There's a good news story to be told about a remote island in the South Atlantic right now, even though you wouldn't think it from the news pages.
They're currently focused on threats from Argentina's president against oil companies drilling near the Falkland Islands, while Britain insists its military commitment to its overseas territory is unshakeable.
Tensions are visibly heightening, at least for the human inhabitants of the archipelago that Argentina attempted unsuccessfully to invade in 1982. On just shy of nine miles of grass and rock at the edge of that territory, however, one island is home to nothing but bird life.
And thanks to one good-hearted photographer, it seems to be doing pretty well.
The story starts, as these things often do, with environmental degradation. Whaling camps, penguin oil rendering, sheep and cattle farming, plus an army of introduced rats, cats and rabbits, had left the island's ecological balance in a precarious state.
Then, in 1972, English naturalist and photographer Ian Jon Strange, who'd been involved in Falklands conservation since the 1960s, teamed up with Falklands resident Roddy Napier to buy the island. And they just stopped it all.
Road to recovery
Whaling was ended. Farming was phased out. Livestock came off the land. The focus shifted to research and low-impact wildlife tourism. And the island's ecology was given room to recover.
Strange spent decades studying bird colonies, writing books (he published ten on the Falklands) and promoting eco-tourism and land protection. From 1982-2013 he was advisor to the Ministry of Defence and the British Forces in the Falklands on environmental matters, and was honored with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1992.
Today, five penguin species live on the island (including gentoo, southern rockhopper and Magellanic penguins) alongside other birds including black-browed albatrosses, imperial shags and white-chinned petrels.
Most strikingly, more than two million breeding pairs of thin-billed prions now nest on New Island; an incredible number for a strip of land less than nine miles long. The Falklands tourism board counts 39 breeding bird species in total, and the island now carries both Important Bird Area and Key Biodiversity Area status.
Strange's camera did as much to achieve this as his cash. Long before drone footage and David Attenborough's Netflix series, his photographs and books were busy building the case that Falklands wildlife was worth protecting.
He died in 2018, aged 84. Much of the work is now being taken on board by Falklands Conservation, a local-membership non-governmental organisation. And his legacy remains highly visible today.
New Island draws small numbers of wildlife photographers and researchers each year, most arriving on the same kind of expedition ships that once carried Strange's own images out into the world.
It's a rare thing: an island made famous by photography, saved partly because of it, and tough enough to reach that photographs are the only way most of us will ever experience it.
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