they’re just there for humans.
They believe we can do without nature. But there is no life without nature. That is why we call it ‘sacred’.
How has Safari Etiquette been received so far?
Jonathan: We’ve had an amazing response from the conservation space and the tourism industry – that is vital, because our mission is to try to put reasoning behind the rules and regulations instead of just being schoolmaster-ish and saying, “Don’t do this, don’t drive off-road, don’t drive too close to the animals”.
We’re explaining why you shouldn’t do these things because, for example, if you drive up to where a cheetah has her babies, where she may have spent a few weeks deciding where she was going to den, and you just drive blindly up to get closer for your shot, then she’s going to move and may lose her cubs.
So we have to be considerate. We have to put nature first, and what we’re concerned with is that – and, unfortunately, this is driven by photography because everybody is a photographer now – there’s this urge to compete, because social media has created a competition for everything.
People want to be famous, to be celebrities, and will do just about anything to achieve it. It’s all about getting a better shot, more likes or winning a [photography] award.
And now there’s this insane competition to get ahead of everybody else, where people have to have elbows like the paparazzi to get the image they want.
When you talk to other photographers and ask them how they managed to get a particular shot, they will often say it was the access and the time they had that was the key.
Now, not everybody can spend 50 years watching the same big cats or dedicating themselves to one area, as Angela and I have done.
However, all of us can pause for a moment, step back and become a little more considerate and thoughtful about what’s going on.
Our Sacred Nature Initiative, with our books and this latest e-book, explains these basic points to people. It’s just common sense, really.
In the next couple of years, we’re hoping to publish the final part of the trilogy, Sacred Nature 3: Life’s Incredible Journey.
And that will be, in a sense, about us and our personal journey, what we learned and what we hope we can share with other people.
How do your creative roles differ?
Jonathan: I took up photography because I loved animal behavior. My background was zoology, which I was fascinated by, so my driving force was nature and not initially photography.
I used to love drawing and then I found myself in this extraordinary place, the Masai Mara, where anybody can take a good photo, quite frankly.
And that’s why Big Cat Diary ran for so many years, because it was the best place to get access to the wildlife and capture footage of it; the landscape is so open and accessible, so finding animals is much easier.
Angela and I met 35 years ago, and what I learned from her was understanding the different types of light and how to create atmosphere and emotion, which are the essence of a beautiful image. I just took what I saw, whereas Angela is never satisfied with the ordinary.
For example, if we had gone out early in the morning and seen a wildebeest against a beautiful backlight – the sort of thing we’d photographed many times before – I’d say, “Let’s go and take some photos”, and she’d reply by saying, “Not if we’re just going to photograph what we’ve already got”.
But on that very morning, she captured a beautiful backlit picture of two egrets jumping on the back of the wildebeest for a ride, then feeding on frogs and insects stirred up by their feet.
Suddenly, Angela had a little window into the details of what goes on around the wildebeest.
There are literally a million photographers taking photographs of African wildlife, whether they’re amateurs or professionals.
And there’s a huge push now to do things differently for a quick fix – to get low-angle shots, to take photos from outside the vehicle, using remote cameras, drones or whatever.
But that’s not our kind of photography. We have taken a different approach by investing our lives in following these creatures, in trying to record every element of their existence without artifice.
As we always say to people, “Isn’t nature impressive enough anyway? Why do you have to embellish it?”
Now, if you want to show things differently from how they are, that’s fine, but not a big cat growling, snarling or looking at you nervously.
They’re in their own world and it’s like you are a fly on the wall, inviting the audience to enter the picture and connect with the individual creature, acknowledging that it is a living, breathing, real entity and an individual.
Angela and I might have watched a particular leopard for 17 years, from when it was a cub until the day it died.
Just imagine that kind of continuity. That is what we did with Half-Tail’s daughter Zawadi (1996-2012) of Big Cat Diary fame.
We’ve had the time and access [for our conservation work], and that’s what we shared with our audience [Jonathan and Angela spoke at a special event to open the 9th edition of the Xposure Festival in 2025].
They were all photographers and we gave them a preview of our exhibition at the festival and they were completely captivated because, through the stories behind the pictures, they understood what we were doing.
Before the preview started, I asked the audience not to look at the photographs as they might otherwise have done – “Oh, there’s a lion, that’s a leopard, this is a cheetah”.
Instead, I wanted them to see that this particular leopard was Zawadi (‘gift’ in Swahili), who was in her 17th year the last time we saw her.
When you make a connection with an animal, as people did with Craig Foster’s film, My Octopus Teacher, the reason it worked was that the viewers connected with the character of the subject, just as they did with the ‘stars’ of Big Cat Diary.
Through doing that, you also learn something about the photographer, and while you don’t want that to be a primary factor, you begin to ask who this photographer is and what they have done to make this film different.
And it’s not because of trickery or gadgets – though they had to use great equipment, of course – but, ultimately, it’s empathy, it’s creating emotion.
Don McCullin nailed it when he said, “If there’s no emotion, if you don’t move me, if you don’t make me feel the emotion when I look at the picture, then you’ve failed.”
Angela: One of the questions we’re asked most often is, “Tell us about when you nearly got trampled or gored”.
The truth is that humans are the most dangerous large animal – 99% of accidents with wildlife happen when people don’t follow the rules, prompting animals to defend themselves, particularly when they are with their young.
Wild creatures learn from experience that humans can be a danger to them; it’s in their DNA.
They invariably try to move away if they see people on foot. Safari vehicles mask the human outline to an extent, which is why big cats in places like the Maasai Mara are so accustomed to people in vehicles.
Safari Etiquette is designed to keep wild animals and humans safe.
Buy the Safari Etiquette e-book
Safari Etiquette: An Essential Guide is available now, priced $12 / £9 / AU$17, from Jonathan and Angela’s website.
You can watch Jonathan talk about Safari Etiquette on The Sacred Nature Initiative’s Masai Mara Podcast, on YouTube.
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A longer version of this interview appears in the March 2026 issue (304) of Digital Camera World magazine.
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