In the 1960s June Nelson and her husband, renowned ornithologist Bryan Nelson, spent a "madcap" year camping in the Galápagos Islands to study the abundant birdlife.
Now aged 85, the audacious naturalist remembers their many eye-opening adventures, including the bizarre experience of lunch with the late Duke of Edinburgh aboard the Britannia, their clothes in tatters.
June has detailed their adventures in the book Galapagos Crusoes, which updates Bryan's celebrated 1968 publication Galapagos: Islands of Birds. Bryan was made an MBE in 2006 for his work with seabirds. He died in 2015.
Shortly after June and Bryan married, they spent three years on Bass Rock, an island to the east of Scotland in the Firth of Forth - a steep volcanic rock home to a large colony of gannets.
They stayed for as long as the gannets did, living in a freezing shed.
"It had no insulation, you could see through the planks and the floor was really really cold. It just came straight through, almost onto our camp beds, it was quite terrible," June told Kim Hill.
This may have been their first adventure together but it was far from their last.
"I was really interested in wildlife before I met Bryan and I had actually ringed a gannet before he had so I think I was more or less destined to have a life a bit like that.
"I just so love living outside, I love watching wildlife, we were fantastically busy, Bryan worked nonstop."
It's what helped them sustain the lifestyle, she says.
On Genovesa [Galápagos] (also known as Tower Island) there was no water and the couple only had water they had stored in polythene containers. "That very quickly became unpleasantly green."
They made a solar still, but eventually little crabs began to make holes in the contraption.
"It all felt part of living on a desert island, that really, we were part of this wildlife [but] none of it was really really scary. Mostly we could enjoy it," she says.
June says while not very tall, she has strong bones, is fit and eats well, she can cope really well with what's thrown at her.
"Of course, Bryan had been studying for all that time, he was quite a fragile person as well. He was very tough, and he spent a lot of his time outside but even so, things took a toll on him, and he didn't sleep well."
On Espanola, the couple put their tent up in the middle of sea lion territory - there were very few campsites and a lot of rock, June says.
"That was very difficult, it had him awake every night."
The sea lion mothers were quite protective of their babies and the babies were really up for being tickled, she says.
"The bulls were a bit ferocious and they're absolutely enormous. If one decides to charge you, it's quite difficult to decide what to do."
June says she's sad the kind of adventures she and Bryan had couldn't happen today.
"For one thing, health and safety just wouldn't let you go off wandering like that. For another thing, the Galápagos is now, quite rightly, very very carefully protected, all parties on the islands have to have a guide, people aren't allowed to stay more than about two hours and they're very much control.
"It's had a huge benefit on the wildlife."
When she and Bryan were on the islands, terrible things were happening, she says.
"Tortoises were still being shipped off for food, turtles being caught. Quite a lot of marine life is still being caught but there are quite large, protected areas around the Galápagos and I think they are making considerable headway."
After the couple spent the year on the two Galápagos Islands, they went off to study the Peruvian Booby - a type of gannet.
It was a watershed moment in June's life.
"We were very excited to go and see another species of booby, something quite different nesting very, very densely. We knew that their behaviour would be different from very close relatives but actually when we got there...there wasn't a single green thing on the island.
"We did enjoy having a new species to study but the actual life there was pretty miserable."
Everything was covered in guano, she says - the accumulated excrement of sea birds and bats.
"You sat down for a rest and clouds of guano were around you because everything was so dry. I can't say we enjoyed living there, I was quite pleased to leave."
During that time, June ended up questioning her existence. "I was just so fed up."
She wondered if her marriage would survive but the couple got through it, "it was just a blip", she says.
Later in life the couple travelled to Christmas Island and were influential in establishing a national park there.
"Christmas Island is the only place in the world that Abbott's boobies nest and already the island had been extensively mined for phosphate. The areas that they'd mined they had to remove all of the vegetation and then dig out the phosphate from between the limestone pinnacles."
Photo: Dumfries and Galloway Standard
What was left looked like the moon, she says.
Abbott's booby are very unusual, and nest 100 feet up in trees. "But once they started mining the phosphate, farmers were crying out for fertiliser, there would have been no stopping them."
The rehabilitation centre at the national park now cares for 80-100 orphaned or injured birds annually.
