Sir John Philip Lister Lister-Kaye, 8th Baronet, OBE (born 8 May 1946) is an English naturalist, conservationist, author who is owner and director of the Aigas Field Centre, among other business interests.
[1] He was born into an ancient established family who for many generations had been Yorkshire landowners, distinguished political figures and successful industrialists with interests in both quarrying and mining.
[2] After witnessing the ecological disaster that resulted from the sinking of the supertanker Torrey Canyon [off the Isles of Scilly] in 1967, Lister-Kaye then knew that a long-term career in industry was not for him.
In 1970, after the completion of The White Island, Lister-Kaye formed Highland Wildlife Enterprises, a natural history guiding service based at the village of Drumnadrochit, near Loch Ness.
[9] Lister-Kaye was commissioned to write a Penguin Special 'SealCull' (published 1979) on the political row that surrounded a proposal by the UK government to cull thousands of grey seals off the coast of Scotland.
Lister-Kaye's second autobiographical work, The Seeing Eye: Notes of a Highland Naturalist, which was published by Allen Lane in 1979, continues the story of his life from when he left Eilean Bàn in 1970 up until his purchase of Aigas in 1976.
Lister-Kaye's seventh book is the sequel to Song of the Rolling Earth, 'Nature's Child – Encounters with Wonders of the Natural World' (Time Warner 2004), and is about exciting expeditions and adventures with his youngest daughter Hermione.
In 2000, to celebrate the millennium Lister-Kaye took ten members of his family and Aigas Field centre staff on an expedition to follow the footsteps of Laurens van der Post's across the Kalahari Desert (recounted in Nature's Child).
In 2008, with his son Warwick and daughter Hermione, Lister-Kaye mounted a private Land Rover expedition up 8,000 miles of Africa's Great Rift Valley from Malawi to Ethiopia to explore and write about the human ecology of the seven countries they passed through.