Chapter 8

A little snippet from the memoir

This is a chapter from my book ‘I Can’t Eat My Guinea Pig, I’ve Had Too Much Cocaine’. I pulled out of my book deal with Collins last year and haven’t attempted to find a new publisher yet. I think I might just publish it here, but maybe through paid subscription. Not sure yet. Anyway following on from my previous post about National Geographic and Simon Thomsett, I thought I’d post this chapter. It’s a few years old now and the story of us in Kenya was back in 2012. I hope you enjoy.

Vultures

When you fall in love with the Hell’s Angels

I’ve met some extraordinary people in my travels but none of them even comes close to Simon Thomsett. You wouldn’t think anything of the guy if you saw him. He’s short, slight, knocking on his mid-fifties, with a tight crop of blond hair. OK, he’s handsome, and grizzled, and has deep-riven crows’ feet from a life under the Kenya sun, yet he dresses like a dirtbag – supermarket denim and filthy, ripped T-shirts – and usually has grubby bare feet. He also only has nine fingers because his dog shot one of them off when he was a kid. I call his missing finger Stumpy, and always try to feature it in any photographs I ever take of him. As a result he hates me, but he loves me too.

Breakfast with Simon in the mud hut is always interesting.

Simon grew up in Kenya to English parents. Unlike many in the white Kenyan community he’s not considered a ‘KC’ – Kenya cowboy. He doesn’t wear the requisite shorts, khaki shirt or bush hat. He’s not entitled and he doesn’t strut around as if he owns the place. He’s a reluctant misanthrope, in love with birds of prey and a vision of the past, and little else. Meek, humble and painfully self-effacing, he’s romantic, polite and old fashioned and, as a result, single, but above all he has rock-solid, unwavering integrity.

I first met Simon when he joined Aidan, Hector and me on a shoot in the Maasai Mara in 2012. Off the back of an interest sparked by the condor, I’d pitched a film about vultures, which ended up having no condors in it at all and the whole thing being set in Africa. The BBC had commissioned a ‘quirky, funny’ film on vultures, and I’d brought Simon on board as everyone I’d spoken to in the vulture community said he was the world expert. I had a thing for the anti-heroes like vultures and hyenas, the misfits that everyone ignored but which I believed were just as important and charismatic as the supposedly noble, big-ticket subjects – lions, cheetahs, etc. I didn’t know much about vultures other than they were big and ugly and quite fun to watch ripping dead animals apart.

The drive from the airport in Nairobi to the Maasai Mara took about eight hours; Aidan and I travelled with Wilson, an extremely respectable veteran film-crew driver whom I’d worked with in the past on a shoot and also knew from Big Cat Diary years earlier. Hector drove in Simon’s 1973 green Range Rover, which, despite being the same age as me, looked about 110 (a testament to its age were the three fire extinguishers that Simon kept in it). It chugged and spluttered, and every ten miles or so Simon would have to pull over, get out and pump one or two of the tyres with his small lighter-socket air compressor. Sometimes he’d get more serious and plug a puncture, which he did with complete proficiency, as if it were as routine to him as drinking a cup of tea – because ultimately it was.

By the time we reached the Mara it was getting dark. The journey had taken perhaps three more hours than it should have done, and when we pulled into Matira Camp, a small, tented bush camp, Hector almost fell out of the car.

‘Jesus Christ, I want to shoot myself,’ he said with a sarcastic laugh. ‘That man can’t half depress you.’

Simon had apparently done to Hector what Simon does best, for the entire journey: explained to him how Kenya was dying, and why it was dying, in extraordinary detail. Simon uses a metric of vultures, falcons and eagles to measure the success and failure of humanity. If you drive with him he scans the skies and the power lines constantly for raptors, logging every one he sees and bemoaning all those he doesn’t. ‘They’ve all gone,’ he’ll say. He’s an expert on powerlines – ‘Those fucking Chinese powerlines,’ he’ll rant whenever you go past a large modern run of them heading off into the Rift Valley, ‘they’ll fry anything that goes near them.’

He’ll explain how a bird landing at some point on it will be instantly killed if its tail or wing touches the wrong bit. He’ll get cross when Hell’s Gate National Park comes into view in the distance on the drive to the Mara, because a sprawling, ever expanding hydrothermal power station has been built there. Yes, that’s right. A geothermal power station has been built within what is listed as a tentative World Heritage site without complying with Kenya Wildlife Service rules, which poses a lethal threat to raptors and other wildlife. He’ll tell you how its noxious gases kills raptors and how it’s built on top of a vulture-nesting cliff, one of the last in Kenya, so they’re all fucked too. And he’ll just about blow his nut when the wind turbines of the Ngong Hills come into view; they might be necessary to help curb humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, but they kill eagles and vultures, so they’re the devil’s work.

As you drive through townships and overgrazed, fenced countryside, he’ll complain about the Kenyan population being two and half times over its holding capacity, with one of the world’s fastest-growing population. How there’s zero gazetting, allowing for uncontrolled building and subdivision everywhere, which destroys dispersal areas and grazing land for wildlife. How the Kenyans have killed so much of their wildlife, and what a disgrace that is. And as you edge ever closer to the Mara your depression will grow to meet his. When you reach the town of Narok, he’ll tell you how, when he was a young man, the Mara migration used to start there, but now you have to drive two more hours to reach it, and how the rich white Kenyans have destroyed the place with their massive wheat farms. And all the way, he’ll bemoan all the Maasai, and all their goats, sheep and cattle.

This is what Hector listened to. I know that, because I’ve done the same drive with Simon many times and I’ve heard the same complaints on loop every time. Kenya has turned Simon into someone exhausted by their own experience. He has become depressed and morose over what has been lost and the stupidity of what has replaced it. He will talk and talk and talk about it to anyone who will listen. Because he’s standing on a soap box shouting like a mad man at the crazy, the stupid, the corrupt and the ignorant, all of whom fail to stop and listen. So if you ever give him an ear, he’ll rip it off.

The problem was, it didn’t really matter how you skinned it, Simon spoke complete sense. The lack of vultures, falcons and eagles might have seemed small but it was painfully significant. The disappearance of any predator or scavenger would tell you the same thing – the natural world was changing, and not for the better. And as you looked out of the window of the car you’d see nothing but human settlement and fencing, roads chock-full of lorries and cars, a chaotic clutter of humanity intensely and haphazardly mosaiced across an exhausted countryside – dirty and desperate in many places, beautiful and manicured in others.

None of us saw a vulture on the way to the Mara, because there weren’t any. Simon explained that there was barely a single one left outside protected areas. There was no food for them, and in any case they’d either been killed by powerlines and wind turbines, or simply been poisoned. The more I learned on those first few days, driving around with him, the more I realised that all hopes of making a ‘quirky, funny film’ on vultures would be based on a lie.

It was November, the wildebeest were supposed to have gone, but rains had returned to the northern Serengeti so the wildebeest had weirdly turned around and returned. Normally they’d follow a fairly standard migration. They’d head north from the Serengeti in Tanzania and pop into the Maasai Mara in southern Kenya in July and August. They’d hang around until October, then head back again into Tanzania, following the seasonal rains south and the fresh grass that sprouted in the wake of the rains. The great migration, as it’s known, is one of the largest movement of animals anywhere on earth; and it’s of course hugely important for the caravan of predators and scavengers that it services – vultures being no exception.

But this year the wildebeest headed south in October, crossing the infamous Mara River, where all the crocs lie in wait, then they’d turned around and come back to the Mara. It was a huge stroke of luck for us really as we were late out of the gate with the film and thought we’d missed the migration; and the migration meant more dead stuff for the vultures and more for us to film.

Vultures are obligate scavengers. Few, if any, other animals can claim to be that. It means that they only eat dead things. It’s of course not actually true, but it’s essentially true; only a few weeks ago I watched a Rüppell’s vulture kill an adult male impala that had been injured on the road into the Maasai Mara by ripping its arsehole out. A group of perhaps thirty other vultures then piled in and ate the poor creature alive, from the inside. Even I had to turn away watching that, and I can stomach pretty much anything. I’ve seen Rüppell’s vultures kill an adult wildebeest by ripping its eyes out and eating through its head. Jesus.

A Rüppell’s vulture coming in to land.

Our first morning in the Mara was wonderful. Aidan and I were all excited to be back and bored Hector with stories of our filming exploits there ‘back in the day’. At dawn we headed for Look Out Hill, a high point in the centre of the reserve from where we could look across the plains for vultures. We drank coffee and watched the sunrise over the undulating green plains, and Simon explained that we were a little early as vultures tended to feed after sunrise as they needed the air to warm up a bit. Apparently each species has a different ‘wing loading’, and the heavier ones need warmer air to really enjoy any lift and thus get high enough to spot potential meals. We sat in the cars at Look Out for about an hour, scanning the plains below with our binoculars.

The Maasai Mara is really incomparable as a wildlife destination, as from any high vantage point you can almost always find lions and hyenas; if you’re lucky, cheetahs too. It is, as a result, busy, like a safari park on a Sunday in high season – from July to October the plains are overloaded with large decked-out Toyota Land Cruisers for the reasonably well-off and a million small Toyota vans for the budget safari tripper. They have, over the years, torn the place up, so now there’s almost nowhere remaining without a track carved through it. But as we watched there were few cars to be seen; the low season had begun.

There are many stereotypes the West plays out about Africa; most are over-romanticised nonsense befitting the spiritual emptiness of white people, others are narratives of poverty, which although accurate to a degree, are always misguided by Western sensibilities. Sunrise and sunsets, however, richly deserve their stereotypes. There is, without doubt, something about African light as the sun rises and sets that sets it a notch above anywhere else in the world. Watching the peach light slowly creep down the escarpment on the west side of the Mara that morning and then slither across the plains was unforgettable.

Below us a large herd of wildebeest, flecked with the odd zebra, covered the plains, loose and grazing. As I scanned my binoculars through them, small herds of impala would appear, the females tightly corralled by their bachelor male, while younger lesser males fringed the edges. Topi and hartebeest grazed in patches together among hundreds of white dots, Thomson’s gazelles, scattered across the entire scene. In the distance a matriarchal group of elephants browsed the far plains. Like the screaming piha is to the Amazon, with its eerie rising and falling call, the Cape turtle dove is to the plains of East Africa. It’s ever-present, repetitive mewing call adds a beautiful calming presence to the wider symphony of the savannah, a relentless backing track to the occasional roar of a lion, the grunting of the herds of wildebeest, or my favourite, the distant giggling bay of a hyena. The scene that morning, accompanied by sweet, black instant coffee that we clutched to keep warm, was one of utter beauty.

‘Wilson, if you had to have sex with any animal, what would it be?’ Aidan smiled, naturally, as he let his question hang in the air. Wilson didn’t responding, he just froze utterly horrified. ‘For me, it’s impala.’ Aidan continued. Fortunately, Simon came to Wilson’s rescue as he spotted two white-backed vultures beating their wings lethargically off to the north, and suggested we go and investigate what they were interested in.

We headed off and followed more vultures as they laboriously flapped and glided low over the morning dew until eventually we arrived at a lone wildebeest carcass surrounded by vultures. We pulled up perhaps thirty yards away and got our cameras out.

‘This is a kill from last night,’ Simon explained, staring at the contorted and splayed-open carcass. ‘The vultures can’t break the hide. It looks like a hyena got here first.’

We could smell the pungent stench of the gut sack that the vultures were feasting on. Much of the meat had gone from the back legs, exposing white hip bones. The ribs were all exposed and the vultures were frantically pecking at them, while others were actually buried deep in the carcass, up inside the rib cage, pulling out whatever might be in the neck cavity.

The hissing and aggression, as the vultures fought for access to the carcass, seemed extreme. Simon explained that, despite looking vicious to us, this was perfectly normal to them. Apparently everyone wanted the best cuts of meat – the sirloin, the rump and so on. It seemed obvious when Simon put it like that. Of course they did, why wouldn’t they? We do. They wanted nice fresh meat, not old rotten stuff; they’d eat that, sure, but fresh meat was more palatable and to be preferred.

There were four species of vulture at the carcass, and despite their apparent similarities, Simon pointed out the differences. The most impressive, the lappet-faced vultures, were huge. They stood maybe three and half feet tall, with wingspans of nine feet. They had beady black eyes and enormous hooked bills attached to a head that looked like a sunburned scrotum. Their short bald necks were met by a ring of what Simon called ‘Lancelot feathers’, a term I’d not heard before but which seemed fitting when he said it, as they looked like a kind of medieval ruff. These Lancelot feathers were brown and mottled, flattened across the birds’ shoulders to form the uniform brown plumage of their backs, wings and tail. Their legs were white, and they had enormous hand-sized feet with slightly hooked talons.

The lappets were perhaps the most interesting to watch, as they appeared to stay back for most of the time, then occasionally leap onto the carcass, which they’d dominate on account of their massive size. They’d then feed briefly, before jumping back out of the scrum to watch the action. They were apparently very fussy eaters, so left the rabble of other vultures to do most of the work and the fighting.

Below the lappets in the vulture hierarchy were Rüppell’s griffon vultures, to give them their full name. Again, these were huge birds, actually only very slightly smaller in stature than the lappets but around the same weight. They seemed to rule the carcass just from their sheer size and numbers, as well as their extreme aggression. It was incredible to watch them arrive at the carcass, as they resembled huge cargo planes, lowering their legs like landing gear as they glided in on eight-and-a-half-foot wings. Some touched down near the carcass, others would simply land right in it, attacking the dominant vulture on the top of the carcass with outstretched talons, usually aimed at the neck or back. Then an explosive fight would ensue as the birds bit and ripped the skin on each other’s elongated bare necks with their massive ivory-coloured bills, or leapt up and strafed with their talons. And, naturally, they’d hiss like demons as they fought and jostled for prime position on the carcass, no doubt carrying on vendettas about which we knew nothing.

Rüppell’s have long strong necks with few feathers to keep them clean; so that they can stick their heads where the sun don’t shine.

The Rüppell’s were a handsome bird – big beaks, of course, and small heads on the end of long, thin, powerful necks. Simon explained that their neck skin had to be very tough so as not to rip during all the fighting. Their necks also needed to be bare so that when they were forced inside the carcasses of animals, often up the anus or down the gullet, they remained relatively clean. At the base of their necks, above their breasts, they had naked pale blue and red ‘baboon’ patches. Simon didn’t seem to know what these were for –nor did anyone else, it turned out – but he suggested that they might act as false eyes when the vultures had their heads stuffed down in the carcass, or perhaps they were sexual signals or signs of health better seen in off-spectrum (to us humans) vision. The patches were surrounded by a white ruff, before giving way to the mottled browns and greys that made up most of their plumage.

Simon was great on camera and Aidan seemed excited by this. So often scientists and contributors are stiff, and it’s hard to get them to relax, but Simon was straight out of the gate, explaining everything concisely and with great clarity.

‘Imagine looking down from above,’ he said. ‘You’d have the carcass in the middle and rings of different species moving out from it. The Rüppell’s in the middle, the white-backs in a ring around them, then the others.’ Hierarchy, he explained, was most likely established not just by age and size but also by aggression, although the white-backs were submissive to the Rüppell’s simply because of their lesser size, but they hung around in greater numbers. They seemed resigned to their place in the pecking order and sat patiently, some with wings fully stretched out to absorb the morning sun, others bored, heads hung low in a Nixonian hunch. They tended to take a step back when the Rüppell’s were overpowering the carcass, but occasionally an aggressive adult would have the chutzpah to take on the Rüppell’s and own the carcass, albeit briefly. It appeared that no one bird, however aggressive, ever managed to own the carcass for more than a moment; there was always a new one piling in to kick the shit out of it.

The whole dining experience was incredible to watch; it seemed drunk and dramatic, the seething mass of birds cackling and bullying constantly as individuals fought for a few moments of intense feeding before they were booted out of the way by other hungrier or angrier birds. The white-backs lacked both the charisma and the looks of the Rüppell’s, being more uniformly grey with darker wings. Some had white backs but most didn’t, and they lacked the attractive pronounced beaks of the lappets and Rüppell’s, instead having dark heads and beaks.

Beyond the ring of white-backs stalked the fourth and final species, the hooded vultures. These were uglier and smaller than the others, with thin hooked beaks and weird judge-like wigs that sat atop their thin pink necks. They were generally excluded from the carcass and anyway seemed more interested in the delightful flotsam around the edges, bits of skin and viscera, botfly larvae, maggots and grubs. They loved lion poo, too, apparently, the fresher the better.

Marabou storks poked around between the vultures like a band of hideously ugly undertakers, ignoring the vulture hierarchy and fighting them for bits of offal or bone. They were huge, with massive bills and disgusting flappy pale pink neck wattles. Their bodies were long, their tight-fitting grey plumage extending across their backs and down their tails, which hung like morning suits on top of their long, thin legs, white with dried excrement – marabous shit on their legs to cool themselves down.

Simon complained about the IUCN Red List while I filmed the storks. They’re only listed as ‘least concern’, he explained, on this definitive list of species’ conservation status for scientists. He thought this inaccurate; they were in trouble, apparently, all across Africa and should have been afforded a higher status on the list, something no species of course deserves. That year hooded vultures, white-backed vultures and Rüppell’s vultures had been elevated to ‘critically endangered’ on the list, Lappet’s to ‘endangered’. Sitting in the car that morning we were looking at a bunch of birds, grotesque, perhaps, in looks and habit; lowly and insignificant to some, portents of death and disease to others. No matter. They were as imperilled as the black rhino.

Watching them on the ground and picking up shots of them fighting and ripping each other was fascinating, far more interesting than watching lions feeding, which is honestly somewhat boring in comparison. There was more drama, more detail to observe, more to try and understand. But then Simon explained what was happening above our heads, and the full extent of the system began to unfold. The true value of vultures, it seemed, was up in the clouds.

‘First,’ he said, ‘a bateleur flies by. It might circle once, it might just dip a wing to take a look. It doesn’t land. But it means a carcass has been spotted.’ Simon lit up when he spoke about bateleurs. Who wouldn’t? They’re beautiful gliding eagles, with dark bodies, crimson red heads and very short, squat tails, and they glide with such grace and attention to the nuances of the wind that they rarely have to beat their wings. Instead they wobble, responsive to every last gust in the current.

‘Then the bateleur drifts off,’ he continued, ‘but the lappets are watching, mid-altitude, not that far up on early morning localised thermals.’ They slowly fly over, hundreds or thousands of feet up, to see what the bateleur was looking at. Often they would be beaten to it by a tawny eagle, who had also spotted the bateleur that cocked an eye downwards. And they’re all being watched by the white-backs that fly much higher above them and by the Rüppell’s that fly higher still; the world’s highest-flying bird.

‘It’s a vast, stacked social network,’ Simon explained. ‘It could be twenty to even thirty thousand feet high and spread out over twenty or more miles. They’re all up there, like aeroplanes, all watching to see what the others are doing. Below them on the ground, crucially, hyenas, lions and jackals are all watching. The moment a vulture plucks up the courage to leave the safety of the sky and land, it’s a signal that there’s food to be had.’ Most carcasses at the height of the migration, Simon explained, were not killed by lions or hyenas, but died for other reasons such as disease, wounds and exhaustion, and the predators will scavenge if it means a free meal. Vultures, it appeared, were their eyes in the sky.

Simon’s description of how nuanced the plains ecosystem was, and how vultures were so key to it, was a revelation. Soon we began to see everything we were filming from this perspective. Simon impressed on us the relative lack of vultures compared with the past and the almost complete absence of some species, like the beautiful white Egyptian vultures – famous for cracking ostrich eggs with stones – which were now nowhere to be seen. The same was true for white-headed vultures; during the few weeks we spent in the Mara we only saw one. Like their cousins, they had declined catastrophically and for the same reasons – too many people, the resulting loss of habitat and, critically, poisoning.

Simon had been talking about poisoning since the beginning of the shoot but it was a hard subject to get my head round. It seemed a pervasive problem, however, and cropped up in almost every conversation we had about vultures. Vultures in Kenya were seemingly being poisoned by pastoralists and farmers. In the area around the Mara, a poisoning hotspot apparently, the Maasai were to blame.

‘The lion kills your cow, the hyena kills your cow . . . So what do you do?’ Simon would constantly ask, as if trying to wrongfoot us and open up discussion.

‘You kill the lion?’ I’d suggest.

‘You poison the lion. You poison the hyena.’

The method was simple, he explained. There was a black market in pesticides across Kenya, in fact throughout much of Africa. On our journey to the Maasai Mara we passed an endless number of small towns, each with one or two agro-vet stores, many of which apparently sold small hand-wrapped packets of purple or pink powder for a couple of bucks. Sprinkled on a dead cow or goat and left out for the guilty predators, the poison would kill everything that ate the meat. The problem was that the killing was indiscriminate and so everything died. All the lions, all the hyenas, all the jackals, all the leopards – whatever ate the poisoned carcass would die. And obviously the victims included all the vultures and other raptors – tawny and steppe eagles particularly – and they were dying in their thousands.

‘But it’s worse than that,’ Simon said. ‘The hyena eats the poisoned meat, it runs off home, maybe four miles, it dies; vultures eat it, they fly off to make it a few miles or a hundred miles and then die; perhaps after regurgitating the food to their chicks in the nest who then all die. It’s like an explosion from the centre out, with an untold number of smaller explosions radiating from it.’

It was a silent form of slaughter, which made it all the deadlier; more often than not these poisoning events would go unnoticed or unreported. And so the plains were slowly being denuded of wildlife, without anyone really noticing, all because of some cheap, accessible pesticide. Carbofuran was apparently the weapon of choice, manufactured in the US under the trade name Furadan; it was a systemic insecticide, designed to kill a number of insects that threaten plant crops, but deadly to anything else that went near it.

One night Simon sat us down by the fire and showed us images on his computer of him and a few other guys loading a tractor trailer with the corpses of over a hundred vultures who’d consumed meat laced with carbofuran. It was horrific. There were other vultures dying in the grass near the trailer, their long necks craned and contorted, their brains firing and whirring as the poison blew out their synapses. I’ve watched that video many times since I incorporated it into our film and it still brings a tear to my eye.

A poisoning event on the edge of the Maasai Mara. Thankfully, in recent years, local activists and vets are playing an important role treating and saving poisoned vultures and other raptors.

After hearing the full and honest story of the vulture ‘crisis’, the narrative of the film changed completely. Perhaps the starkest example of the vulture decline came one day after a wildebeest crossing when we spotted a kettle of vultures above the Mara River.

We headed over to investigate, as always, and worked out that the birds were circling over the river at the Trans-mara Bridge, a crossing point between the Maasai Mara Reserve and a separately administered area called the Mara Conservancy. As we drove across the bridge we noticed vultures hopping around on the edge of the river; drawing closer, we realised that they were feeding on the bodies of hundreds of wildebeest. Some corpses were bloated, others fresh. We stopped the car and wandered down to the river’s edge.

The scene was horrific, Dante meets Hieronymus Bosch. Vultures, ibis and marabous stalked between a vast soup of rotting corpses and skeletons dripping in foul sinews. Skulls lay in the shallows, still attached to arched spines and ribs, while hooves and femurs floated among horns and scapulas, the water thick with unidentifiable putrid matter. Fresh corpses were being pushed and eddied in from the main current, forcing them up against larger swollen corpses, which turned from dark brown to white as their skin sloughed off, then to yellow and green as the heat rotted them. At the end of this floating mass grave, perhaps fifty yards away, the bodies had stacked up in piles, rolled onto each other by the swift current of the river. Crocodiles tore lazily at protruding limbs, but with no real conviction; like the vultures, they’d eaten more than they should.

We met an American couple on the bridge over the river and chatted to them. They were scientists who were monitoring the wildebeest crossings. Apparently that morning the wildebeest had attempted to cross the river at a spot with no actual exit on the other side, so they were confronted by a huge steep bank; the result was that three and a half thousand had drowned. As we talked, the bodies continued to flow beneath us, some piling up in the shallows, others floating on towards Lake Victoria. Some were being ridden and consumed by vultures as they bounced around in the current; it was as comical as it was horrific. The previous day, ten thousand wildebeest had died trying to cross in the same spot.

Finding such a glut of vultures was exciting for us, but Simon was more sanguine. In fact he was cross. ‘There should be five times more than this’, he ranted. ‘There should be hundreds. This is the most important feeding event of the year. Where are all the birds?’

There may have been thirty on the ground and the same number in the sky, but there should have been many, many more.

Later on, we hauled one of the wildebeest carcasses out of the water with the winch on Simon’s car so that we could get some shots of the vultures eating it on the bank. Hector, being the young assistant, was instructed to pop the terrifyingly swollen stomach of the bloated corpse with the Bowie knife that he insisted on taking everywhere. We told him that we’d finally found a use for it, and we all knew it was going to be like sticking a knife into a shaken can of Coke. It didn’t disappoint. As he stabbed it, after much encouragement and while holding a T-shirt over his nose – which we all joked was so big that the smell was going to be worse for him – a spray of the foulest-smelling putrid intestinal fluid exploded with a violent whoosh ten feet into the air. Hector moaned, and naturally wretched as he ran away from the scene.

A few days later we headed north through Kenya to a reserve called Ol Pejata, where we made Hector kill a sheep with a sword. We were trying to catch a vulture to place a GPRS unit on it and needed some bait, so Darcy Ogada, on of Simon’s colleague, had bought a couple of sheep. Simon for some reason kept a sword in his car, which had been exciting Hector for days. Hector, to his credit, dispatched the first sheep with such grace and artistry that we awarded him both the ears and the tail. The sheep was then butchered by Simon and laid out on the plains, surrounded by soft-tipped humane nooses.

After a few hours the vultures arrived, and we waited nervously until one made the mistake of stepping in a snare and getting its leg stuck, at which point Simon and I zoomed in with the car, jumped out and grabbed it, prompting the bird to vomit all over us. Simon, Darcy and I then attached the GPRS unit to it before letting it go. We monitored the vulture for several months as it moved all over northern Kenya, before it died, probably from being poisoned.

This was the narrative the film had started to follow; conservation became the central theme, so catching and tagging were important as they showed what was being done to monitor how the vultures behaving and where they were feeding. In the south of Kenya we filmed on the edge of Lake Kwenia, in a remote area near Lake Magadi. Lake Kwenia was dry for much of the year and flooded seasonally, the land surrounding it becoming grassy and lush. It was a haven for birds, not least because it was bordered to the north by huge cliffs, perhaps five hundred feet high. Rüppell’s vultures nested in them, safe from baboons and leopards who could predate their chicks.

The land was owned by a man from Nairobi who’d bought it from Titus, a local Maasai, on speculation that land prices would rocket while the land was being subdivided, a fate that inevitably resulted in less productive land and water and grazing conflicts. We invited the guy from Nairobi down to visit. He was planning to build a lodge (and incongruously a children’s playground) beneath the cliffs, which would have been a little out of place and badly impacted the area, as vultures’ nesting sites are extremely sensitive. He showed up, and Aidan filmed me interviewing him and discussing the cliffs. In the end I tried to sting him on camera by getting him to assure me he wouldn’t build the lodge as this was such an important area, but he slithered away from that request. A few weeks later a friend of his began illegally farming the lake bed, splitting it up into vast chunks to grow crops.

Simon was utterly depressed by this march of so-called progress, and he was right to be. Everywhere we looked humanity was moving in, claiming ownership and building or destroying. He rallied everyone he could to get behind protecting Kwenia; nobody had even heard of it, although it appeared to be the most important nesting site for Rüppell’s in Kenya. But as it was vultures, nobody really cared.

At Athi River near Nairobi we visited a nesting colony of white-backed vultures in a small fever tree forest. There were only a few of these birds left as the once-remote road was now a busy track for trucks serving a newly built concrete factory, ironically called Simba Cement. This sported a large billboard sign with a picture of a lion on it that read ‘Simba Cement – king of the concrete jungle’. Ironic, because it was creating a concrete jungle in a country that seemed to have forgotten about its wildlife.

Athi River was a weird place, a huge plains area just south of the capital Nairobi. Simon explained that it had the densest cheetah population in the world, but again, nobody cared. Much of it had been earmarked as the site of a new ‘techno city’ being built by the China. We spent a few days driving around the place looking for vultures and only saw a handful. At one point we came across a tumbled-down stone dwelling, alone in the middle of the plains. Simon explained that it was his old house and that he’d built it himself. As we poked around the remains, he pointed out two wires sticking out of the cement below where the kitchen windowsill used to be.

‘You know what they are?’ he asked me.

‘Not a clue,’ I replied.

‘Mortars,’ he said. ‘I rigged the house with them to blow up the bandits when they attacked.’

Apparently, in the few years that Simon had lived there, the house had been surrounded, shot up and raided seven times. He never went into too much detail about what actually happened, but the trauma of these obviously brutal experiences wore Simon like a tight-fitting suit.

He became more relaxed when he explained how he’d lost a girlfriend once at the house. Apparently he’d woken up in the middle of the night to a swarm of rats leaping out of the roof thatch above the bed and scuttling down the side of the mosquito net. His girlfriend slept through the commotion, but Simon knew exactly what was about to happen next so he reached for his gun. A moment later a large cobra slithered out of the thatch and down onto the top of the mosquito net; it then slid down the side of the net until it was almost touching the end of the bed, at which point Simon blew its head off with his .357 Magnum. His girlfriend was so freaked out that she leapt up and stormed off in a fury, never to return. Of course, Simon couldn’t understand why, as these sorts of things seemed so normal to him.

I keep a list of the things Simon says when we’re on trips and send them to a few mutual friends. Simon pretends that he’s embarrassed but he can’t help laughing at himself either.

‘I used to be really bad when I was drunk. I’d play Russian roulette with my dog.’

‘I once went to London and got lost on the inner tube. I didn’t know what to do so I found some black people to ask as I don’t understand white people.’

‘Social media will never catch on.’

‘I once cut the leg off a dead wildebeest, then it got up and tried to run away.’

Simon got his first falcon at six and his first eagle at sixteen, a massive male crowned eagle called Rosie, who died last year in his forties from a cobra bite. Crowned eagles are huge, powerful eagles with massive feet the size of a man’s hand and terrifying three-inch-long talons, sharp, hooked and designed to crush the skulls of monkeys. They’re a forest species, similar in size and stature to the more well-known harpy eagle of the South American rainforests. Rosie spent much of his life in an aviary with Girl, an even larger female crowned eagle that Simon had captured in the wild after it had killed a four-year-old girl with the intent of eating her. The local villagers had quite rightly chased the bird off and tried to kill it, but Simon had stepped in and caught her, keeping her in captivity for the remainder of her life.

Simon had perhaps forty birds, most having been rescued from either direct persecution or injury. There are numerous superstitions surrounding birds of prey in parts of Africa, particularly owls, which are mercilessly persecuted. Other birds are killed just for the sake of it. Watching Simon handle them you realise the true nature of the man. He’s an artist, so involved and immersed in his birds’ behaviour and their needs that he works and coaxes them effortlessly, understanding every tiny nuance of their body language, and more impressively, they of his. I’ve watched him repair birds as if they were Airfix models – splinting wings, fixing broken legs, draining abscesses – even though he’s completely untrained. But here’s a man who was performing neurosurgery on hawks when he was eighteen.

It was these birds that eventually dragged him away from us. After shooting with him for a few weeks, one day he suddenly said he had to go. Apparently he had one guy who looked after his birds while he was away working, and others who’d occasionally come in to look after his house. He’d just received news that a couple of these people had been beating his birds and had killed some of them. He seemed very annoyed but ultimately resigned as he explained the situation to us, almost as if it were normal that people would beat his birds to death for no reason at all. But this was Kenya, and Simon understood, in a way that we didn’t. So he lived with, what seemed absurd to us, as if it were normal, because it was.

But then Simon’s whole life was bizarre and absurd, as he’d explain, often with a wry grin, on the long car journeys across Kenya while we chased down vultures. He’d been sent to boarding school in England as a boy, and was so angry and depressed by such a change of culture and place that he refused to speak for four years. The boy, it appeared, was the man, stubborn to a point way beyond benefit. He hated everything about school. He told me on one car journey how he’d been taken on a school shooting trip and a gamekeeper had apparently blasted at a buzzard for no reason, so Simon promptly shot at him. Didn’t kill him, but scared the hell out of him and gave him a stern warning to leave raptors alone.

In theory he was to have a holiday back in Kenya and then return to school. But in practice he ran away from boarding school, adopted Rosie the crowned eagle and moved about northern Kenya with a growing collection of birds, staying on ranches and conservancies. He’d hunt francolins, guineafowl, hares and sometimes small gazelles with his eagles and hawks and falcons. But depression and starvation caught up with him and in the end he was forced to shoot his horse and eat it. He would sometimes nip to a neighbour’s house and push his pet cheetah in the car and go out hunting with it during the day and at night. It was for food for the birds who’d eat hundreds of kilos of meat a year. With no fridge or freezer, flying the hawks was the only way to get food for a number of years. Those were in the days when one could such things without raising too many eyebrows.

It’s hard to fathom a white man living so tough in Kenya, a country where the disparity between rich white and poor black has historically been so obtuse and so stark. But Simon is set apart from any form of norm; he’s a bushman in the truest sense and so colour and culture mean nothing. That said, he’s also remarkably clumsy. Not only did his dog shoot his finger off, by catching its lead around the trigger of his shotgun, but ricocheting bullets had hit him in the eye twice, and he had broken his neck and his back. He built a plane and taught himself to fly, then crashed it so many times he lost count.

Simon would always relate these peculiar stories with complete nonchalance, but then when we all started giggling he’d realise how absurd he sounded and grin. Perhaps my favourite story was the one about how he once dropped a heavy metal chest onto himself, chopping off his ‘third nipple’ (it was a large mole). It later took to growing into a grotesque disfigured lump that destroyed any chance of alluring a young lady. So one night he decided to cut it out. He used a local anaesthetic, lidocaine, but the first incision was agony. So, for reasons that make little sense, he took some ketamine, but he took too much and blacked out and when he woke up he realised his dog, who had lain close to his prostrate body all night to protect him, had eaten the nipple. The surgery was a success in the end, though he never knew how he had managed to suture the large gaping wound dug deep into the muscle tissue below the skin.

Aidan, Hector and I shot the whole vulture film in six weeks, which was ridiculously quick for a one-hour wildlife documentary. The edit, however, proved complicated. The story was there, there was a strong narrative, the images were good and we had plenty of material, but the commissioning editor and I came to blows over the amount of conservation I was putting into the film.

I wanted the whole story to be about the demise of vultures in Africa; why shouldn’t it be? There really was no other story in my opinion. How could we take the vultures – one of the fastest declining groups of species in history – and make something quirky and funny about them? It would not only have been totally disingenuous but also deeply irresponsible. Roger Webb, the series producer, was stuck in the middle, sympathetic to both our arguments, and ultimately Roger was right to be sympathetic to both sides. There’s no point making a true but depressing film if nobody’s going to watch it. It might have placated my burgeoning passion for vulture conservation, but to what end?

So I bitched and spat and moaned and accepted the standard five-minute conservation message at the end, then ignored it and made it a fifteen-minute conservation message. Of course, the film went out all over the Western world but it wasn’t shown in Africa, where it really needed to be seen. A few of us tried to persuade the BBC to allow the film to be screened for free in Kenya and Tanzania, but BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC who owned the distribution rights, wouldn’t consider it. They just wanted to turn a profit. This was grossly irresponsible in my opinion. Vultures spelled the end of my career as a filmmaker. I’ve subsequently worked in television on occasion, but I never produced another film.

Simon had changed me, anyway. He’d bestowed upon me a weight of understanding and responsibility that I couldn’t, with any integrity, shirk. And he was right. I had access to millions of people across the globe through mainstream media and the rise of social media, and I needed to use that power for good. Simon was a man frustrated by the limited reach of his soap box, but I had a much wider audience and I had to use that opportunity. Unlike the world of elephant or rhino conservation, the world of vulture conservation is tiny; just a handful of people trying against all the odds to do something and ultimately failing, because in reality there’s very little one can do. As vulture conservationist Pat Benson described it, ‘We are just monitoring to extinction.’ A few people with almost no funding can’t possibly be expected to save a group of species facing insurmountable odds against millions of people couldn’t care about them.

Vultures shifted my understanding of conservation, and Simon was central to that, which is perhaps why I go on about him so much. He’s not just an extraordinary man who has selflessly devoted his life to the conservation of birds, and when I say devoted his life, he lives in a mud hut. He’s a conservationist without the bourgeois and narcissistic trappings that accompany so many others in the field, and for that reason he’s my hero.

After making the film for the BBC, Simon and I travelled across Africa photographing vultures for National Geographic magazine.

A month or so after the vulture film was released (much to my embarrassment, the BBC had given Vultures the subtitle Beauty in the Beast and the National Geographic Wild channel titled it Super Vulture), I’d got a call from National Geographic deputy director of photography Ken Geiger. He’d heard that I’d been working with vultures and asked me to shoot a story on them. So the following year Simon and I travelled across Africa, telling the true story of vultures and their catastrophic and continuing decline for the magazine.

The story had been pitched by Elizabeth Royte, a popular-science writer from New York. It was a quirky, funny look at vultures. I chewed Ken’s ear off for twenty minutes, explaining the actual situation about the catastrophic decline of Old World vultures (India’s population had declined by up to 99 per cent). By the end of the phone call the short, funny little article had turned into a twenty-six-page geopolitical story on vulture decline. National Geographic did what the BBC had failed to do: they looked for the real story, made that story the central focus and shouldered the responsibility of telling it, regardless of ratings, because the story needed an audience.

I realised that I wanted to work for National Geographic full-time, and that I was going to devote the rest of my life to conservation. I just had one little thing I needed to do first. The previous summer I’d bought an illegal coca plantation in Peru by mistake and that massive cock-up needed dealing with.