Stephen Mills

Stephen Mills has made over 40 films for television and is a former Chairman of the International Association of Wildlife Filmmakers.

He wrote the award-winning BBC films Tiger Crisis and Wolf Saga, wrote and filmed the BBC tiger film Man-Eater: To Be or Not To Be and filmed for major BBC series including The Private Life of Plants, Land of the Tiger, Winners and Losers and Survivors. He has published over 500 papers and articles, writing extensively for New Scientist, The Times Literary Supplement and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

He is the author of Nature In its Place (Bodley Head) and Tiger (BBC), is a graduate of Oxford University and California Institute of the Arts and a Churchill Fellow.

Stephen’s life story, Natural Causes, was published by Chiselbury in Spring 2024 and is available here

Breathed on by a tiger, stalked by a lion, nearly flattened by a rhino, struck by lightning and rocked by an earthquake… A wildlife filmmaker’s life is certainly exciting. But there’s a serious side to these adventures. In the last 50 years nature films have helped to shape public awareness of both the beauty of the natural world and its plight. Environmental issues that once seemed peripheral are now centre-stage.

 Stephen Mills has been a leading cameraperson and writer and this is a book about his life in film. Natural Causes tells the story of his campaigns, his companions, his colleagues, the challenges and charms of the landscapes in which he has worked and the extraordinary wild animals he has filmed. And it is a book about one man’s modest bid to ever-so-slightly change the world. For, at its heart, Natural Causes touches on the profound spiritual importance of nature to us all. 

 “… if you have a dream, a mission, a wish to change the world, you can do it. You can do it as long as you accept that the dream may shrink, the mission may creep a little and the change you make may be very small and that all those little bites out of your ambitions in no way render them pointless.”