Turner, E. L. | Togo, My Squirrel and His Lady-Friend Buda

First edition, first impression of this memoir of a red squirrel saved and reared by the author, the pioneering wildlife photographer and conservationist Emma Louise Turner (1867-1940). This volume was published in the Arrowsmith series The Library of Animal Friends, which also featured books by fellow photographers Frances Pitt and Cherry Kearton, and included another of Turner’s books, My Swans the Wylly-Wyllys. Uncommon in the dust jacket.

Turner became interested in wildlife photography after meeting Richard Kearton in 1900. She joined the Royal Photographic Society the following year, and by 1904 was giving talks illustrated with her own slides. Turner was particularly interested in birds and travelled throughout the UK and in Europe to photograph them, but her main base of operations was in the Norfolk Broads, where she lived for part of each year beginning as early as 1901. This was where, in 1911, she photographed a nestling bittern, proving that the species was breeding in Britain for the first time since 1886. Another highlight of her career was the award of the Royal Photographic Society’s Gold Medal for a photograph of a great crested grebe on its nest, published in her book Broadland Birds in 1924. In 1904 Turner was elected one of the first fifteen female members of the Linnean Society, in 1909 she became one of the first four honorary female members of the British Ornithologist’s Union, and she was the only woman involved in the 1933 appeal that led to the creation of the British Trust for Ornithology.