The Robert Fuller Gallery

A recognized authority on wildlife, Robert often appears on television and regularly writes about his wildlife subjects for his local newspaper, The Yorkshire Post. His life-long passion for the natural world was shaped by his upbringing on a farm on the Yorkshire Wolds. Here he tells his story.I was born in 1972, and moved to Great Givendale, not far from where I still live today, when I was 2. My father, Richard Fuller, is well known for his conservationist approach to farming. His efforts to make Givendale a haven for wildlife at the same time as being a commercially successful farm won him the much-coveted silver lapwing award for farm conservation and the farmer of the year award presented by the Duke of Edinburgh.He would take my brother, David Fuller, and I out into the fields with him and show us nesting sites, badger setts, roe rings or otter tracks. He published a book on the wildlife at Givendale and I used to help him with the photographs, shining a torch through fungi for him. In the school holidays we roamed the farm freely. My mother fondly called us 'feral'. We were always adopting orphaned birds, foxes, even a deer once and the garden was littered with aviaries, coops, fox-runs and hutches. Looking back, my mum was exceedingly tolerant of it all!