Cherry Kearton

Cherry Kearton (1871–1940) was one of the world's earliest wildlife photographers and writers.

Kearton was born in the small Yorkshire Dales (Swaledale) village of Thwaite, North Riding of Yorkshire, England. In 1900, he married Mary Burwood Coates, with whom he had a son, also named Cherry, and a daughter, Nina. They divorced in 1920, and he married Ada Forrest, a South African soprano, in 1922. He died in 1940 after reading for the BBC's Children's Hour. The Royal Geographical Society's Cherry Kearton Medal and Award was created in his honour.

Cherry Kearton specialised in animal photography, having taken the first ever photograph of a bird's nest with eggs in 1892. In the summer of 1896 he and his brother Richard Kearton (1862–1928), a naturalist, reached the Outer Hebridean islands of St Kilda and many other remote places. In 1898 their famous book With Nature and a Camera, illustrated by 160 photographs, was published in London by Cassell. Cherry Kearton contributed photographs to seventeen of Richard Kearton's books, and wrote and illustrated a further seventeen titles of his own. He made the first phonograph recording of birds (a nightingale and a song thrush) singing in the wild in 1900; took the first film of London from the air in 1908, and the first footage of hostilities in the First World War at Antwerp in 1914. Cherry and Richard Kearton are perhaps best remembered for the development of naturalistic photographic hides, including the stuffed ox of 1900 and the stuffed sheep of 1901.

Cherry and Richard Kearton shot a number of 'shorts' of birds and animals for Charles Urban in the years 1905-1908. From 1909, Cherry moved into the field of wildlife documentary film making, shot on visits to Africa, India, Borneo, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He directed more than thirty films for his film companies Cherry Kearton Ltd and Cherry Kearton Films Ltd., including the following:

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