About me

My name is Daniel James Phillips, I was born on the 30th of may 1988 to Janet and David Phillips. When I was 11 years old, my family moved to southern France. Where I could benefit from a laid back and peaceful village to go out exploring, that's when I first got interested in scorpions, and then snakes and from there all reptiles and amphibians. It was Steve Irwin who got me interested in these animals, this is the first time I saw him:

I always remembered the first time I saw him, the "crazy" man, one day when I was playing with my dinosaurs in our back garden (as a kid, you know you love dinosaurs too !), my dad called out: "Dan, there's crocodiles on TV". I rushed into the front room to see a blond guy, an aussie on top of a HUGE crocodile, Cricky he said, She's a beauty he screamed, since that day I was hooked on the Crocodile hunter, every time it was on I was parked on the sofa. He made some amazing viewing. I was always fascinated by the techniques used to catch dangerous reptiles, he's my hero. So when we moved to the South of France, I saw snakes, I saw lizards, I saw my passion and by using his techniques and building up my skill and reflexes, I've become a reptile fan.

I started to get interested in 1997 when I "discovered" the Crocodile hunter on the discovery channel.
Since then it was all just a dream until my family and I moved to the south of France where I could finally live my dream of studying and helping reptiles.

MY HOBBY

At first I only caught the reptiles that I saw but after a while, I wanted to make records of what I saw, so I used cameras to photograph the different species, in 2000 I got my first field guide which helped me enormously with learning the different species and telling the difference.

Now I work at locating populations of species and then try to protect it by keeping check on the population numbers and making sure no one to harm them comes near their habitat.

Me on the floor with a large Ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) wanting to run by me - June 2006

Closer inspection on this Ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) female - October 2006