Eric Ashby

Conservationist and wildlife film-maker who observed the secret life of the New Forest

Eric Ashby, naturalist and film-maker: born Maryport, Cumberland 19 January 1918; married 1975 Eileen Batchelor; died Ringwood, Hampshire 6 February 2003.

Eric Ashby was a naturalist and film-maker noted for the sensitivity and integrity he brought to recording the lives of his subjects. He specialised in Britain's wildlife, especially the mammals and birds at his own doorstep. Many of his films were based in his two-and-a-half-acre garden-cum-sanctuary at Linwood in the New Forest.

Ashby worked on a series of classic wildlife films in the 1960s for the newly founded BBC Natural History Unit based in Bristol. His début film was The Unknown Forest, a portrait of the forest and its wild animals narrated by Johnny Morris, which was first broadcast in January 1961. It was the first wildlife film to dispense with lights and other studio props. The aim of its producer, Christopher Parsons, was to make a programme which would interest ordinary viewers with no particular knowledge of the subject. It was a great success, and hundreds of people asked for a sequel.

This was The Major. It presented a year in the life of a mature oak tree on a village green, from the squirrels, jays and caterpillars among its branches to the cricket matches and Morris dances beneath. It was the first television wildlife film to be shot in colour, though it was transmitted in black-and-white for its first screening in 1963. The colour version was eventually shown on BBC2 four years later. Among Ashby's later television films were A Forest Diary, A Hare's Life and The Private Life of the Fox.

To film animals as he wished, behaving naturally and unaware of the camera, Ashby needed to make innovations. He developed a sound-proof camera box or "blimp" to allow him to get close to wild deer without their taking flight at the noise of the mechanism. He also developed a technique of slow acclimatisation, so that the animals became used to his presence. He was the first to film badgers underground in an artificial sett in his garden. Patience was always his hallmark. Peter Scott nicknamed Ashby "The Silent Watcher".

Eric Ashby was a gentle, self- effacing man, with a rare empathy for wild animals. Born in 1918, he was brought up at Southsea in Hampshire, where he filmed house martins and a young cuckoo with a cheap ten-and-sixpenny cine-camera. At the age of 16 he published an article in Boy's Own Paper on bird photography, the first of many pieces on wildlife based on field study. Initially he started life as a farmer in Devon, in partnership with his brother, but soon moved to the New Forest, where he lived with his wife Eileen for the rest of his life.

Ashby was a pioneer conservationist. From his long-term studies of the New Forest's badgers, he claimed that their numbers were falling due to the local hunt's practice of blocking the setts to keep the fox above ground while they were hunted. In 1969, he helped found the first local badger group, dedicated to the protection of this beloved but much maligned animal. Today there are around 80 such groups throughout Britain.

Ashby became further embroiled with the New Forest Buckhounds in 1982, after a deer was killed in his garden. After two court cases, the hunt was banned from his land, and they were obliged to build a 6ft-high fence (electrified on hunting days) around it. Bemused locals nicknamed it "Stalag Ashby". But Ashby had the last laugh when in 1997 the New Forest Buckhounds disbanded after being refused a licence by the Forestry Commission. As a result of all the publicity, Ashby's sanctuary garden became famous, and received many visitors from as far away as Russia and New Zealand.

Eric Ashby published two well-known books, The Secret Life of the New Forest (1989) and My Life with Foxes (2000), both illustrated with his own photographs. The latter tells the story of how he and Eileen raised an orphaned cub they called Tiger, and in time came to share their sanctuary with some 30 foxes in all, some brought there by rescue centres.

Ashby received the Royal Geographical Society's medal in 1967 for his films, and in 1992 was appointed MBE for his work for wildlife. He has left his entire film and photographic archive to the online collection ARKive, which is creating an illustrated database on rare and endangered animals and plants. ARKive is to be launched by David Attenborough in May.

Peter Marren