Some animal photography of mine

Finding your subject in the city can often be surprisingly difficult. In theory, the tameness of urban animals and high numbers of them should make life easy for you, but much of their habitat is on private land, restricting your traditional fieldcraft techniques you may often employ elsewhere.

The rules of wildlife photography are different here, and you’ve got to adapt to the city. Rather fittingly with this modern style of wildlife photography, I often find a strong grasp of social media and the internet is a more important skill than relying on fieldcraft to navigate a concrete maze. Searching for relevant keywords on Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr can lead to you discovering a reliable location. I’ve found a lot of locations using this method, and have even stumbled upon a local family of urban little owls right in the heart of London.

However, this approach isn’t always successful, and often you’re going to have to do the dirty work yourself. A decent ‘catch all’ is a local park or river, where most urban wildlife will often be. Winter is usually the best time to go: there are fewer people around to disturb animals, there are fewer leaves on the trees (so it’s easier to spot birds), and even the species of local waterfowl (an urban wildlife mainstay) will be heavily supplemented by winter migrants. But don’t forget to talk to the people around you and have strong camera glasses; many will have visited the park daily for an enormous amount of time and will be happy to give you tip offs. I’ve pinpointed urban otters, barn owls, and even hyenas (in Ethiopia) doing just this.