Dr Michael Leach: Animals Behaving Badly

Dr Leach treated us to an evening of highly amusing stories of his encounters as a renowned wildlife cameraman and photographer, yet with thought-provoking insights into animal behaviour. As a zoologist with an interest in higher mammals, he worked worldwide as a wildlife cameraman for television and Hollywood. He left us in no doubt about the arduous life – 49 hours in a tiny hide on a mountain to film a golden eagle, months of filming an elusive creature to get a few seconds of usable film – with no weekends off or holidays! He is now a successful writer of wildlife books, illustrated with his own amazing photographs.

His latest book ‘Animals Behaving Badly’ is, as he says, a misnomer. It is humans that make moral judgements of behaviour, animals are just extending their behaviour, trying things out in order to be more successful. Like humans, higher animals have a range of intelligence within a population, there are ‘innovators’ and ‘copiers’. The most intelligent animals will be inventive and, if successful, others will follow. He illustrated this with a series of unforgettable images and stories – the orangutan in Borneo who created a bridge to retrieve bananas from a canoe, the young ring-tailed lemur in Madagascar who sloped off from the group to get ‘high’ on narcotic flower petals, and perhaps most strangely, the magpie with a penchant for poking buttercups into holes, including Dr Leach’s ear!

The next Indoor Meeting is on Thursday 3rd November at 7.30 pm at the Lyttelton Rooms, Church Street, Malvern. Johnny Birks’ talk is ‘Can we restore our native mammal predators to Britain?’ Members and non-members are welcome.

CHRISTINE SEYMOUR