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WELCOME TO NEVER SPOOK THE ANIMALS WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY. Here you will find a small sampling of the many wildlife and landscape images made by Vancouver, Canada-based photographer Roberta Olenick.

By academic training, Roberta is an animal ecologist with a Master’s in Zoology from the University of British Columbia. But she could never really be trained to regard animals dispassionately as data points, so after graduating she worked as a park interpreter, a natural history writer, and an environmental activist for the Earth Island Institute and the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now renamed Ecojustice Canada).

In 1998, Roberta rather serendipitously discovered the camera as an ideal tool for indulging her life-long curiosity about, and expressing her reverence for animals. “What I love about photographing wildlife,” she says, “is that I get to know the animals as individuals, their personalities and day-to-day behaviour patterns.  The camera slows me down enough when nothing much is happening, so that I am right there when something does happen.” Never Spook the Animals succinctly summarizes her approach to gaining the trust of the creatures she observes through her viewfinder.

Roberta’s images have appeared in numerous magazines including BBC Wildlife, Canadian Geographic, Living Bird, Destinations and Western Living, as well as in a variety of books, calendars, cards, brochures, and as fine art prints in private collections. She donates 10% of the proceeds of all image sales to charities dedicated to environmental protection and animal advocacy.

All of the images presented on this website have been optimized for accurate colour, contrast and sharpness in Photoshop, but the biological content has not been digitally manipulated in any way. All of the wildlife images are of animals in the wild unless clearly indicated otherwise in the image caption.