HIS life sounds like the plot of a movie starring one of the legends he befriended in the heyday of the silver screen.
Mike Tomkies is the Sussex boy who made it to Fleet Street and then on to Hollywood – hanging out with stars like John Wayne, Steve McQueen and Doris Day – before giving it all up to build a log cabin in the Canadian wilderness and study grizzly bears, cougars, bald eagles and killer whales.
His love of wild spaces and empathy with nature took him to the Highlands of Scotland, where he spent two decades in similarly Spartan surroundings, studying, photographing and writing about the country’s most endangered creatures – most notably golden eagles, black-throated divers, pine martens and wildcats.
There, he became the first person to successfully breed and release wildcats, returning nine of them to the wild – an achievement which earned him an honorary fellowship of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.
Now nearing his 80th birthday and awesomely hale and hearty despite a brush with cancer 12 years ago, he is still working with wildlife in Scotland and in Spain and adding to his lengthy catalogue of books and documentaries.
His 20th book, the second volume of his autobiography, has just been sent to the publisher, and number 19 – a collection of his best writing and photographs from his years in the Scottish wilderness – has just been released by Caithness-based Whittles Publishing.
It’s a remarkable story by anyone’s standards. But for all the glamour of hanging out on film sets or interviewing the Rat Pack in Vegas, it was his time in Scotland – captured in the new book, Rare, Wild and Free – that stands out in his memory.
“I’ve lived two completely separate lives, but the wilderness was definitely the one I would do all over again,” he said.
What makes the images in Mike’s books and films so astonishing is the fact that they were gathered with the minimum of equipment or funding. While modern wildlife documentary-makers rely on powerful lenses, big budgets and a cast of thousands to help them get the perfect shot, he did it through determination, patience and an unerring understanding of his subject.
His years in the Highlands were spent slogging up and down sea and freshwater lochs in small, open boats in all weathers, trekking, stalking and spending up to 38 hours at a time in home-made hides.
At the end of a long, hard trek he would return home to a series of semi-derelict, isolated shacks with no road access or electricity to chop wood and make food by an oil lamp.
All this with no salary, no grant and no organisational back-up.
“I had to laugh at one documentary that came out recently,” he said.
“It was shot over a year on Mull at a cost of £100,000. I got the same images all those years ago with a £200 video camera and £32.50 on petrol and the ferry.
“For me, it was never a job; it was a way of life. I’d get up in the morning, get in the boat and spend the whole day looking for eagles. One time, an eagle brushed my head as it was swooping into its nest. They’d got so used to me dragging dead deer out of the woods for them to eat that they didn’t think of me as a threat any more.
“It took years to get that close, but there was never anything else I would rather have been doing.”
Home today is a dilapidated farmhouse in Sussex, which he shares with the mice, rats and spiders, and the family of badgers who come to his back door to be fed every night.
But he still returns to the Highlands every May to spend his birthday watching golden eagles, and dreams of finding a bothy on a beach as far from civilisation as possible where he can live out his days in splendid isolation.
“The Highlands of Scotland is one of the last great wilderness areas left in the world,” he said.
“There are still places where no foot has ever trod. On a good day it is paradise.”