His love of wild nature began as a teenager: after reading Karen Blixen he bought a piece of land near the writer’s house. In the early 1960s the great hunters still led safaris as in Out of Africa, but times were changing: the demographic explosion challenged the country’s scarce resources and put heavy pressure on the animals. Beard documented what he saw with diaries, photographs and collages, going against the current with sometimes shocking work, carcasses lying on the ground, facts typed or handwritten, sometimes in blood. "You cannot play with Mother Nature; we are artificial, far from it. We will be its disaster."