The 2022/2023 season is the RSPB Belfast Local Group’s 50th anniversary and you’re invited to celebrate with us! We are delighted to be hosting a very special guest: Colin Stafford-Johnson! Colin is an award-winning cameraman, director and broadcaster and one of the best-known faces on British and Irish television. He has a long list of credits as a photographer, presenter, producer, and broadcaster, most recently with BBC Two’s ‘The Wild Gardener’ and Wild Cuba: A Caribbean Journey, a documentary for which he won the distinguished Jackson Wild ‘Best Presenter-Led’ award for a second time. Other credits include Wild UK, Animal Babies: First Year on Earth, Wild Ireland: The Edge of the World and the eighth series of BBC One’s Living the Wildlife, in which he examines the beautiful variety of Irish flora and fauna. His documentary On a River in Ireland, which featured his exploration via canoe of the wildlife of the River Shannon through all four seasons won both the Grand Teton at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Fim Festival as well as the Golden Panda at Wildscreen.
Our venue for the evening will be the Drama Theatre, Central Building, Stranmillis University College, BT9 5DY. The theatre seats about 260 and is fully accessible. There is some on-site parking. All profits from the evening will go to RSPB NI conservation projects.
We invite all wildlife and nature enthusiasts, photographers and gardeners to join us for this special evening. Colin’s presentation, ‘Wild by Design‘, is not to be missed:
Thirty years of wildlife film making and experiencing nature in all its glory has fundamentally changed the way I see the world and my own land. Abandoning traditional gardening in favour of native planting has not just transformed the lives of the creatures that live around me – it’s transformed my life too.
My childhood was spent outdoors watching birds, finding their nests and recording their songs. I soon got to know the habits of the birds that lived around me. A chance encounter with a pen and ink sketch of a wildly exotic bird when I was eight years old was to change my life. It led me on a journey to the other side of the world to see it with my own eyes. It lived in one of the most pristine places on earth on the island of New Guinea. Seeing a part of the world untouched by man made me see the country where I grew up very differently. I realised how much we had changed our landscape and how the fate of the natural world is very much in our hands.
Sometimes all the bad environmental news we hear on a daily basis can be almost overwhelming. One can feel powerless when faced with the scale of the problems facing the natural world. In many parts of the globe we still wage war on the very things that nature depends upon – native plants. No more so than on this island.
So when I inherited a piece of land, it was immediately obvious to me that here was a wonderful opportunity for me as an individual to do something really positive not just for nature but for myself. The best thing I could do was to abandon traditional gardening and to allow the native plants to return without the aid of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Soon the insects that depended on those plants arrived and the place began to buzz. Flowers, fruits, seeds and cover soon followed and the birds that depended upon them. I may not as an individual be able to save the rainforest or the tiger or the panda but I can do plenty for our insect world that is in such desperate need. My garden is now full of life and I am filled with a wonderful sense of well being!