Well that was a lot of fun. Two weeks bobbing around on the Arctic Ocean filming Orcas, Humpbacks, Fin Whales and whatever else rolled by for the BBC’s Atlantic series.

I’m very aware of the grim state of many of the world’s marine ecosystems, and I have absolutely nothing to compare my experience to (I suspect that the abundance of life in this region was simply staggering a couple of hundred years ago) but I was really impressed with the mass of life that surrounded us in our little boat. Every day we would see orcas and humpbacks, most days we’d also see fin whales too, and judging by the fantastic underwater footage that David Reichard shot – colossal seething schools of herring – there was plenty going on beneath the surface.

Our boat, us, and a humpback. Courtesy of Thomas Evensen and his drone, may it rest in peace.

It seemed slightly bizarre; it was cold, sometimes rough, dark, but you could look at the horizon most days and loose count of the dozens of puffs of moist breath, looking like little chimney’s, as various whale species exhaled.

The behaviour we wanted to film was orcas co-operatively hunting herring; they herd schools into dense bait balls before whacking them with their tails to stun them, then they pick off individual fish as they float to the surface. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, it’s very cool, and very difficult to film.

Here I’m about to test if an Immersion Suit works with the fly open

We’d be out before dawn looking for signs that the orcas were feeding – usually flocks of gulls on the horizon – and then try to manoeuvre the boat into position to drop the divers close enough to the action to film what was going on. This was all very tricky, the feeding bouts wouldn’t usually last very long, maybe a few minutes, and they could range over a pretty wide area.

Herring would bubble to the surface 40m of the port bow and there would be orca dorsal fins slicing the water in the distinctive way they do when they are feeding, we’d drop the divers in the water, but before they had time to get organised the main action would be on the other side of the boat moving away faster than the divers could swim. Or a huge humpback would steam through the bait ball ruining everything for both us and the orcas. This would be repeated regularly though the day, the divers getting in and out of a pitching and rolling boat – the water was cold and the wind bitter.

My job was to try to cover the action from topside, which had it’s own set of challenges. We’d toyed with the idea of bringing some kind of gyrostabilised camera platform to cope with the boat movement, but decided against it on the grounds of cost and practicality, which ultimately proved to be the right decision. The orca behaviour was so unpredictable; they never pop up in the same place twice, and never for more than a couple of seconds. The only way you could react fast enough to get an animal in frame was to be hand-held on the front deck. So I’d spend my days attempting to stay on my feet holding a heavy camera, trying to stabilise the boat movement, while aiming for shots where focus and framing were critical, and trying not to puke. A bit like performing neurosurgery while on a trampoline. I think I got better as the shoot went on, I didn’t puke.

Photo Kenneth Pettersen

It was fantastic fun, brilliant wildlife, a really great team and phenomenal scenery.

Huge thanks to Andrew, Lucy, David, Tore, PB, Anders, Thomas and Kenneth for making it so memorable – our brilliant Norwegian friends very kindly fed us cod cooked in unusual ways and didn’t throw us in the sea despite the threats.

I also got to see the Northern Lights for the first time, very very special, and impossible to do justice to with an image.

I’m about to head off to the west coast of Ireland for a week to work with my great friends, and ace film-makers, Ken & Katrina O’Sullivan, but while I’m away Wild Brazil starts on BBC2.

I filmed the jaguars, giant otters, and some other stuff. A great team, fantastic country and magical wildlife.

Here’s a jaguar…

… and here’s a giant otter

Home at last from my last shoot of 2013. It’s been a fantastic year of filming – everything from Chimpanzees in Senegal to Hermit Crabs in Belize, Lions in the Masai Mara to wolves in Alaska. Lots of great experiences, wonderful wildlife, great places and people, very good to be home now though.

This last shoot (for BBC1’s upcoming Survival series and BBC2’s Alaska series) was 5 weeks in Alaska, with a varied shopping list including Bald Eagles, Ravens, Wolves and Arctic Ground Squirrels. Starting in Haines for 10 days of eagles on the Chillkat River then moving on up to Anchorage for scavengers, scenery and ground squirrels. In terms of  the sheer beauty and interest of imagery this was probably one of my best ever shoots. A lot of the subjects were things I’d filmed before and that familiarity of knowing the locations and animals really helped make the most of the amazing conditions we were presented with.

We had some brutally cold weather with lovely low light mixed with periods where it warmed up and dumped huge amounts of snow. So there was always something in the conditions that made already wonderful wildlife sequences really special; slow motion Bald Eagle aerial combat with big fat flakes of snow falling, 20 ravens squabbling over a moose carcass all backlit and covered in hoarfrost at -30C, I probably shot too much.

The really exciting news was that, after 10 years of trying, I finally managed to film the wolves that live on the outskirts of Anchorage. This was no mean feat, required a huge amount of planning, and use of one of the most bizarre cameras I’ve ever come across; a prototype military thermal camera called the Selex Merlin. This was an amazing piece of technology which looked like it had come from a 1970’s episode of Dr Who. It’s utterly bizarre; there are no glass elements in the image path – instead the thermal radiation is focussed through elements made from Germanium, the sensor has to be constantly cooled to about -190C and the whole lot has to be housed inside a vacuum. All operations – zoom, focus, calibration etc are operated via a touch screen. The whole rig runs off a combination of 12 & 24V and sits there chattering away constantly as its cooling system and vacuum pump do their thing.

The slightly odd thing was that, when the wolves did appear – which was a genuinely amazing moment – you felt slightly removed from the whole experience. We knew the wolves would probably only come in at night, hence the deceision to try to film them with the thermal camera. So that meant committing to spending whole nights in a hide – this was a bit of a challenge with temperatures getting close to -30C.

So you would be bundled up in the hide wearing every imaginable piece of hi-tech-down-filled clothing you could squeeze into, sitting in complete darkness with the vacuum pump from the camera puttering away and looking at a tiny screen. The hours would drift by and you would get increasingly cold.

Then, like an apparition, a wolf would suddenly be there on the screen. There would be no warning – nothing you could hear over the noise of the camera at least – so it did feel slightly supernatural. And then you would be sitting 30m or so from a wild wolf in a midst of a pitch black Alaskan night, and there only evidence you would have of its presence would be this slightly bizzare image on the thermal camera’s screen. So you knew you were experiencing a very special close encounter with a near mythical creature, but it was all rather removed and indirect – very memorable, but I still do wish I’d been able to see one with my own eyes.

The joys of spending long periods of time in a hide means that, eventually, nature calls. Answering that call at -30C when you have 8 layers of clothing on and have lost all sensation in your fingers is one of life’s small challenges. I’m sure you have never wondered what happens to a pee bottle at sub zero temperatures, but here’s a photo just in case you did.

We also used thermal cameras to film hibernating Arctic Ground Squirrels at the University of Alaska. These innocuous looking animals are, in fact, one of the most extraordinaliry weird creatures on earth. What they do during the course of their 270 day annual hibernation is utterly amazing and there is nothing quite like them. Their bodies cool to nearly -5C (holding a mammal that actually makes your hands cold is very odd), sections of their brains die, they breathe once a minute and their heart beats once a minute. They rouse themselves every couple of weeks, just up to normal operating temperature for a few hours, before descending back into this state of extreme torpor. We are still trying to unlock exactly what’s going on with this species – the physiological processes that go on inside an Arctic Ground Squirrel could allow us to deal with everything from degenerative brain diseases to long distance space travel.

It was a really great shoot – long and hard work, certainly not much sleep and the odd disaster (Tuppence broken finger, burning Jonathan’s truck – sometimes the Film God demands sacrifices)  – but a great team. Huge thanks to Tuppence, Joe, Jonathan, Rick, Glen Haasl and Dr Buck for making it all work.

While I was away one of my favourite musicians – Jim Hall – died aged 84. Jim was one of the cornerstones of jazz guitar, producing beautiful and relevant music for over half a century. His music was a sublime mix of intellect and emotion, a brilliant accompanist, soloist, writer and arranger – and seemed to be one of the most humble and lovely humans you could ever meet. I love all his work, my particular favourites are the two albums he did with pianist Bill Evans (Undercurrent and Intermodulation), the brilliant Live! and his album Concierto is absolutely divine – put it on your Christmas list.

A very Merry Christmas to everyone, I hope 2014 is fruitful, peaceful and happy. Love from all of us.

Back off to Alaska for my last shoot of the year. I’m initially going to one of my favourite locations; the Chilkat River, where, rather bizarrely, I’ve been for the the last three winters.

It’s a stunning location – there will be between 1,000 and 2,000 bald eagles there right now, all gathered along a mile long stretch of the river making the most of the last of the last salmon run before freeze-up.

Then on to Anchorage to film a pretty wide range of material; eagles / ravens / wolves / wolverines / coyotes / lynx scavenging on moose carcass, arctic ground squirrels in hibernation (their body temperature drops to around -3C which is truly freaky), and to go systematically repeat all the locked off shots and time lapses that I did in the fall to paint a picture of freeze up.

The moose carcass / scavengers sequence is going to take up most of my time – sitting in a hide at -20C all day, and probably all night too – is going to be somewhat fun. I do really like this kind of work; you never know what animals are going to turn up and you don’t have to talk to anyone – perfect.

We’re taking out a state of the art thermal camera for night-time filming which I’m really excited about assuming my fingers are still working.

I’ve spent many hours, and a huge amount of effort, over the last 10 years trying to film the wolves that live around the fringes of Anchorage, with very limited success. It always feels like unfinished business when I take them on again. Their numbers aren’t what they used to be a few years ago, and of all the creatures lurking out in the woods there are few more challenging than wolves. This pack has been persecuted, is very shy and are supernaturally skilled at giving one the slip. Maybe this year.

The Chilkat River

Our multi-award winning film about the work of Erik Patel, Madagascar, the Environmental Investigation Agency, Silky Sifakas, illegal logging, world trade, Satcha Von Bismark, evil guitar manufacturers, mud and some rain is showing at the Anglo-Malagashy Society in London on Saturday 2nd of November.

http://anglo-malagasysociety.co.uk/tickets.html

The result of a huge amount of hard work from everyone involved, this film was shown to the US Senate in support of the amended Lacey Act. For once I think one of our films made a real difference.

Home at last after what seems like an eternity away  – in all it was 7 weeks away with 6 days at home at the halfway point, just enough time to really screw up my body clock. This was the second shoot for a major BBC series about the wildlife of Alaska, the shopping list consisted of rutting moose, hoarding squirrels, and glorious autumnal scenics. We scored 2 out of three.

The first half of the shoot was spent carrying 60lbs of camera kit through the Chugach Mountains outside Anchorage in search of rutting moose. I was working with old friend and ex Fish & Game biologist Rick Sinnott, no one better to be with in the field, especially if you don’t mind having multiple heart attacks per day trying to keep up with him. We were pretty successful, it’s a real challenge to work with moose in this kind of habitat, but we filmed more behaviour that I thought we might manage; fighting, posturing, mating … and a lot of sleeping.

What was really great was that we managed to find, and work with, the same bull on several consecutive days; a really impressive old chap with an injured leg, which didn’t seem to stop him seeing off all-comers and finally getting the girl – which made for a really strong story. It was pretty physical, sometimes cold, sometimes wet, sometimes cold and wet. Rick calculated we probably walked 10 miles or so on some days – up and down hills though marshes, knee deep willow and impenetrable hemlock. It was all strangely addictive though; great scenery, wildlife and company, and the weirdly therapeutic process of trudging around with a heavy pack for 10 hours a day.

A member of the public took this of us filming, figured out who we were, and sent it to me, very kind indeed. Rather embarrassingly it looks like we haven’t spotted the moose right behind us, we were actually watching a Golden Eagle, really.

Here is an article Rick wrote for the Alaska Dispatch about our adventures, and the increasingly common issue of sharing the wild with utterly clueless photographers.

I was also hoping to film squirrels hoarding pine cones. Squirrels collect cones and pile them up into huge middens to feed on during the winter, these middens can be several feet deep and several decades old, they are passed on from generation to generation. We found some really good midden sites, one in particular seemed to be owned by a squirrel with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – the cones were neatly stored according to size and colour, and all seemed set. I was then faced with pretty much two weeks of torrential rain and high winds. I spent one day sitting in my hide next to the midden and got completely soaked, it never got light enough to film, and the squirrel hardly appeared.

The forecast was then so cruddy that I had to quickly shift emphasis to filming the autumn colours for a seasonal transition sequence before all the leaves got blown from the trees. There then followed a very frustrating 10 days of travelling to locations and waiting for the rain to stop, or spending hours setting up complex tracking timelapses only for the heavens to open. I think I still got some really nice material but it was a real struggle.

I did get a chance to do some proper photography for once, here are a few landscapes from in between the showers:

For the technically inclined these were taken with the Nikon D800E with a 24mm tilt-shift lens – small jpegs in a blog don’t do them justice, with proper technique the resolution of this camera is incredible.

While I was away Max’s Witney RFC U9’s reached the semi finals of the country championships, narrowly beaten by the eventual winners, a great performance again.

There is something about working in two different countries on the same trip that makes it feel like you have been away from home longer than you actually have. This last shoot consisted of three weeks in Canada followed by a week in Alaska, and it is very nice to home. Although the joys of jet-lag mean I am writing this, wide awake, at 3am.

The first part of the trip was for Survival, a major BBC1 series about animal behaviour, and we were in the Canadian Rockies filming Pikas. These are absolutely brilliant creatures, about the size of a hamster and related to rabbits. They live on scree slopes and their party piece is that they gather plant material throughout the summer and autumn which they store in piles – slowly drying it as the season progresses – so that by the time winter arrives they have enough food to last them through. Pikas don’t hibernate so it is a matter of life or death as to whether they manage to store enough food in their hay piles to survive the long alpine winter.

You really get the sense that the pressure is on as they repeatedly charge between the meadows at the fringe of the scree and their own patch of rocks and boulders, mouths full with vegetation, pausing only to scream their characteristic ”Eeek!’. They have several hay piles which they tend in a very systematic way, layering different types of vegetation to help the drying process and adding flowers and seed-heads which are known to release preservative compounds.

They were really fantastic creatures to observe, I can’t think of an animal that has made me smile more while filming. They can become very habituated and the individual I was focusing on came and and sat on my lap and stuck his nose in the icing of my cinnamon roll one afternoon.

They did present their own set of challenges, not least the fact that they have two speeds: zero and 200mph, and normal rules  of Newtonian physics don’t seem to apply. They can (and do) stop dead from a full-on sprint, turn on a sixpence, and never really seem to follow the same path twice. So getting close up shots of them running through their territories was pretty challenging. If you did occasionally manage to follow focus with one for a few seconds the resulting slow motion image showed that, what to the naked eye might look like an animal flawlessly speeding through it’s world, was actually a comedy of skids, slips, various degrees of wheel spin and the occasional wipe-out. This was especially true when they were returning to their haypiles with a mouth full of plants. Of course, this made them all the more endearing.

The scenery was absolutely stunning, there were bears, bighorn sheep, daily visits by guided-missle goshawks and we had wall to wall sunshine for most of the trip, it was a shame to move on.

The second part of the shoot took me back to the very familiar territory of Anchorage, Alaska, to film the moose rut. This is for a 3-part BBC series on Alaska which I’ll be working on for much of the next year. It’s strange to think that it’s over 10 years since I first filmed in Anchorage, and I’ve been back so many times since that I probably know my way around town better than any other city on earth. I was working with my old friend Rick Sinnott, who used to be the Alaska Fish & Game area biologist for Anchorage. There is nobody I’d rather have on hand to help in the slightly iffy process of finding and filming testosterone addled moose – even if I have a heart attack trying to keep up with him in the mountains.

We got in amongst some good moose, but the rut was only just warming up so the behaviour was fairly low key, I’m back next week so things should be boiling over nicely into characteristic moose chaos by then.

Home again after a great, if rather weird, 5 weeks in the Maasi Mara. I was filming two sequences for BBC1’s upcoming landmark series Survival; a sequence about the zebras crossing the Mara River, and a sequence about lion society. I think we got some really great material, but, as a first experience of the Mara, it was all rather strange.

I’ve known about the Maasi Mara for as long as I can remember, it’s an iconic location and one of the homes of natural history film-making. Hundreds of film crews have worked there over the years and we’ll all have seen sequences filmed in the park on our televisions – so I knew all about the wildebeeste migration, the crossing of the Mara River, the prides of lions, and the abundance and diversity of wildlife found in the area.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the sheer numbers of tourists who visit the Mara at this time of year, and, more disturbingly, the bizarre and dysfunctional relationship that so many people have with the natural world.

When we arrived there were a few cars cruising around; lions doing anything interesting would probably be accompanied by a couple of Landcruisers, and the key river crossing locations might have 10 cars waiting if a crossing looked likely. This was all fine, people were pretty well behaved and the wildlife didn’t seem unduly stressed.

By the time we left there would be up to 100 cars jostling for position at a crossing site, people getting out of their cars, yelling, walking around, flying mini helicopters and generally freaking out the wildlife. A lion pride could be spotted from space because there would be 20 vehicles parked in a ring around the poor beasts, and (not that I witnesses it myself) a hunting cheetah might have 70 vehicles in persuit. Filming at the crossings became impossible, and we’d generally park a few hundred meters away from the lions we were filming to avoid drawing attention to them.

It seemed to me that most people were not relating to the wildlife on any level; they would drive up as close as they possibly could to an animal (breaking park rules that forbid off-road driving without a permit), point their iPads at the poor creature for a few minutes, then charge off to the next victim. Wildlife was experienced via the screens on whatever device they were carrying rather than by actually watching with their own eyes, and the key aim seemed to be to get as close as possible rather than just sitting back and observing.

All of this was totally counter productive, animals were stressed and there would be no chance of seeing any interesting behaviour. We saw an entire herd of maybe 5,000 wildebeest, desperate to cross the river, be so freaked out by the noise of tourists that they milled around in panic and uncertainty for hours before finally moving off to cross a few hundred meters downstream – the tourists didn’t get to see a crossing, and dozens of animals died because the wildebeest were forced to cross in a dangerous location.

The numbers of tourists are increasing year on year, so the problem is only going to get worse. Unless something is done to control the situation and educate tourists and operators in proper wildlife etiquette, the Mara is going to become one of the most depressing wildlife locations on earth. It must have been a magical place 50 years ago, it now feels like a theme park. I do realise that, as wildlife film makers, much of the blame in creating such huge interest in events such as the wildebeest migration is down to us. Sadly it does say something pretty damming about our industry that we have succeeded in generating global interest in these events while seemingly totally failing to instil any empathy for the natural world in many of the people who view our programmes.

The crossings themselves were incredible to experience, dramatic and unsettling – I feel like I’ve seen enough wildebeest misery to last me quite a while. It felt like you were witnessing an animated Hieronymus Bosch painting with sinners substituted for hapless wildebeest. The lions were wonderful, supremely impressive and a real pleasure to spend such a prolonged amount of time with.

Sitting in a car for 13 hours a day allows you to read lots – if depraved Americana is your thing I can thoroughly recommend Ablutions by Patrick De Witt, The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock and Suttree by the great Cormac McCarthy.

Huge thanks to Rupert, Nick and Wilson for making this such a memorable trip, and to the fantastic people at Governor’s Camp for looking after us so well. Amazingly we got out of Nairobi 5 hours before the airport burnt down, the Film God must have been smiling on us …

Right, we’re all of to St Ives to eat ice cream for a couple of weeks!

Two weeks at home which have gone by in a bit of a blur, but have been lovely. It seems utterly daft to head off again just as the Great British Summer seems to have finally come to life, but at least it’ll be good to know that Julie and the boys will have some decent weather to enjoy when I’m away for once.

The two weeks consisted of recovering from the last trip and getting ready for the next. In between we managed to harvest our first crop of honey and get a second colony of bees going. After two years of anguish, lousy weather and minor cock-ups it does feel great to have finally succeeded in having bees happy enough to feel like we can harvest some honey from them without too much guilt. We got just under 10lb’s from 4 frames, a pretty decent haul, and it tastes lovely – well done Bees!

Tastes just like … summer

I also finished the work I’d planned on the my Fender Esprit guitar, see here for more detail, it’s a beauty.

’84 Fender Esprit

So my next trip is another shoot for the BBC’s Survival series, this time I’m off to the Maasi Mara in Kenya two film a couple of stories for two different programmes in the series. Lion cubs for Programme 1 and a story about Zebras for Programme 2. In 20 years of filming I’ve never filmed in the Mara – which is slightly perverse as it’s probably the the most iconic natural history location on earth – so I’m really looking forward to this. A month at the very lovely looking Governor’s Camp with a fairly broad remit to film lion’s and zebras, is a very special thing.