Photographer Page

Charlie Hamilton James

A story in the October 2018 issue documented some of the last remaining isolated tribes in the Amazon. The Juruá River, pictured here, runs along the Peru-Brazil border, and falls victim to illegal logging.

An otter hunts in Dorset's River Stour. Otter populations have been increasing over the last few decades, both in protected areas and urban centres.

Over a hundred tons of seized elephant ivory and rhino horn was burned by Kenyan authorities in an anti-poaching display at Nairobi National Park in 2016. While regulated trophy hunting is legal in many countries, including Botswana and South Africa, the illegal wildlife trade is rife with animal parts trafficked for use in the black market for so-called medicinal applications.

Guides in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve have dubbed them the “Magnificent Five.” These male cheetahs hunted together for more than four years. Males normally are competitors, but the species is social and highly adaptive. These animals stayed together for as long as they benefited from the alliance. (From “The urgent need to protect the Serengeti’s intricate web of life,” November 2021.)

Every February, before they begin a grueling trek north, wildebeests—along with the many zebras that travel with them—gather to graze and calve on the short-grass plains near the southern border of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Half a million young wildebeests are born here each year, an average of 24,000 a day. Calves can walk within minutes of birth. Some 1.3 million wildebeests each year follow seasonal rains in a clockwise loop from Tanzania into Kenya and back—the largest land migration on the planet. (From “Why the wildebeest is the unlikely king of the Serengeti,” November 2021.)

A fire rages in Brazil's rainforest, near Maranhao at night.

Seen from the air, Posto Awá is one of four settlements founded by FUNAI within three separate Indigenous reserves to provide food, protection, and medical care to Awá communities. Since the 1970s, the Awá have suffered violence and disease at the hands of outsiders entering their ancestral homelands.

Awá families start out on a hunting trip from Posto Awá, established by the Indigenous affairs agency FUNAI to settle nomadic Awá hunter-gatherers after agents made contact with them during the 1970s and 80s. Today perhaps a hundred uncontacted Awá nomads still live in the forest, as the grip of the outside world tightens around them.

Karapiru, a member of Brazil’s Awá tribe, poses in his home in Tiracambu in 2017. He survived an ambush in the late 1970s that set him on a 10-year trek in the eastern Amazon. He died of respiratory illness from COVID-19 on July 16.

Sage grouse won’t dance if there’s a human around. So Charlie asked Tom to build him a remote-control train with a camera hidden inside a fake bird, a contraption that he now calls “the funky-bird train."