Only home for a week, but lovely to spend some time with Julie and the boys. We had Max’s slightly delayed birthday party in the Leafield community wood – great fun on a beautiful October afternoon. Capture the flag, a treasure hunt and lots of cake and mud.

Max is far right with gold flag, Felix is front row with blue fleece - 'Lord of the Flies' anyone?

I’m off to Brazil later today, filming for the BBC. We’re going to try to film Jaguars in the wild which is very exciting – I’ve never seen a Jaguar in the wild, come across their tracks a few times, but never actually face to face with one so I’m really looking forward to this.

The awards news is that Frozen Planet won an EMMY for cinematography for a ‘factual series’ but Madagascar was pipped for it’s best documentary cinematography EMMY by Human Planet – a worthy winner. We’ll find out about Empire of the Desert Ants Wildscreen award in a couple of weeks.

As part of the Wildscreen festival all nominated films are shown are shown on a big screen, Ants is shown on the 23rd of October at the Watershed in Bristol at 16.00 – if you have a quiet afternoon and fancy seeing our 3mm long stars blown up to monstrous proportions ….

The BBC Madagascar series that I spent nearly two years working on has just been nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Sound / Music in the 2012 News & Documentary EMMY awards to be held in New York in October.

Great news for everyone who worked so hard on the series.

After the best part of 9 weeks away from home I’m finally back, and we’re all very much due a holiday.

We had a fantastic four weeks in Zambia with the Wild Dogs, they have always been one of my favourite species and to get to spend such a long period of time with them was really wonderful. We stayed at the Liuwa Plains National Park and were supported by the fantastic team at African Parks – Liuwa Plains NP is vast and beautiful – a real undiscovered gem. Our aim was to try to tell the story of the social organisation within a pack of Wild Dogs and to film them hunting and caring for their litter of 12 pups which were a couple of months old when we arrived.

At first it looked like it was going to be ultra challenging; the dogs weren’t particularly habituated, the den site was in thick bush, and the terrain – although flat and open – was largely covered in 4ft tall grass and was sufficiently bumpy to really restrict how well we could keep up with the dogs when they went out hunting.

Slowly things began to fall into place, the first stroke of luck was that the dogs moved their den after a couple of days to a small corpse of trees which, although not ideal in terms of seeing the pups, at least allowed us to monitor the dog’s movements better.

The dogs slowly got used to us, I could get out of the Land Cruiser and film from the ground as long as I stayed next to the car – any movement away from the vehicle tended to result in rather ominous growling – but at least I had a stable grounding for the tripod. Seeing the pups was always difficult, they would often have a prolonged play session about 30 minutes before sunrise, and a couple of times came right up to the vehicle and perform all sorts of adorable puppy antics, but as it got light enough to film they tended to retreat into the cover of the den site. We managed to place a remote camera next to the den and Alex got some great stuff of them messing around, although the combined smears from 12 snotty pup noses didn’t to much for the image quality.

The really big challenge was to film a hunt – a few years ago Planet Earth had spent 8 weeks with three camera teams and a helicopter but hadn’t succeeded. Our hopes were high when we saw a spectacular hunt on the first day when we’d gone out for a quick recce drive, but as the days dragged on and we didn’t see any indication that the dogs were interested in anything other than catching the odd bunny and lounging around at the den all day we began to get rather worried.

If there’s one thing Wild Dogs are famous for it’s their incredibly co-ordinated and ruthless hunting skills – I’d read that 80% of Wild Dog hunts end in a kill – so we guessed that it was only a matter of time before we’d get a change to film them doing something rather special. The problem was that we could average about 15mph in out truck (and that speed was often so bumpy that the camera equipment was rattling its-self to bits), but the dogs – when they really pin their ears back, can probably run at close to 50mph. So that when we did start to see hunts happen the dogs, and their prey, would be dots on the horizon within seconds and we’d be rumbling and crashing after them at not much more than walking speed.

Eventually we got better at second guessing what the dogs were after, we realised that the only way to get good coverage of the hunt was to gamble that the tiny dot on the horizon was a wildebeest, and that was what the dogs were heading towards and then we’d try to get to the other side of the wildebeest before the dogs spooked it. Sometimes it worked, but often the dogs would get distracted by a rabbit or a small antelope and charge off in all directions and we’d be left trying to find them again in the long grass and the whole process would start again. It also proved tricky guessing what might appeal to the dogs – lone wildebeest seemed most likely – but every now and again they would ignore something that looked perfectly achievable to us and go steaming off to chase a herd of 50 zebra with which they had no chance.

In the end we filmed 4 or 5 kills and some pretty spectacular near-misses, the chases were always dramatic, the sheer speed of the dogs is really impressive and to witness how they nip and hassle prey much larger than themselves is incredible to see, but when they have finally bought down their pray it all gets a bit grim, I have new-found respect for wildebeest who never seemed to know when they are beaten, even when dogs had removed most of their organs – I don’t think we’ll be able to broadcast much of that stuff.

Dennis & Steve - tooled up

The days were pretty long, up at 4.30, out to the field at 5.30 – we’d usually manage a siesta in the middle of the day (the dogs always did!) and then back home by 7 in the evening. We never knew what would happen from day to day, sometimes it was so obvious that the dogs were in a ‘lighter’ mood, they wouldn’t be particularly organised in the field and would be content with catching a couple of bunnies. But on those days when all 8 of the adults would go out you knew they would probably kill something big, and that moment when they change their gait from a jaunty bouncing run and all fall in to a menacing single file with their ears flat to their heads you knew they meant business – they would change from Grommet to the  Hound of the Baskervilles in a couple of paces.

Can you see the dogs? ... neither can I

I’m not sure I’d say our pack had an 80% success rate – probably more like 50% – but they where a pretty awesome unit when they got it together, they certainly kept us guessing.

It was a great team, Alex Lanchester from the Survival production team was fantastic – as good a companion in the field as you could ever have, and Dennis and Steve, the African Parks guides who tracked the dogs and stopped us getting eaten by lions, were brilliant.

The last day of filming - 2 minutes later the dogs killed another wildebeest

It really was a great trip – I was 40 on our last day of filming, and the whole shoot felt like a bit of a birthday present.

My 40th birthday morning - camo tape from Alex, just what I always wanted

On a totally unrelated topic I found this beautiful 1957 Gibson ES175 on E-bay a few weeks ago – a model of guitar I’ve been in love with for a long time, and this is from the golden age of Gibson archtops. Someone has removed all the hard wear (probably because the pickups would have been from the legendary ‘Patent Applied For’ era and worth a fortune) and the guitar was being sold as wood-only. It’s in great condition for a 55 year old instrument so now I have a project on my hands to restore it to its former glory.

Many thanks to Alex for the great photographs.

‘Empire of the Desert Ants’ has just been nominated in the ‘Best Animal Behaviour’ category at the 2012 Wildscreen awards. Wildscreen is the world’s biggest and most prestigious natural history film festival – the wildlife film equivalent of the Oscars.

The full list of nominations is here.

For more information about the film see here.

I’m really thrilled, everyone worked so hard on the film and it’s great to get recognition at such a high level.

The awards are in mid October, party frocks for the ants again …

Finally home from the Great Alaskan Road Trip. It felt like (and was) a pretty long shoot, just under five weeks. All in all it was good, we got some great filming done although is was tough going for the most part, not least due to the fact that it’s difficult to know exactly when to stop working when there are 19 hrs of daylight each day and the best light is often at 10.30pm – when you should be tucked up in bed!

The first 10 days I was up in Denali National Park based out of a camper van which was fantastic fun – never having even set foot in a camper van before everything was rather new but I think we got on rather well. There was plenty of room (if you didn’t mind climbing over camera cases the whole time) and it’s pretty amazing to have the option of setting a couple of timelapses running and then go inside and have a hot shower and cook a meal. The plus side was that you always had everything with you – none of the dashing back to the hotel because you’ve forgotten some batteries, and you could have a snooze anywhere you liked – although inevitably if you found a quiet spot to pull off the road a park ranger would come and ask you what you were doing and / or an irate tour bus driver would insist that you were in the exact spot where he / she might need to turn round. The Denali bus drivers are a rather special breed – I hope they are genuinely happier with their lives than they outwardly appeared.

Home sweet home

My van came with some free kids included

The down sides to the camper van are a) you look like an idiot driving around in this ridiculous machine covered in dumb graphics b) they do about 20ft to the gallon which is not nice for the environment and means that you are constantly planning ahead to figure out when you need to fill up again. Other than that it’s a very neat way of filming.

Denali its-self was incredible, and has definitely become one of my top 10 locations on the planet. The landscape is on a breathtaking scale – it feels like you are in the pleistocene and that a herd of wooly mammoths could come trundling over the hill at any moment, and Denali (the mountain after which the park is named, and the highest peak in North America) is an absolutely vast lump of rock, it’s often hidden by cloud but when it puts in an appearance it dwarfs everything around it. The wildlife is fabulous too, I saw wolf, caribou, brown bear, lynx, moose, golden eagle and got some good filming done.

Sadly the main wolf pack – the Grant Creek Pack – has been severely disrupted by the death of the alpha female (trapped on the park border by a hunter) and the pack’s oldest female who died during the winter – they weren’t denning at their usual site, if at all, and I only saw one individual when they are usually pretty conspicuous along the park road. The brown bears were great and the scenery fantastic. I was lucky to be their just at the start of the tourist season and had a few days in the park before the tour busses start running – once they do start the effect on the wildlife is rather pronounced and animals appeared to me to be rather stressed by their constant presence – I can’t think of another way of large numbers of people to experience the park though so it’s a tough one.

Self portrait at 'Polychome Overlook' - if you get up early enough you have the park to yourself

After Denali it was back down to Anchorage for 10 days of trying to track down moose, black bears and to film the King Salmon run. I was working with my old friends Rick and Jessy from the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, essentially trying to do much of the same sorts of things I’d done 6 years ago when I made ‘Moose on the Loose’. It was interesting how much has changed with Anchorage’s urban wildlife; the garbage situation (which was causing all sorts of problems with black bears) is under much better control with people being fined $300 if bears get into their garbage. In many hours of driving around with Rick we never saw a single bear eating trash, or even a single bin bag that had been opened by a bear. 6 years ago evidence of bear action was easy to find, and you could often follow the trail of strewn rubbish to a bear with its nose in a bin. The moose also seemed much harder to find, especially cows with calves, possibly the record setting tough winter had killed a proportion of pregnant females or caused them to re-absorb their foetus’s. Worst of all was the almost complete failure of the King Salmon run. These spectacular fish can grow to over 40lbs and typically thousands of them run up through the rivers and creeks that drain through the city – it’s a spectacular site – and you can have hundreds of fishermen standing shoulder to shoulder trying to catch them. This year there where practically none, at first it looked like the huge amount of snowmelt was making the river water too cold and the fish were waiting out at sea, and maybe the run would just be late, but as time went on it became apparent that something serious has happened. Salmon run numbers are cyclical, but its really unsettling to think that there may be environmental issues out at sea that are causing such a catastrophic drop in fish numbers.

The Anchorage filming, although I got some really nice stuff, was very tough going, so the last week was the perfect antidote. Sarah, the film’s fantastic and long suffering researcher came out and we headed down to the Katmai peninsula, to a place called Hallo Bay, which is famous for its brown bear viewing. We had a week at the Hallo Bay camp, a really well run low-impact outfit set just back from the shoreline of the bay. There were plenty of bears and virtually wall to wall sunshine and we got some great footage. We should have been their for peak mating season but – again probably due to the slightly unusual weather – it seemed that most mating activity was already over, so the bears had settled into a routine of feeding on sedge grass, clams and taking extended naps, biding their time before the summer’s big event of the August salmon run kicks off. My favorite bit was filming the bears feeding on clams, they would wander the mud flats at low tide with thier muzzles inches from the wet sand and as soon as they sensed a clam they would dig down with those massive paws to grab these little 2 inch long clams, they would then delicately prize open the shell and squeeze the contents onto the fur of their forearms (so as not to get the clam meat fouled by sand) then lick it off, fantastic.

So a long trip, hard work but with some really nice footage to show for it. It was so good to get back home Max & Felix had really grown – and it’s lovely to be back at the heart of it all. I’m off to Zambia on Sunday for a month – a horribly quick turnaround between two long trips, but I think we’re all just looking forward to our holiday in August.

I got back from Hawaii 10 days ago, it was a really good trip, lots of variety and a huge amount fitted into a few filming days. The first three days were in the studio with the fantastic Steve Montgomery filming a couple of types of carnivorous caterpillars (one of which he discovered).

Beware of the caterpillars ...

It was tricky – the fly eating caterpillars where no more than 15mm long, and usually 7-8mm, so we were at the challenging end of macro filming especially as we were trying to film in slow motion which requires lots of light (and too much light cooks caterpillars!), but I think we got some good behaviour. It’s actually pretty surreal to see a caterpillar equipped with ‘bear-trap’ forelegs whip round and catch a fly and then chew it’s face off!

The snail eating caterpillars (a species of bagworm) were no less challenging – the snails they predate are really tiny, a big one would be no more than 1mm across, and they were pretty sensitive to light so we’d have to wait until the behaviour had begun before filming. But it was fascinating to see the caterpillar tie the snail down then burrow inside the shell and start eating. Having evolved a shell to live in you would have at least thought you might be safe from caterpillars, how annoying.

We then had a couple of days charging around the big island; filming the volcanoes then filming birdlife in a beautiful forest reserve in the south east of the island. I then headed off to O’ahu by myself to spend a couple of days filming Hawaiian Monk Seals, a species right on the brink of extinction with only 1400 or so left in the wild. The individuals who live on O’ahu are all known by name and there is a dedicated network of volunteers keeps an eye on them daily, setting up perimeter fences around them if they decide to haul up for the day on busy tourist beaches. I got some nice footage of one on my first day, doing what Monk Seals do best – sleeping in the sun – then on the second day I was really lucky to have two males playing in the surf in front of me for a couple of hours and got some really lovely material.

The night before I headed off to Hawaii Felix started being sick (not ideal if you need to get up at 2am to get to the airport), he was then ill for a few days, followed by Max, followed by Julie, the night I got back from Hawaii Max was sick again and was ill for a week. I finally succumbed on Friday, the day before our scheduled trip to LegoLand! A treat for the boys which we’d had planned for ages and they had been becoming increasingly excited about. We all went in the end, which was great fun, if slightly surreal. There were some incredible things made out of Lego, confirming that it is the greatest toy known to humanity, but there was also the slightly creepy feeling that after each themed ride you were funneled though and equally themed gift shop and that the wonder of this incredible invention was slightly tainted by the full-on retail drive that accompanied it, maybe I’m just cynical, we all had a great time.

We got home and Max and I were sick.

Anyway, Max is finally back at school, I feel like death warmed up but there’s no time for convalescing as tomorrow I head off on the Great Alaskan Road Trip. It’s the third shoot for the 2hr ‘Wild Alaska’ film I’m working on for Parthenon / Animal Planet. It’s a great trip; 10 days in a camper van in Denali National Park – wolves, bears, moose, then a couple of weeks in Anchorage filming more moose, black bears and the salmon run and then a week at Halo Bay filming brown bears. I’m really excited, it’s a great time of year in Alaska, with some really fantastic filming to be done. I’m looking forward to living in a camper van for 10 days. I’ve never lived in one before so it should all be very amusing, I’ve watched the 25minute ‘orientation video’ online, paying special attention to the part that dealt with the disposal of ‘solid waste’ (don’t want any mistakes there), and I feel ready to hit the open road.

As you can see, as befits a natural history film shoot, these camper vans are very unobtrusive and designed to blend perfectly with their environment, you’d almost never know it was there.

If this unfortunate camper had only parked in front of Mount Rushmore he would have melted seamlessly into the background, an easy mistake to make, but obviously not one I intend to replicate …

I’m off to Hawaii for 10 days, working for Parthenon Entertainment. This is for the same series of films that the 2hr Alaska film I’ve been busy filming is for. It’s a fairly packed schedule that includes Monk Seals, volcanic scenery and carnivorous caterpillars. The latter sound fantastic; one species that has evolved to ‘slingshot’ the front portion of their bodies at unsuspecting fruit flies and a second that eats snails by first lashing them to a leaf with silk and then chomping through the leaf and into the snail through its operculum. Weirdly I can’t remember either of these featuring in my copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but perhaps there is a more gruesome Hawaiian version?

Hawaii is a place I never really imagined visiting. I’m really excited – we all know a bit about Hawaii: Hawaii Five O, death defying surfers, perfect sunsets, lilting guitar music and colossal tourists in tasteless shirts. It’ll be really interesting to see what the truth really is.

My Red Epic camera has arrived, I got to play with it for half a day before it headed off to Namibia for three months to film elephants (lucky camera). It’s a shame not to be using it on the Hawaii shoot (we’re taking anther Epic with us) but it’s great that my camera is out there earning its keep. It is such an exciting camera, a large sensor, RAW files and a fantastic latitude – it’s like working with film again … it’s the way of the future.

The Epic has landed

It’s been so miserable and wet here that we’ve had to resort to feeding our bees to keep them going. The plan was that they would work for us in exchange for their rent in honey, but so far it hasn’t quite worked out like that. I delivered them a couple of litres of sugar solution this morning during a break in the rain, they seemed happy enough – they have started drawing out cells in the ‘super’ which will be where they store honey, which I took to be a good sign, but I imagine they are getting rather fed up with one another stuck inside the hive all day.

Oh and Max passed his first violin exam yesterday – the result of much hard work – very well done, that’s one more music exam than I’ve ever achieved!

The list of winners from the prestigious 35th Missoula International Wildlife Film festival has just been announced, and our recent Natural World film for BBC2, Madagascar Lemurs & Spies, has scooped awards in three categories: Best Conservation Message, Best of Category in Conservation, and a Merit Award for Cinematography.

All very exciting, and fantastic news for Erik, Sascha, their teams in the field, and everyone who has put so much effort and passion into trying to bring this story into the public consciousness. We all worked so hard on this film, and it’s great for it to gain some recognition, but more importantly it raises the profile of the issue as the film now gets shown as part of the festival in May.

I’ve also just received an e-mail from the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012 telling me that one of my photographs has reached the finals of this year’s competition, apparently there were close to 50,000 entries, I think the winners are announced in a couple of months.