BBC_Wild Cameramen at Work_2of4_Land
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Scotland, a paradise for wildlife and a cameraman's dream.
00:16This country, with its rugged mountains and endless coastline, has produced a generation
00:22of the best wildlife cameramen in the world.
00:28For decades, five filmmakers, all rooted in Scotland, have travelled the globe to bring
00:34home incredible images, shaping our understanding of the natural world.
00:41How did these men learn the incredible skills needed for catching the natural world in action?
00:49What is it that prepared them for travelling the globe and enduring the toughest of environments?
00:58In this series, these five cameramen will share their extraordinary stories and the
01:03secrets of their trade.
01:05Secrets often learned from filming wildlife in the wildest parts of Scotland.
01:13But this time, the camera is on them.
01:33When filming land mammals, large and small, our cameraman must take on every kind of environment.
01:42Through jungle, savannah, mountains and forests, they track some of the planet's most remarkable
01:53creatures.
01:55My career has rested on the resilience and ingenuity of men like these.
02:01The shots they capture give us an intimate insight into life in the natural world.
02:12Spawn Gordon Buchanan is an expert at forging relationships with land animals.
02:19He has filmed some of the planet's rarest and most dangerous animals, sometimes getting
02:27too close to them.
02:28Got a bear.
02:29Well, I'll show you how close it is.
02:34Too close.
02:38Gordon is famous for his work with big cats.
02:43In the grasslands of the Maasai Mara in Kenya, he spent time following a family of leopards.
02:50Filming these shy animals takes skill and patience.
02:55Leopards will do their utmost to stay out of sight.
03:00So if you do manage to find a leopard, it is incredibly exciting because, you know,
03:05just getting a glimpse of the animal, you know that it's special.
03:08If you're able to stay with it for a length of time, you know that every second that you're
03:13with it, it is an intimate moment.
03:19Spending extended periods of time getting to know big cats is a unique privilege.
03:25Gordon had the good fortune to film Bella the leopard for three years.
03:32I got to know this one cat and it was amazing.
03:36It was like seeing an old friend when I went back there.
03:43This one occasion, because we were hooking up with Bella every single day, we knew that
03:48she hadn't eaten for four days and that's sort of getting to the point where the survival
03:52of her cubs, her own survival, depends on her being able to run something down and catch it.
04:06When it comes to watching something like a leopard hunt, you know, it is fantastic
04:16because you are seeing one of these rare spectacles, something that's incredibly difficult to see
04:21and even harder to film.
04:30Those are the shots that you go to bed at night time just kind of smiling to yourself
04:35and kind of, I suppose, quite smugly because the chances of messing up are really, really high.
04:44Gordon first learned about wildcat behaviour in his native Scotland.
04:52His big break came when he spent a year filming wildlife, including Scottish wildcats, in the Cairngorms.
05:03It was probably one of the most challenging years that I've ever had.
05:08I definitely learned to become a filmmaker, I think, just in that period of time because
05:13I had to make these three half-hour films and having never done that before, I was just
05:20learning on the job.
05:23His mentor at the time was naturalist Dick Balharry.
05:28Fifteen years later, they meet again in the Cairngorms.
05:33I remember when you came here, you were so keen and really up for everything and strong
05:37and able.
05:38Where are they?
05:39So I think we'll go and get them.
05:41How do you feel when you come back here to, you know, see this land and then compare it
05:47to all your world sort of, you know, jaunts?
05:50I could spend a happy day up in the Cairngorms as happy as I would be in the jungles of Papua
05:58New Guinea.
05:59But I think there's something, there's something special about Scotland and I don't think that's
06:02just because I'm Scottish, there's a sort of magic and a mystery to a lot of what Scotland
06:08has to offer.
06:10And the more I travel, the more I see that Scotland is unique.
06:20These special landscapes feed a passion for wildlife.
06:24They proved an effective training ground for another Scotland-based wildlife cameraman,
06:29Mark Smith.
06:35From the icy wastes of the Antarctic, via the Australian outback and the remote Falkland
06:42Islands, Mark has filmed all over the world.
06:48But it was Scotland he fell in love with and decided to make his home.
06:54I wanted to come up and live here on the west coast because I think it's one of the most
06:59beautiful places I've ever seen.
07:03I'll go on filming trips, you know, to Africa or to Asia and spend six weeks really sort
07:08of banging your head against a brick wall trying to get the shots to look nice and the
07:14light's so harsh and then you come back here and you think why aren't there more films
07:19made around here because the light, the quality of the light is just fantastic and you go
07:24into some of these forests, some of these woodlands and it's the most beautiful, beautiful
07:29thing you've seen.
07:30Much more beautiful than the place you've often been away filming.
07:37In Gordon, Mark learned the essential skills of wildlife filmmaking in the Scottish Highlands.
07:45He spent seven months in beautiful Glen Afrik near Loch Ness, tracking and filming red deer.
07:55We got a camper van and just kind of immersed ourselves in the place, spent time with the
07:59animals and get to know them, sort of get inside their head a bit.
08:09Mark has returned to Glen Afrik to see if he can find his old friends.
08:15Everybody thinks that filming wildlife in Scotland or the UK is, you know, it's kind
08:22of easier for some reason but actually it's completely opposite.
08:25I mean most of the animals here are really often very frightened of people because there's
08:31a lot of people in the country and they're often being hunted and so really starting
08:37to film in Scotland is a great kind of training ground about getting close to animals.
08:42If you can get close to a lot of the wild animals in Scotland then you can probably
08:45do it in most places in the world.
08:47Red deer generally, they can be the most difficult animals, you know, ever to film.
08:52And um, there's another one coming, fantastic.
08:57So that's two of them, there's one behind, yeah, that's three of them, nice.
09:05Oh, he's even nicer this one.
09:10They're just looking over the top at us.
09:13Northern Pakistan in winter.
09:17A most unforgiving landscape with challenging terrain, but home to the rarely seen snow leopard.
09:27The snow leopard was kind of the holy grail of wildlife filmmaking.
09:32There had been films made about snow leopards, but they weren't really about them.
09:38They were not about snow leopards, they were about a lot of wildlife filmmaking.
09:40There had been films made about snow leopards and good films as well, but they'd always
09:46been in places where it was almost impossible to get close to them.
09:49You didn't really sort of feel intimate with the animal at all.
10:01We turned up in this place after some extraordinary journey, some kind of boy's own adventure.
10:06getting over at least 12,000-foot passes to get into this valley in winter.
10:14Christmas Day was spent on a fruitless search for the elusive leopard.
10:19Then, five days later, he received some promising news.
10:24We just got a report that there's a snow leopard up on the ridge.
10:29We're too low to where we were before, so we're just trying to get some height to get a better view of it.
10:36People on the radio said it was just up the valley on the cliff on the left here.
10:43When I first saw that snow leopard, I just could not believe it.
10:46Because you can imagine, you're in this incredible mountain environment.
10:50Every hour of the day, you're scanning this hillside, these rocks, for something that looks like a snow leopard.
10:56And after two weeks, three weeks of that, you just think this is never going to happen.
11:00These animals don't exist.
11:01And then, for your binoculars suddenly to be filled with that animal looking straight at you, it was just extraordinary.
11:12And actually, the last thing in your mind at that moment is filming it.
11:20For three weeks, he filmed the behaviour of mother and cub in intimate detail.
11:25But he still lacked the prized hunting sequence.
11:32On the very last day of the shoot, they spotted an injured markhor next to the leopard's cave.
11:39We thought, if ever it's going to happen, this is a chance we've got to film a real proper hunt.
11:45And we had about two hours left of daylight.
11:51About three o'clock in the afternoon, she went to the corner of the cave, looked around and immediately saw this markhor.
11:58And she went into this hole, stalking up the hillside.
12:05And got to this point where she could obviously see the markhor, and she disappeared behind this rock.
12:14I'm looking through this viewfinder, it's a black and white viewfinder, right on the end of a long lens.
12:19And you think, if you take your eyes off this rock now, and then she comes out, you'll never find her again.
12:26Because you cannot find anything in that landscape.
12:29And then suddenly she went.
12:56In my memory, it took several minutes. The whole shot's actually over in a few seconds.
13:03It was an incredible feeling of achievement. Finally you've done it.
13:07And it's probably five seconds of real elation before you start worrying whether it's in focus and all the rest of the worries that you have after it.
13:16Mark was the first person ever to film a snow leopard hunting.
13:25Gordon Buchanan also bagged a filming first when working in the unforgiving bamboo groves of China.
13:33Pandas are famous for mating only rarely. Some pairs only mate once in their lives.
13:40Not surprising then that the act had never been filmed in the wild before.
13:45Pandas, China, bamboo. I was thinking it would be, I don't know, maybe just kind of big groves of bamboo with pandas in there somewhere.
13:54No, this was sort of incredibly steep mountains covered in the thickest bamboo ever.
14:03And bamboo is the worst thing to walk through. It snags on everything, it twangs back, hits you in the face.
14:10It sort of trips you up. It is impenetrable.
14:15So we get up to the top of the mountains where the pandas were at that time of year.
14:20And you just sit and listen. If you could hear pandas off in the distance, you could start working your way towards them.
14:28You call across the valleys, males letting other males know that they're there, females letting males know that they're there.
14:35And we really struck lucky. We just happened to be there at the perfect time and managed to film this sequence.
14:53It was so difficult going through the bamboo that we'd actually ditched the tripod sort of, you know, days and nights.
15:00It was so difficult going through the bamboo that we'd actually ditched the tripod sort of, you know, days and days before because it was impossible.
15:08So I'd shot that entire sequence sort of on my shoulder, which isn't ideal when you're shooting wildlife.
15:14That's kind of sort of page one of the wildlife filmmaker's handbook is use a tripod.
15:19But, you know, sometimes the behavior outweighs the technical kind of quality of the images.
15:26Wildlife cameramen need an in-depth knowledge of animal behavior.
15:33But they can't know every animal they're asked to film.
15:37One day the phone went and the producer said, lovely if you could go off and try and film a Colugo sequence for us.
15:44I was, yeah, sure, yeah, great. I haven't got a clue what this is.
15:48I thought, I'll try and get some more information.
15:50I thought, I'll try and get some more information.
15:52So were you thinking of filming?
15:54So Bonnie was like, OK, good, we've got a kind of sort of, and I didn't know what Colugo was.
15:58And I think I kind of sort of quietly went over to my computer and sort of tried to tap in, like, how would you spell Colugo?
16:04And then it up it popped. Yes, of course, people call them the flying lemur, don't they?
16:08Yes, but they don't fly and they're not a lemur.
16:10So suddenly I was looking at an image of this really peculiar looking creature.
16:16Filming the Colugo was a significant challenge.
16:20It's one of the world's most camouflaged animals and only comes out at night.
16:26They blend in perfectly, you know, they kind of, these flaps of skin that go from their arms to their legs
16:33that kind of actually flap in against the side of a tree.
16:36So when they're lying against a tree trunk they just become part of the tree.
16:40They could be like 50 feet up the trees and they're just sort of boings, just jump off the tree and glide.
16:49So I thought, you know, God, OK, how do we do it?
16:54But then we just sort of began to understand the animal, how they move, what they were likely to do,
17:00you know, so the unpredictable became slightly predictable.
17:10The sad thing about filming wildlife is that the moment that the most incredible things are happening,
17:16you are terrified about messing it up.
17:19And, you know, it's a shame because I've been lucky enough to see lots of incredible things
17:25but at the time it's, I find it really, it's really quite stressful
17:30because you're sort of, you know, you're in the middle of, you know,
17:35at the time it's, I find it really, it's really quite stressful
17:39because, you know, this has never been filmed before, it's a unique piece of behaviour
17:44so it has to be focused and composed and sort of the camera has to be running,
17:48they have to make sure that, OK, is that battery about to run out?
17:51So there's kind of not that many things to think about
17:53but when you combine it with something rare and unusual,
17:56it spoils the experience a little bit to observe that
18:01but then I suppose if you manage to record it on tape,
18:04you've got the rest of your life to sit back and watch it again and again.
18:15A memorable shoot for Mark Smith was with wolves in the sparse open wilderness of the Arctic.
18:24The real challenge of filming these Arctic wolves up on Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic
18:29was the fact that the landscape is so huge.
18:33So you have to go through this whole process of surveying your landscape,
18:37working out where you can go.
18:40Say for instance the river, you have to work out how deep the river is.
18:44The only way we could do it, we had to take our trousers off and our socks and shoes
18:49and walk in this river to see how deep it was
18:53and put little cairns at each crossing point which is this braided river
18:56so the next time you know you can just drive straight across and follow them.
19:03When you're following this pack, they've become very used to you.
19:08I mean they're quite naive wolves anyway, they've not really seen humans before.
19:13So you'd be going along with them as they're on a hunt,
19:17so they're going far through the landscape.
19:20You're there trying to keep up with them
19:22and at one point the tamest of the whole pack came right up next to me, lolloping along
19:28and she'd be within three feet of the quad bike
19:31and she'd look up at me as if to say,
19:34why are you so useless, why are you going so slowly?
19:37It was the most amazing moment.
19:53A golden rule for wildlife cameramen
19:56has always been to simply observe nature and never interfere.
20:09Ignore me, ignore me, ignore me, get away.
20:15But when he was working on a series about North American black bears,
20:19Gordon broke this rule several times.
20:22Part of me is just going to pick her up and give her a big cuddle.
20:27The bears were being studied by controversial animal biologist Dr Lynn Rogers
20:33who adopts a more hands-on approach.
20:36This is all part of Lynn's unconventional technique
20:42which is by giving a bear a few handouts
20:45that they'll let you, well, touch them
20:49so you can put a collar on them
20:52and follow them and just observe their natural behaviour.
20:55And to be honest I was really dubious about it at the beginning
20:59but now I see it, I really see that it is quite incredible what Lynn has been able to do.
21:06Touching a wild animal is something that I kind of didn't ever want to do.
21:10I never wanted to get hands-on, I was quite happy to watch and observe
21:16It took time for me to figure out what it was all about
21:20and I saw very quickly the benefits of, you know, this little system that was in place.
21:25You know, what you could reveal about those animals' lives.
21:30It's quite easy to forget what an amazing beast this is.
21:39One must always remind oneself that they are big, wild animals.
21:45When one of the mother bears abandoned her cub
21:49Gordon was faced with a dilemma
21:52and one which took him into further controversial territory.
21:56Should he intervene and save her life?
22:00It wasn't an issue for me.
22:03I could see that this was a bear cub that needed help
22:07and I thought, well, forget this, you know, forget this line.
22:10By helping this animal, seeing it through a tough time,
22:14just a couple of weeks, giving it a little bit of food
22:18is going to make the difference between life and death.
22:22We did everything we could to keep her alive and she survived.
22:34A few years before getting close to the black bears
22:37Gordon found himself in a much more dangerous situation
22:41on a night shoot in Sri Lanka.
22:48He was surrounded by a group of crocodiles and leopards
22:52who were fighting over a wild boar carcass.
22:56Twelve crocodiles came in and did this massive tussle with the carcass
23:01and dragged it into this thick, thick lantana bush
23:04and you just couldn't see anything at all.
23:08And I sat there and kind of weighed up my options
23:11and I thought, I'll maybe just encourage this carcass out of the bushes a bit.
23:15It's at least a place where I could see it and a place that I could film it.
23:20So I walk, sort of picking my way between the crocodiles that were there,
23:24leant into the bush and grabbed a hold of this huge pig's trotter
23:28and start sort of pulling it out and I kind of tug on this thing
23:31and it must have weighed about, you know, easily 12, 13 stone.
23:35And I sort of snagged and pulled it out and I just sort of looked up
23:39and I had a head torch on and just on this little kind of rock
23:44there was three fully grown leopards just watching me.
23:48And I thought, you know, God, I remember what a domestic cat was like
23:52if you went anywhere near its food when it was eating
23:55and I thought, well, in for a penny in for a pound.
23:57So I just kept on pulling this thing and pulled it clear of the bushes.
24:04And by the time I actually switched the camera back on
24:07the leopards were back on the carcass and happily feeding away.
24:12I wouldn't say I was fearless, but I get a buzz out of doing things
24:16that are a little bit, a little bit dicey.
24:21Gordon was only able to capture this extraordinary sequence
24:24with the use of an infrared camera.
24:29Huge advances in technology have helped unlock the secrets
24:33of animals' nocturnal behaviour.
24:38Another piece of kit that has revolutionised wildlife filmmaking
24:42is the camera trap.
24:45The technology in a camera trap is really quite straightforward.
24:49It's a passive infrared sensor like you have in security lights
24:52and a camera in a waterproof box.
24:55And they are, they are fantastic.
24:58It gives you an opportunity to have a constant presence
25:02anywhere you want, 24 hours of the day.
25:06The camera trap proved crucial when Gordon was working in Bhutan.
25:13He went there to find out if tigers were living high up in the Himalayas.
25:17If they did, their chances of survival as a species would be much greater.
25:25These little camera traps, they're giving us a little kind of peek
25:29through a keyhole into a very rich environment,
25:33a place that is more than capable of supporting tigers.
25:38Come on, just once. I don't even want a whole tiger.
25:42I just want a tail.
25:44A stripe, an ear, just something to tell me that tigers are here.
25:49I just so wanted to find tigers there.
25:54It was so, so important for the survival,
25:58the long-term survival of tigers as a species.
26:03Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
26:07Oh. Oh, I don't believe it.
26:10Oh, my gosh. Oh. Oh, I don't believe it.
26:15Oh, God. Oh.
26:18Thank you, thank you, thank you.
26:25Oh, gosh.
26:28My reaction was just one of huge relief on so many different levels.
26:33I was completely overwhelmed.
26:41As a wildlife cameraman, there's a lot of sacrifice,
26:45and your family have to sacrifice a lot because you're away from home,
26:49and you only want to do that if it's worthwhile.
26:53And, you know, when we found these tigers, I thought,
26:57no, this is almost a lot of the absences,
27:00a lot of the time I spent away from my wife and my kids,
27:04it's been worth it because we've done something really quite important.
27:11The work of wildlife cameramen
27:14can help ensure the very survival of a species.
27:19These tenacious individuals work in difficult conditions
27:24to capture enduring images of the natural world.
27:28Images that can help safeguard its conservation.
27:34I think you have to be kind of quite stubborn
27:37to just keep going relentlessly each day, building this sequence.
27:45A lot of it is tough, a lot of it is physically very demanding,
27:50mentally very demanding, and it's lonely, and it can be boring.
27:55But on those rare occasions, and they are rare occasions
27:59when you look across your entire career,
28:02where you are able to get what you're after
28:04and capture something interesting, something unique,
28:08something never seen before on film,
28:11that's when I realise that I do have the best job in the world.
28:20Next time, our cameramen are looking to the sky,
28:24filming flying devils in the Falklands,
28:28black kites on a dump in Delhi,
28:31and sharks looking for an easy meal.
28:34That was lovely, I hope it shows.