The real curiosity in The Curious Mister Catesby, the premiere of which took place at the Royal Society on November 14, is why so few people either in Britain or the US have heard of him at all. Mark Catesby was in many ways the most important artist and scientist of the Americas. He was certainly the first to set out in loving detail an extraordinary collection of drawings and information about the birds, insects, other wildlife and plants of the then colonies. Yet John James Audubon, whose work was published more than a century later than his forebear’s, and whose style it might be charitably said owed not a little to Catesby, is a much more famous individual.

This comparative anonymity might — and should — be corrected by a documentary film, which is more a labour of love than a hard-headed commercial venture. Aimed principally at informing an American audience about the person who did most to catalogue a natural world then occupied by a comparative handful of settlers, it started life as the project of one man — David Elliot — supported by, among others, the Catesby Commemorative Trust, based in Charleston, South Carolina. It was produced and directed by Cynthia Neal, who has established herself as a leading figure in the filming of the natural world in the US.

Catesby, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society, was an Englishman, believed to have been born in Essex in 1683, but he spent several years in America — first in Virginia, then in what was the single colony of the Carolinas, where he had been sent on a plant-finding expedition, later in Spanish Florida, and finally in what are now the Bahamas.

The task of transforming a weighty volume such as the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first published account of the flora and fauna of North America, into a film is inherently demanding. In this instance, it has been accomplished with style. It deserves a much bigger platform, perhaps on TV.