In the Hide by Gordon Buchanan review: 'richly enjoyable'

Gordon Buchanan’s autobiography helps us better understand our role as trustees of the living world, writes Allan Massie

Gordon Buchanan is one of the finest and best-known of wildlife photographers and filmmakers, and this delightful, often enchanting book is the story of his life. I would simply call it an autobiography if it wasn't also an exploration of the countless other species with whom we share the Earth, not always, sadly, to their benefit.

It begins with the author in a hide in Mumbai, waiting and hoping to snap an urban leopard - "a large, lethal ghost cat, hunting somewhere in the shadows of skyscrapers.” He will spend weeks of nights in the hide to catch his moment. A wildlife photographer must combine the patience of a cat with eyes on a mousehole with a bird's ability to snatch a fast-flying insect.

Buchanan's story begins on a council estate on the edge of Dumbarton. His was a close family, even if his father was mostly missing, and then, in what was surely a key moment of his life, they moved to Mull where, with his brothers and his best friend Norrie, a boy with "more than a whiff of eccentricity", he ran free, sailing boats and riding ponies. He enjoyed what reads like an idyllic childhood, though he doesn't shrink from recording darker moments, chiefly his mother's short relationship with an abusive man; the boys got rid of him, however.

There was another alarming, if memorable, moment when he encountered his first capercaillie in the remnant of the Caledonian Forest, and was attacked by it. Since then, he has had happier meetings with may other birds and animals generally deemed more dangerous. His time spent with wolves is especially fascinating. Very few people, he tells us, are actually killed by wolves. Long ago, “wolves' natural curiosity graduated towards a curiosity towards a tolerance of our presence, which later evolved towards the recognition of a mutually beneficial opportunity to get food or protection." Wolves became dogs - some of them anyway - and Buchanan himself has had good relations with individual wolves. Nice chaps when you get to known them.

There is also a very interesting chapter on our close relatives, chimpanzees, with their extraordinary eidetic ability to recognize patterns and commit them to memory. Researchers, Buchanan says, believe that we long ago lost that ability and replaced it with language, but it is humbling that when it comes to some tests of memory, chimps can beat us. I'm not sure that “humbling" is the right word. After all, anyone who lives with animals recognizes that they have skills that we lack, though we may once have had them. As Quoodle the dog says in Chesterton's poem, we humans "haven't got no noses” and “even the smell of roses is not what they supposes."

Buchanan's work has taken him all over the world, to the depths of Borneo and the rainforests of the Amazon, to Africa - he is splendid on elephants - and Antarctica. The book is not without its grim passages - involvement in Sierra Leone and a narrow escape from a civil war, an episode of horror which left him feeling ashamed - but he is always happy tp return to Scotland, and some of the best passages deal with domestic life and our diverse if tamer wildlife.

The chapters telling of family life are equally good, and the whole book is richly enjoyable. Perhaps, one is left thinking, that at a time when so many believe that climate change may alter our human life out of recognition, we have in the last half century and more at last come to experience a sense of a duty as trustees of the living world, and at the same time have come to learn a new and surely desirable humility in our relationship with the animals, birds, fish and even insects who live among us.

In the Hide, by Gordon Buchanan, Witness Books, £22