Eric Ashby

Eric Ashby MBE (19 January 1918 – 6 February 2003) was an English naturalist and wildlife cameraman, often working for the BBC Natural History Unit.

Personal life

Ashby was born in Cumberland, England on 19 January 1918. Not long afterwards, his family moved to Southsea, Hampshire, where he was raised. In later years, he and his wife Eileen nursed injured foxes at their home there, Badger Cottage. He was involved in a number of court cases against the New Forest Buck Hounds, his local hunt, and its members, after they trespassed onto his land, variously killing a young buck deer, damaging a badger sett and forcing him to abandon a BBC commission to film badger cubs there.

His first full-length film, The Unknown Forest (45 minutes) was shown on the BBC in 1961.

Unlike many of his early contemporaries, Ashby refused to film tame animals, preferring to painstakingly film natural activity, and was made MBE in 1992, for his work with wildlife. He died on 6 February 2003. His wife survived him. He bequeathed most of his film and photographic archive to the charitable conservation project ARKive. A smaller archive was donated to the environmental charity No More Dodos in 2018, by the trustees of his wife Eileen's estate.