'In the 1990s I spent several months camped at Drotsky's Camp in the Panhandle area of the Okavango in Botswana with the sole intention of getting material for bird paintings of Carmine Bee Eaters which had a huge nesting site in the high riverbank upstream of the camp. I also put up a hide next to the stream that flowed between the vast papyrus beds of the Okavango and the riverbank. From these hides I saw every kind of bird imaginable including this tiny (really tiny) little hawk which would flutter down regularly to drink an arm's length away from my position in the hide. This painting was the result of hundreds of those sightings. However when I look at this painting I am reminded also that one morning when I was fully focused on what my little visitor was doing, I failed to notice a very large black mamba slithering into my hide from the back. When I finally realised what was in the hide with me I nearly had a heart attack. Luckily by the time I noticed it, the snake was already on its way out of the hide. I never saw the head of the mamba. '

.