Chris Harvey

My name is Chris Harvey and I was born in London in 1947, where I have worked as an advertising executive for most of my life.

I first visited Africa in 1982 with my wife to be, Maggi and we travelled through Kenya, Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Botswana was a true wilderness area in those days with very few tourists and I was fortunate to experience it when migratations of zebra in Savuti numbered over 40,000. Over the following years I spent time camping in Namibia's Namib desert, Etosha Pan and Kaokoveldt, and the kalahari desert in Botswana.

In 1993 Swan Hill Press agreed to publish my first book "Beyond the Endless Mopane a photographic safari through Livingstone's Africa". This recorded a journey through Botswana with extracts from David Livingstone's books and visited many of the places that the great explorerers discovered. This project took 4 years to complete.

In 1997 I began to work on a second book with researcher Dr. Pieter Kat.

This documented the lives of four prides of lions in a remote corner of The Okavango Delta in Botswana. For 4 years we lived with lions on our doorstep and had the rewarding experience of getting to know individuals and watch them grow up in their insecure and often violent lives. During this period we made our home under canvas in one place and gained intimate knowledge of the local wildlife, including other large carnivores like wild dogs, hyaenas and leopards.

We learn the sounds, the smells and how the animals responded to the rhythm of the seasons.

In 1999 I began work with Dr. Glyn Maud, photographing brown hyaenas in the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana's northern Kalahari.

In 2000, "Prides" was published by The Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, receiving excellent reviews.

I have had several articles published in South African wildlife magazines and I am currently working on brown hyaenas for the BBC Wildlife Magazine.