I had been a wildlife artist all my life when I first encountered sharks. After observing bears, racoons, cougars, and the other birds and mammals of North America, I was not expecting to see much of interest in such an ancient line of animals, but was intrigued to find strong signs that they were using cognition in their daily lives, and were more alert and quick thinking than people. Faced with an unanticipated richness of community into which the sharks had accepted me, I hung out with them for years, writing down everything that they did, everything that happened. It was they who convinced me that animals have unknown capacities, understanding, and intelligence, that has been overlooked for too long, in this world that exploits them. And when they were finned, I wrote down their story, my first book, The Shark Sessions. Since then I have written seven more books about wildlife behaviour, and published several scientific behaviour about the sharks, who were lost to the shark fin trade, and shark conservation.