A lifelong search for the wild

As a child, I bought booklets and binders filled with animal stickers and fact sheets from around the world. I collected, sorted, read and dreamt of creating a collection of my own one day. My first written word was apparently “tiger”, and I drew big cats long before I knew they would one day become animals I would actually meet in the wild.

Africa sat at the very top of the wish list, and The Lion King probably deserves some of the blame. But the fascination was never only about the large and spectacular animals. I loved the diversity itself: the fact that the world was full of species with different shapes, lives, adaptations and stories. It is essentially the same curiosity that still drives Wildlife Vagabond today.

What used to be binders in a childhood bedroom has gradually become a digital field archive. The difference is that I now try to fill the collection with animals I have encountered and photographed myself.

Before I left for South Africa I received a Canon 600D and a simple telephoto lens as a birthday gift. The early photographs probably contained more enthusiasm than finesse, but the camera changed the way I experienced wildlife. One day at Thanda in 2012 gave me several moments that truly hooked me on wildlife photography: first with cheetahs, and later that same drive with playful lion cubs in front of the lens. I began learning more, trying more and spending an increasing amount of time attempting to come home with a better photograph than the last.

At first, mammals and the larger birds, particularly raptors, received most of my attention. In Tembe, in August 2014, just a few months before leaving South Africa, I started the first, much simpler version of Wildlife Vagabond. Only a few weeks into this little project of mine, a tiny, unassuming bird appeared in the grass in front of me, a green-backed camaroptera. It let me get close because my movements were flushing small insects for it to eat. I identified it using my field guide afterwards, added the photographs to the new website, and it became the first bird species I wrote about there. After that, there was no going back. Suddenly every bird was interesting, including the small brown ones most people drive straight past.

When I moved back to Norway, lions and elephants were no longer readily available. Birds therefore became a natural focus, and at the same time they broadened the way I looked at wildlife. A great moment in nature does not have to involve a large predator five metres away. It can just as easily be an owl on a cold winter day, a wader in perfect light or a species I have never seen before appearing beside the road.

Wildlife Vagabond is built around species I have seen and photographed myself. That means the archive is deliberately incomplete. Thousands of species are missing, and that is part of the point. Every new page represents a real encounter in the field, a place, a date, a photograph and a story that can be added to the rest of the collection.

Not every image is a portfolio photograph. Some species have only given me a brief glimpse or a documentary shot, but they still earn a place when the encounter or the species matters enough. At other times I may spend hours, days or years trying to get the photograph I actually want. For me, the documentation and the experience itself have always mattered as much as technical perfection.

That is why the site connects photographs, species facts, observations, research, range maps and destinations. I want you to be able to move from an image to the species, from the species to the place where I encountered it, and onwards to the other animals that share the same landscape. It is my collection, but the aim is for other people to be able to explore the natural world through it too.