To travel with Bristol is to travel with a profoundly interesting man who has influenced biology on a global scale.

During his PhD work in the early 1960s, Bristol discovered the universal truth later called Foster's Rule (or the island rule): that rodents usually get larger on islands throughout the world while hoofed mammals get smaller. Published in Nature, the rule was later expanded upon by E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur in The Theory of Island Biogeography.

Whether you travel to Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), the Galapagos Islands or any other, you will no doubt learn of island biogeography.

Since then, Bristol has been a professor, teacher, documentary filmmaker and museum director -- contributing greatly both to our understanding of the natural world and to its preservation.

Bristol spent his first 21 years in Toronto, after which he had accumulated a Bachelor's degree in Biology and Master's in Mammalogy. By then he figured it was time for an adventure. So he took off around the world for 18 months with Robert Bateman (an artist and teacher who now lives in B.C.). They crossed Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Australia in a land rover.

Then, turning his attention to the "exotic world" of his home country, Canada, Bristol went to Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) to study the evolution of the archipelago's native mammals for his PhD. It was there that he discovered Foster's Rule.

Although the next decade of his life took him away from Haida Gwaii, he and these "misty isles" had not seen the last of each other. He returned to Africa, where he was head of wildlife ecology studies at the University of Nairobi (Kenya). There, he wrote a book and articles on the ecology of Kenya, and especially about giraffes. He returned to B.C. to become the Director of the world-renowned Royal BC Museum.

When the novelty of this desk job wore off, Bristol led a government program for 10 years to establish Ecological Reserves throughout B.C., which brought him into the debate about protecting Gwaii Haanas, particularly the Windy Bay Ecological Reserve, in Haida Gwaii. Gwaii Haanas was protected in 1987.

Since then Bristol has made 14 natural history documentaries and helped to lead ecotours on four continents.