A life of fossas, frogs and photography

Writer Elaine Davie

When Betty’s Bay resident Pete Oxford was a little boy of four living in Singapore, his father, an enthusiastic amateur naturalist, presented him with a snake, and he was bitten. Happily, not by the snake, but by a fascination with all things wild and wonderful in the natural world. Indeed, his entire life since then has been driven by a desire to experience and share the beauty of this often unseen world with others, especially children.

By the time he had finished his schooling in the UK, there were two things he knew he didn’t want to do – remain in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small island with too many people, and be forced to do a job he wouldn’t enjoy. The answer was to travel, to discover the world and its wild places and meet people of very different cultures from his own. Before too long he washed up on an even smaller island, or group of islands, the Galapagos, famed for the unique diversity of their wildlife, as Darwin had noted many years before.

TOP LEFT: No creature too small to care for. Pete and Renée have built a wall at their Betty’s Bay home to provide sanctuary for insects of all kinds in a diversity of habitats.

During the three years he spent there as a guide, photography was a natural progression. His father had already taught him the virtue of patience, how to watch animals, and what to look for. At a time when still relatively few photographs had been taken of these animals from a conservation perspective, Pete produced four books on the subject.

BOTTOM LEFT: One of the species for which the Islands are famous, the Galapagos Giant Tortoise (Geochelone elephantopus), takes all Pete’s strength to move for DNA testing on Isabela Island.

Establishing a base for himself in Ecuador, he travelled widely throughout South America both as a guide and a wildlife photographer, covering the length and breadth of the environmentally-sensitive Amazon, which spans seven countries. This, indeed, was where he met South African, Renée Bish, who was to become his wife. Even this was not an extensive enough canvass for him, though, and after he joined a global eco-tourism company he was able to travel to remote destinations all over the world traversing every continent and every ocean, including the Arctic and Antarctic.

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