Most of my North American adventures were captured in two wild sanctuaries: Chincoteague Island, Virginia, and the raw majesty of Yellowstone National Park. Chincoteague was a world of secrets, and Martin, Chris, and I spent endless weekends chasing its wild heart through the lens of a camera. Every turn revealed a new marvel—flocks of waterfowl erupting from glassy marshes, their wings flashing in the sunlight, and the iconic Spanish ponies tearing across open fields, manes whipping like banners in the wind.

But it was the Sika deer that stole our breath. Small, elusive, and cloaked in mystery, they seemed like ghosts of another land. Legend has it the Boy Scouts of America brought them here from Asia, and now they haunt these shores with their bugling cries—sounds eerily akin to elk, rising and falling through the stillness of dawn.

Chincoteague wasn’t just a place; it was a living, breathing masterpiece. Loblolly pine forests tangled with mature dunes. Marshes whispered secrets to the sea. Beaches stretched like pale ribbons beneath an endless sky. To walk there was to stand inside an ecological symphony, where every note was wild and untamed.

To close this North American gallery, we shift to an unexpected corner of the wild—the Duke Primate Center in the heart of Duke Forest, Durham, North Carolina. Here, far from the red soils of Madagascar, I found myself face to face with the island’s most iconic residents: ring-tailed lemurs.

It wasn’t the open savannah or the spiny desert of their homeland, but Duke’s work in preserving these rare marsupials was nothing short of extraordinary. Filming them was an absolute privilege. Their amber eyes glowed like molten gold as they leapt through the dappled forest light, their striped tails curling like living ribbons against the green. Every frame captured not just an animal, but a fragment of a vanishing world—a glimpse into Madagascar’s soul, alive and thriving in a sanctuary half a world away.