A fantastic couple of weeks in a genuine tropical paradise. The crabs did everything that we were told that they would and more. It’s a really incredible behaviour and possibly unique to hermit crabs and humans. We certainly couldn’t think of another species which forms these ‘vacancy chains’ – individuals queue in order to move up from a limiting resource to a more suitable resource.

Shells are everything in the world of the hermit crab, and an individual’s ability to grow is limited by the size of the shell it inhabits. Hermit crabs therefore rely on finding a shell slightly bigger and better than their own in order to move up the housing ladder. Sometimes these shells are occupied by another crab, sometimes not, and sometimes a small crab comes across an empty shell that is too big for it to move into. What’s really fascinating is that the crab then ‘knows’ that waiting next to the empty shell is a good strategy as, sooner or later, the presence of that big empty shell will probably set off a chain of ‘house moves’ that will result in an empty shell of a suitable size for it to move in to.

Within hours a large empty shell can have dozens of crabs patiently waiting next to it, sometimes arranged in neat lines according to size, all biding their time until the right sized crab turns up to unlock the chain – rather like the home owners on a housing ladder, waiting for the family at the top of the ladder to get their mortgage approved.

Sometimes this waiting is orderly, sometimes it disintegrates into a mass brawl, with multiple lines forming and tug-of-war battles developing between rival lines – while tiny crabs rush from the end of one queue to another trying to guess which line is going to win.

When the move finally happens the speed is incredible. Ten or more crabs can switch up in shell size in a matter of a few seconds, usually leaving a tiny empty shell at the end as everyone has moved up one size. Occasionally the chain would break down as an individual would move up in shell size but be reluctant to let go of his/her old shell and you’ll end up with a nude crab charging around desperately trying to figure out what to do, like the looser in a game of musical chairs. It was great behaviour but surprisingly tricky to film – small and sensitive creatures and a behaviour that can go from nothing to completion in a few seconds, but I think we got a really strong sequence.

We were lucky to be on the island with the nicest bunch of people you could imagine, Randi Rotjan (who discovered the synchronous vacancy chain behaviour) was absolutely fantastic, a brilliant advisor and great fun to work with.

The island was so lovely to work on; you wake up at sunrise, pull on swimming shorts, get some coffee brewing, and could be filming within 5 minutes. In addition to the very cool hermit crabs there were pelicans, a pair of ospreys, frigate birds and the bath-warm sea was filled with fantastic marine life.

We got the bulk of the sequence filmed in the first 10 days, which was a good thing as the weather gradually deteriorated to the point that we found ourselves in the midst of the terrifyingly named Hurricane Barry. This resulted in 3 days of intense rain (7.5 inches one night), gale force winds, and huge seas – which somewhat re-moddeled the island. All the crabs climbed the palm trees which was very interesting, a bit unnerving (what did they know that we didn’t?), and behaviour which, in the future, I’ll take more seriously.

While I was away Max won U8 ‘Player of the Year’ and ‘Players Player of the Year’ at Witney Rugby Club – really well deserved.

There were lots of lovely things to photograph on Carrie Bow Cay, I became rather obsessed with taking pictures of the outhouse, which may herald an exciting new direction for my career ….

A fantastic, if rather hectic, few weeks at home, and now heading off again just as summer seems to be finally happening. Next stop is Belize, or, to be more precise Carrie Bow Cay, an island the size of a couple of tennis courts 14 miles off the coast – it looks unbelievably idyllic.

It’s the site of the Smithsonian Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystem lab – and very nice too. I’m filming a sequence about hermit crabs for the BBC’s Survival series, a really great story of the hermit crab ‘housing ladder’  – queues of crabs forming to wait for suitably sized shells become available – I’m sure it won’t be as straightforward as it sounds but it’ll be a really fun story to try to tell. We’ve got three weeks, I’ll take my mask and snorkel just in case …

During the time at home since my last Survival shoot I’ve been flat out with other filming work. I was Director of Photography on a short feature film for first time director Nic Evans. Scareful –  a very cool screenplay that culminated with divers bursting out from the River Thames. All shot around Whittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, a lovely cast and crew and great fun.

I’ve also spent three weeks in my studio filming macro sequences for a BBC NHU special about UK butterflies and moths. This was somewhat challenging – the brief was to make eggs, pupa and larva to look like high art jewellery, and often the subjects were barely more than 1mm in size.

The results are beautiful – some of the pupa (silver washed fritillary’s in particular) are absolutely stunning in their architecture. It took me right back to my childhood, I had 9 different species of butterfly and moth larva to keep happy for three weeks, and I came to really enjoy the daily routine of going out and foraging for the appropriate food plant for each species. My office was full of little tupperware boxes full of high maintenance wriggling things – just like my bedroom was when I was little, weird how things come full circle.

I’ve also managed to get to see two of my musical hero’s in the last few weeks; Eric Johnson and Robben Ford both toured the UK this spring. Both gigs were fantastic, two individuals with very different styles, but who both play the guitar about as well as it has ever been played. The Robben Ford concert was particularly memorable – I’ve heard people say that seeing him play is akin to a religious experience, it was very very special.

Seeing Robben got me thinking about the type of guitar he plays, and I’d remembered that when I first started getting really interested in the guitar – 30 odd years ago – he played a model called the Fender Esprit. This was a slightly strange attempt by Fender to move into territory occupied by their key rival, Gibson. Fender designers came up with a very cool double cut-away, hollow body guitar with two humbucker pickups and a set neck, just like a Gibson ES335.

Fender’s US manufacturing had pretty much ground to a halt in the mid ’80’s so these instruments were built in Japan and their quality was absolutely outstanding. They were fantastic instruments but never really caught on, and were discontinued after 3 years of production (although the Fender Custom Shop will make you a new one if you have a spare kidney to sell). I didn’t have anything like this type of guitar so I looked on E-bay, and there, somewhere in Nashville, was an ’84 Esprit Standard going very cheap. Now it’s here in Oxfordshire with me.

It’s going to need some work (but that’s the most enjoyable part), the finish was rather bruised and the hardware was very tired, the neck had been broken and repaired and it’ll need some work on the frets and a new nut. It’ll end up being a wonderful instrument, and it’ll be very satisfying to resurrect something that was languishing in the corner of a music shop. They are such good value that I picked up another Esprit Ultra recently too – this needs less work, but I’ll probably fiddle with it anyway. These really are one of the great unsung electric guitar designs, they’ll be highly collectable one day – wonderful instruments; very cool and very rare.

Fender Esprit Standard on my workbench (boxes full of caterpillars in the background!)

And finally, for the first time since our honeymoon 10 years ago, Julie and I managed to escape abroad for a holiday with the boys – a brilliant week in Kos. Swimming and eating ice-cream, we should probably do this more often.

Just back from an fantastic month in Senegal filming for the BBC Natural History Unit’s Survival series. Our plan was to film chimps digging for water – an amazing behaviour, and one that has never been filmed before.

On arrival it was pretty clear why it hasn’t been filmed before – in fact nobody has even tried filming this population of chimps in the dry season until now. The temperatures you have to deal with, and daily routine required to keep up with the chimps, were extreme and close to the limits of what’s possible.

The amazing Jill Pruetz and her team have been studying this population for 10 years. These are savannah chimps, living in a mixed habitat of desert, scrub and woodland that is very different to the thickly forested areas that we are used to chimps inhabiting. They spend a large proportion of their time on the ground, and exhibit some unique behaviours that allow them to survive in this inhospitable region – digging for water during the dry season being perhaps their most remarkable skill.

Chimps need to drink pretty much daily, and the presence of water defines their range in this part of Africa. At this time of year standing water is rare, and often foul and unpalatable, so these chimps have learned to dig down to the water table. They know the best places to dig – dry river beds – and form patient cues at a good hole waiting in turn for water to percolate  into the hole before drinking. Often sticking their entire head into the hole for minutes at a time. Even when there is standing water nearby the chimps will often preferentially dig, and drink from, holes, as the gravel of the stream bed filters the water. Providing cool, clean water as opposed to the scummy, hot, and bee infested surface water.

The daily routine was almost the defining characteristic of the shoot. I’d get up between 3 and 4am in order to drive the 40mins to the study site, we’d then have anything up to an hour’s walk in the dark in order to get to the chimps before they woke up. None of the animals are collared or tagged so the only way of ensuring that you don’t loose them is to stay with them until they have gone to bed at night, then get to them before they wake up and start moving in the morning. Jill is absolutely committed to the welfare of the chimps, and key to this was minimising our impact on them. So only 3 people; Jill, myself, and Michel (Jill’s brilliant research assistant) were allowed in the field on any given day – and often it was just Michel and I. That meant carrying all my own filming kit, plus water and food for the day.

You didn’t have to dress like an idiot to film the chimps … but I did

Once the chimps had woken up we’d shadow them all day, trying to spend time with the key characters within the group that we’d decided to feature. They would usually move and feed from 6.30am until around 10am, then rest until 4pm, then another bout of moving and feeding before settling down to nest for the night between 7 and 8pm. We’d then have to walk back to the vehicle – if I was lucky I’d be in bed by 11pm – with an alarm set for 3am the following morning. Although this was typical, the chimps could do anything, and big moves during the day were not unusual; they could move 6km or so when you were with them plus you might have a 4km walk at either end of the day. We quickly figured that you can only do 2 consecutive days in the field and still function, so we settled on a routine of 2 days on, 1 day off.

The heat was brutal; mid 40’sC in the shade, and almost unbearable in the sun. Surfaces were generally too hot to touch, and the camera was painful to pick up. I’d carry (and drink!) 6 litres a day with four sachets of rehydration salts and still feel pretty wrecked by the end of the day. The air was suffocating and like standing in the blast of a hairdryer – added to this was the fact that we wore surgical face masks to prevent possible cross infection – there were times you felt like you were being gently water-boarded. As this was the dry season most trees didn’t have any leaves so shade was hard to find, and typically occupied by chimps, so you’d often just have to slowly melt in the sun.

The chimps themselves were absolutely wonderful, truly fascinating creatures to film and spend time with. With every other species I’ve filmed – from ants to polar bears – no matter how interesting or beautiful they may be, there is always a very clear line between them as ‘animals’ and one’s self. But with chimps that line is blurred to say the least, and you are absolutely certain that you are sharing the environment with a consciousness that is very similar to one’s own. It took a few days for them to get used to me, but by the end of the trip they were plonking themselves within a few meters of me and going to sleep.

To see the chimps in such a harsh and unfamiliar environment was slightly bizarre, I kept thinking of the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 (one of my all time favourite films) – the similarities were so strong, in my heat addled and sleep deprived state I was half expecting to find the chimps gathered round the Monolith at any moment. The other film reference that came to mind was at bed time when the chimps where making their nests and settling down for the night. A fairly fig-rich diet lead to a cacophony of chimpanzee trouser coughs rivalled only the legendary campfire scene in Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles.

Mask, headnet and camo kneepads. It’s a miracle the chimps didn’t run a mile.

It was a great shoot, and a wonderful team; Emma, Nick, Jill, Michel, Jonny and, of course, the Fongoli chimps, made all the hard work worthwhile, and I think we’ll have a really strong sequence.

I got back just in time to catch one of my musical heros, Eric Johnson, on the last date of his UK tour – really one of the finest guitarists of the last 50 years – it was a great concert with moments of absolute brilliance – you can’t go too far wrong with a vintage Strat and a loud Marshall stack, I think I’ve lost some of my ability to hear.

After a very protracted period of security checks it’s been decided that we can, at last, head off to Senegal. I’m going to be filming chimps for the BBC Survival series.

This is a really interesting group of chimpanzees which live in a semi-desert environment, rather like the patchwork of scrub and grassland in which humans are thought to have evolved. This group do all sorts of fantastic behaviours; digging for water, collecting honey, making tools to spear bush babies, playing twister, holding fondu parties etc, and I can’t wait to see them.

It’s going to be a tough one – it was 42C in the shade there yesterday and I’m be on foot with the chimps from dawn to dusk carrying all our stupidly heavy camera kit. I’m hoping they will take it easy on me, somehow I know they won’t.

I understand they can walk 10+ miles a day (and then you have to walk back to the vehicle in the dark). I’m expecting to have to drill a couple more holes in my belt, which might be no bad thing…. more news to follow.

The Chilkat River

Home after a great month in Alaska, it was snot-freezingly cold (even by Alaskan standards) for much of the time, which meant for some beautiful images. Lots of eagles, ravens, coyote and even lynx. I’ll keep this brief as I’ve got a huge pile of prezzies to wrap, here are some photo’s, it’s lovely to be home.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

I’m off to Alaska for the 4th and final time of the year. This time for the BBC Natural History Unit’s Survival series.

We’re going to Haines to film Bald eagles – it’s a great location and the perfect place to round off a very busy year of filming.

While I’m away Animal Planet USA will be airing the two most recent BBC Natural World programmes that I filmed. They will be part of the ‘Frontier Earth’ series. They have renamed them Killer Ants and Lemurs (I wish they hadn’t), and they are presented by someone called Dave Salmoni (no, neither do I) in association with Walmart (nobody asked me).

There’s lots of information about the series here including dates, times, and rather overcooked programme synopses…. if you have friends or family in the US please let them know.

Ants was nominated for Best Cinematography at the Royal Television Society Awards this year, and Best Animal Behaviour at the 2012 Wildscreen Festival. Lemurs won two conservation film awards and a special award for cinematography at the 2012 Missoula Wildlife Film Festival, and has been shown in the US Senate in support of the Lacey Act – a crucial piece of legislation aimed at protecting the world’s most threatened forests.

I found this rather forlorn looking Gibson ES175 on E-bay a few months ago. I’ve been really interested in this particular model of guitar for years. It’s the original working professionals jazz guitar, and, as a model, it’s been in production since 1949 – the longest production run of any electric guitar. Originally costing $175.00 (hence the model name), it was a guitar that borrowed design features from more expensive archtop designs in the Gibson catalogue of the time, but with a few refinements that bought its price down within range of working musicians.

The most notable design innovation was the use of laminate wood in the front and back of the guitar – a 3-ply sandwich of maple and basswood that was heat pressed to form the distinctive shape of traditional archtop guitars. This was a much cheaper and quicker construction method compared to the usual method of hand carving and tap tuning the front and back plates from solid maple or spruce.

The use of laminate wood, while initially conceived as a cost saving measure, was quickly discovered to have benefits in terms of tone and resistance to feedback while playing amplified at high volume – laminate tops are also less prone to cracking warping due to changes in humidity and temperature.

The ES175 has gone through several incarnations over the last 60 odd years, some good, some not so good. This particular instrument is from 1957 – generally accepted as being the ‘golden age’ of Gibson’s guitar building. Only 273 sunburst finish ES175D (the ‘D’ denoting two pickups) where made in 1957, and it’s unusual to find one in such good structural condition. Many 175’s from this era have had their headstock broken off at some stage in their lives; there is an inherent weakness in the construction of the neck (a solid piece of mahogany). Just under the nut where the wood is rather thin and many guitars from this period have had major surgery to repair and strengthen this area. To find such a clean example was what really got me interested.

It’s sad that someone would have stripped all the hardware and electronics from such a beautiful instrument, but it’s a fairly common practice. The pickups from this era (‘Patent Applied For’, or PAF) are highly desirable and worth a fortune, so dealers ‘part’ guitars like this to sell the pickups individually, or worse, they pop them, into a fake relic Les Paul and try and sell the whole instrument for tens of thousands of dollars. From what I could tell from the photo’s on E-bay it all looked pretty good – no cracks, some lovely checking in the lacquer finish, and the frets, although deeply pitted, looked like they were original and still had some life in them. So I put in a bid and waited.

It all arrived in great shape – even more beautiful than I’d hoped, so now it was a question of restoring the guitar her former glory. My aim was to get this instument back as near as possible to original condition. I knew I’d need to find original examples of some key parts; the bridge – originally carved from Brazilian Rosewood – would not be available as a new replacement part due to that species of tree now being, quite rightly, protected under CITES. The ’57 tailpiece was also a distinctive design, made from nickel, that you couldn’t get an accurate modern reproduction of. So a bit more trawling around on E-bay and I’d found a bridge and tailpiece. The tuners are new reproductions of the traditional Klustons – original Klustons from the 50’s would probably have long since disintegrated.

The electronics would all need to be done from scratch. I contacted Tim Mills at Bare Knuckle pickups, who have made pickups for all my other guitars, and we decided on a set that would suit the character of the instrument. I also sourced vintage spec potentiometers, caps and cloth covered hook-up wire and set to work.

Installing the electronics in an archtop guitar is acknowledged as one of the more challenging manoeuvres known to man – something akin to neurosurgery or James Herriot’s finer moments dealing with breach position livestock. Basically you have to insert a bunch of bulky yet delicate electronics through the existing holes (the pickup and ‘f’ holes) in the guitar’s front then bring them up to the surface of the guitar in the right position to fix them in place.

The first move is to make a template of the control layout of the guitar so you can make up the wiring loom. You want to keep things as neat and compact as possible, but at the same time you need to build in enough wriggle room and flexibility to allow you to fit things into place.

The wiring loom - the easy bit

Once this is all soldered and tested comes the tricky bit – how do you get all this stuff inside a guitar and fixed in position, when the only access holes you have to work with are too small to squeeze your fingers through.

Halfway through the birthing process

Surgical tubing is key to success from this point onwards; it’s just the right size to fit over the pot shafts and through the holes drilled in the face of the guitar, so you feed lengths of tubing through the holes in the front of the guitar and push them onto the shafts of the corresponding pot (volume, tone etc). Then you very gently start to ease everything into place – things go wrong, stuff gets twisted, what seems so simple in principle disintegrates into chaos fairly fast, you start again.

Eventually it’s all in place, what worked well for me was the decision to use vintage style hook-up wire which is pretty inflexible and allows the wiring loom to keep its shape as it all gets eased into position. The pickup selector switch is pulled in to position using a length of cotton thread, the output jack using an improvised coat hangar tool. Everything is secured, you plug in … and the neck position tone control doesn’t work. No idea why, you insert a mirror into the guitar, shine a torch and inspect, all looks fine. Everything comes out, test the circuit again, stick it all back in, and it works – it always worries me slightly when things like that happen.

Then it’s ready to string up – always slightly nerve wracking as you don’t know when the last time this guitar was exposed to the 180lb’s or so of pressure associated with being strung with a set of guitar strings tuned to concert pitch. I always imagine making the final half turn of the high E tuning peg and the whole guitar imploding into a mass of splintered carnage. But this all seemed to settle in pretty well – a few creaks and groans, but nothing too alarming.

Despite the fantastic condition that the guitar was in, it had clearly seen some fairly serious action over the years – although its previous owner(s) seemed to know a limited repertoire of chords – as the fret and fingerboard wear was limited to the first few frets. A quick visit to Bob at RP guitars for a fret dress had it playing beautifully.

So now it’s finally all finished. It’s an absolutely beautiful guitar, and a piece of music history fully restored to playing condition. A chunky neck, but not too big, and tone to die for which only comes with age. There is something so special about old instruments, you can be pretty sure they have given multiple people pleasure but you’ll probably never  know who owned, played, or listened to them, or what music they played. This guitar was built in Michigan half a century ago, now it’s being played in a little cottage in Oxfordshire – you do wish they could talk.

Finally back after a fantastic three weeks in Brazil filming for the BBC. We were based in the Pantanal, a seasonally flooded wetland and one of the richest habitats I’ve ever worked in. Our brief was to try and film as much Jaguar behaviour as possible. 10 years ago even seeing a jaguar would have been have been nearly impossible, but a combination of circumstances has made observing jaguars in the wild  – in this part of Brazil – a realistic proposition.

Home sweet home - The Floatel; part prison ship, part social experiment.

We lived on a ‘floatel’ – a floating hotel that at times seemed part prison ship, part social experiment, but it was by far the best place to be based to film jaguars and the staff where absolutely fantastic. Guests tended to come and go, typically staying for a night or two, so we did feel slightly like inmates. Towards the end of the three weeks of constant bobbing around and getting in our little boat to head upriver each morning I started to feel rather like Captain Willard in Heart of Darkness (or Apocalypse Now for that matter), heading ever upstream to to deal with his inner demons, but I digress.

By 6am each day we’d be chugging upriver, scanning the banks for jaguar which is significantly easier said than done. If a jaguar doesn’t want to be seen, you are not going to see it. If it wasn’t for the unbelievably sharp eyes of Ginho our boatman and Marcos our guide Adam and I would have spotted a total of 3 jaguars. As it was we had a pretty amazing strike rate, some 30 plus sightings in three weeks – in other words we saw more jaguars in three weeks than I have seen foxes in 10 years of living in our village – and this is the cat that up until very recently nobody saw.

There were several days when we didn’t see any, maybe just tracks on a beach, or a fleeting glimpse as one vanished off into the undergrowth. Even when we did come across one that looked like it might be possible to film we would have to find a suitable place for me to get out and set up the tripod – sometimes in the water (pirañas, stingrays, caiman), sometimes climbing up the bank (tick infested grass, other jaguar) or ideally from a beach. So it was slow going, and often 1o hrs in a meltingly hot boat would yield a couple of frustratingly unsatisfactory shots.

There are two jaguars here, ironically for a spotted cat they are not easy to spot

Every now and again the hard work paid off and we were honoured to spend some time in the presence of these incredible animals. There really is something of the supernatural about them, they exude a sort of disinterested self-confidence that makes you feel rather insecure near them, and they have a strange quality through the camera lens where they seem to glow from the inside. One day we found a pair of cubs, probably around 18 months old, that hadn’t been seen before so we got to name them. There are now a two jaguars called Max & Felix on the loose in central Brazil. When I called home on the sat phone to tell the boys the news Max asked if the jaguars were well behaved.

Time stands still when you are with them

One bonus of spending so much time looking for jaguars was that you bump into all sorts of other fantastic creatures, the best of these were the Giant Otters. These fantastic beasts used to be even harder to see than jaguar but, again, the change of attitudes to wildlife in Brazil has meant that this species has made a significant recovery, and the two otter families we got to spend time with were completely unfazed by our presence. Giant Otters grow up to 2m long and seem to be one of those creatures stuck together out of spare parts, I could see bits of dog, seal, platypus and sea-monster in there, they also make the most fantastic noises when eating, I’m sure I actually heard one use proper English swear words a couple of times.

The Giant Otter - a contender for the greatest creature of all time

So all in all a really great trip, but it did feel that I’d been away from home for ever. Sat phone reception was exceptionally naff so communication with home was pretty much non existent which makes it hard to be away from Julie and the boys. While I was away Max’s Witney Under 8’s rugby team reached the finals of the county tag championship which was a really great achievement, they are a fantastic bunch of kids and Julie said they played brilliantly on the day.

Witney U8's - ready to unleash hell

Max (nearest the camera) as another Witney move unfolds ...