about me

Since my early childhood I have been interested in wild animals and nature.
With my parents and my brother we went to the Engadin every year and I always loved to go to the Swiss National Park to observe deer, chamois, ibex, marmots, golden eagles and later bearded vultures or occasionally adders and mountain lizards.
For the WWF I was visiting neighbors in our neighborhood and tried to sell them stamps and that the earnings could be used for animal protection projects.
..and yes, I love wild cats !
After the European lynx had disappeared due to extermination measures in Western Europe, it was reintroduced to Switzerland in 1971 again. Of course, in the beginning there was a lot of resistance, especially in rural areas, where people were afraid for their own pets and farm animals. Some regions and groups have not and do not want to get used to the fact that this beautiful cat is creeping through our forests again.

Little by little the tensions have subsided over the years.
Silently and secretly it has repopulated Switzerland. In the meantime (as of 2018) there should be about 200 adult lynxes in Switzerland again.

Nevertheless I think that the lynx is an absolute success story in the history of Switzerland.

For me personally it has become a symbol in the small and dense Switzerland that a coexistence between humans and large carnivores is possible.

I have taken photos from time to time, already as a teenager, but I only really got interested in photography after I finished my studies to become a business information tecnnology scientist.
After I had invested almost 10 years in further education, I needed some time off and went to the Masai Mara, Kenya for a week. Around the same time I wanted to know if there were lynxes in our Jura trains again, as there had been reports in newspapers since about 2009, that lynxes are also creeping around here in canton of Aargau.

Since 2012 I bought some infrared trailcams and started monitoring the Eurasian lynx. However, I had to wait more than 1 year until I got a rather bad first picture of a lynx.
At the same time I also bought the necessary DSLR equipment to take pictures. In the beginning I was mainly in Kenya and since 2014 we are „in love“ with the nature and wildlife of Andalusia and of course with the Iberian Lynx !

At the end of 2015 I finally had my „breakthrough“ with the Eurasian lynx, with our move even closer to the Jura chain and new locations. Since then I regularly had different lynxes in my trailcams.

As special highlights of the last years the wildcat monitoring and the start of my DSLR photo traps should be mentioned:

In 2018 I was allowed to participate in the wildcat monitoring for the canton of Aargau and the following two years also in the national wildcat monitoring. More about this in a future article.
In the same year I also made my first real steps with the DSLR camera traps. They offer photographers an incredible number of possibilities and intimate insights into the life of nocturnal cats like lynx and wildcats.