Our latest Natural World film; Madagascar, Lemurs & Spies is going to be broadcast this Thursday 15th March at 8PM on BBC2.

It is the amazing story of two very different men who have risked everything to expose illegal logging in Madagascar and to protect the critically endangered Silky Sifaka.

Erik Patel has spent 10 years living in the remote and extremely challenging rain forests of northern Madagascar studying the elusive and beautiful Silky Sifaka. As political turmoil gripped the country in 2009 the forests where these lemurs live were overrun by loggers working for Chinese controlled mafia organisations. The loggers were after rosewood and ebony – rare and slow growing trees whose timber has great value in the international marketplace, not least as they are highly sought after in the construction of guitars and other musical instruments.

Erik did what he could to raise awareness of the issue but it seemed like a futile struggle ….. until he met Sascha Von Bismark.

Sascha is the head of the Washington based Environmental Investigation Agency, and he had just spent 6 years getting an amendment to the Lacey Act, a piece of US legislation that controls the movement of endangered animal products across state borders. Sascha’s amendment gave the Lacey Act more weight by including plant products under its umbrella and including the US’s international border in its remit. Basically meaning that any US company importing any plant product – from raw timber to loo paper – would have to prove that it had been sourced legally. 

Sascha needed a test case, so, in 2009 he went looking for the illegal logging hotspot of the world, which happened to be the forests of Madagascar – and there Erik and Sascha met.

The film follows their story; Erik’s research, Sascha’s undercover work, and it also follows a year in the life of the group of Silky Sifakas that Erik has devoted his life to. It is a beautiful and uplifting conservation story and really does go to show that, through skill, tenacity and determination David can beat Goliath – world trade in endangered and illegally sourced timber is already changing due to these two men.

This was a really challenging film to make; very difficult working conditions and a complex storyline stretched all of us. The days in the field at Erik’s study site were among the toughest I’ve ever experienced but the team was like no other I’ve worked with, Erik is a genuine hero – he and Sascha are the kind of people who reaffirm one’s faith in human nature. Our family of porters who looked after us also became very close friends who I consider it an absolute privilege to have known and worked with – the memory of our dawn ascent of Marojejy Summit will stick with me forever.

There is more about the film here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dlcgk

And Erik’s website is here:http://www.simpona.org/index.html  – you can donate to help Erik’s work and it will be one of the best causes you ever donate to, I’ve never met anyone more selfless, dedicated and passionate.

I hope you enjoy the film … and if you do call the BBC and tell them!

 

We had a fantastic family get together in Harrogate at the weekend to celebrate the 70th birthdays of Auntie Connie and Uncle Mike – a surprise party organised with enviable precision by cousins Laura and Dan (thank you!).

It was a great opportunity to re-create a photograph of all the Tennant cousins (my mother’s side of the family) which was taken (we think) in 1977 …

As you can see it clearly made good sense to come to family gatherings ‘tooled up’, thanks to Dan Curston for the loan of one of his automatic weapons. We couldn’t find Emu (although you would hardly know), and Stephen Jary (top left in ’77) couldn’t make the party.

I shudder to think what we’ll all look like in another 35 years but I’m guessing we’ll need some sort of stair lift to re-create this arrangement.

Huge thanks again to Laura & Dan, what a great day.

So, I still have unfinished business with the wolf packs of Anchorage, five years ago we put a huge amount of effort spread over a year to get one shot of a wolf, and this time it was a complete no show, but not for want of trying …

We had a pretty amazing set up; two remotely operated cameras that could pan, tilt, zoom, focus and switch to infra-red, sending images down fibre optic cables to my hide, infra red lights, one (subsequently two) dead moose, snacks, coffee, handwarmers, and a few hundred square miles of wilderness that contained some wolves.

We had been given permission by the US army to set everything up on an unused firing range on their huge facility outside Anchorage, it was the perfect location – accessible but wild – and the guys on the base were super helpful, if rather bemused at our plans to plonk a dead moose in the snow and wait and see what turned up. My old friends Rick and Jessy from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game provided the moose – there are always some individuals that die in town each year which need to be removed, winter is extremely tough for moose and natural mortality can be high, especially for pregnant females or bull moose that enter the winter in poor condition after the rut.

When we arrived  Rick and Jesse had already delivered a moose, christened ‘Lucky’, which was attracting scavenger attention. Everything looked set.

It took a couple of days to rig the area, running all the control cables and fibre optics back to the firing range control tower where I was going to spend my time, then the waiting began …

It was one of the more peculiar ways to spend one’s time. Spending night after night (and sizeable chunks of the day) confined to my little tower, not knowing if the animals I was hoping to film were 20 metres away in the trees or 20 miles away. I couldn’t move, and it was cold. It got down below -20C a couple of times, but regularly between -10C and -15C, time, cold and darkness does strange things to ones mind!

I’d have a super hot bath before setting off and stuff my boots and gloves with handwarmers, build up layer up on layer of fleece, down and other thermal goodies , but eventually you get really really chilly. The nights were especially weird, no light to read by, no power to run the I-R lights constantly (the whole setup was run off massive truck batteries) so all I could do was peek out a tiny crack in the tower window into the gloom to see if I could make out any shapes in the snow. I’d curl up like a hibernating doormouse to try to keep warm and drift off into weird cryogenically altered states of consciousness, convinced that a pack of salivating wolves was approaching.

But it was not to be. There were tracks reported about 5 miles to the south of where I was, I saw tracks across the highway about 3 miles north of our set up, and I even thought I saw wolf tracks in very soft snow within a mile of our dead moose one night but they didn’t visit the carcass.

There were several factors working against us; record-breaking snowfall meant that the moose were really struggling – near starvation and super deep snow would have made it very easy for wolves to pick them off, so the wolves were probably not particularly motivated to visit our carcass. There had also been a major cull of wolves in the area last year, mainly due to the fact that the pack to the north of where I was had become increasingly bold, chasing people and eating pets, and there had been great public pressure to ‘manage’ them. Probably the main factor was time and the innate wariness of wolves, they would have eventually fed on the carcass (they are probably chewing on it right now!) but no matter how cautious you are they have an almost supernatural ability to spot when something has changed or doesn’t quite ‘feel’ right, they can bide their time but unfortunately we had to come home.

We got some really lovely coyote, raven and eagle behaviour on the carcass, so it wasn’t all in vain. The ravens where (as always) especially fantastic; creeping round behind bald eagles to tweak their tailfeathers in a manner that suggests that there is something deep in raven DNA that compels them to wind up eagles.

The rest of the shoot was great; lovely moose behaviour and snowy scenery, a fantastic day filming a dog musher and actually having a go at driving a dog team, and a great day filming the start of the Iditarod dog race (1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome). Next trip is South Africa to film giraffes … it’s a strange life.

With the inevitability of that seal being washed off the ice floe to be gobbled up by a marauding pod of killer whales, the Frozen Planet camera team bagged the Best Photography prize at the Royal Television Society awards last night  – somewhat predictable, but I think I would have had a heart attack if it had gone any other way, it was a very deserving winner.

It was a great evening though; free champagne and a red carpet which was a bit more like a large doormat than the usual Academy Award type walkway. Ants did look fantastic on the big screen, and did get a big cheer when it came up as a nominee.

It was lovely to see material I’d filmed featured in a few of the nominated films; Madagascar, Ants and my snow monkey footage from the One Life feature film all looked great on the cinema screen. There were some very deserving winners; Madagascar got pipped by the wonderful ‘My Life as a Turkey’ in the Best Wildlife Programme category (also beating Frozen Planet to show that there is hope for the little guy!) and Human Planet won Best Specialist Factual.

 

 

 

I’m off to Alaska tomorrow to carry on with the two films I’m working on there for Parthenon / Animal Planet. The main aim of this trip is to see if we can film wolves scavenging on a moose carcass. I think it could be tricky, I tried filming wolves from this pack several years ago and after a huge amount of effort only got one shot on a remote camera, this time we’re taking out a much more elaborate remote camera setup and I’m really excited at the thought of what we might see – wolves, wolverine, brown bear (apparently there is still one out and about in the area despite it being midwinter) and, of course, the Sasquatch.

I’m working with old friends Rick & Jessy from the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, they seem pretty relaxed about the chances of the wolves turning up and it’s been a very hard winter in Alaska this year so they should be hungry. The action is probably going to happen at night, I’ll be filming in infra red and it’s going to be a case of sitting and monitoring the cameras throughout the night, it’s been -26C there recently, I’ll pack some extra socks.

I have just been sent the list of nominations for the Royal Television Society awards this Thursday, the exciting news is that, in addition to my nomination for Best Photography for Empire of the Desert Ants, the Madagascar series I spent the best part of two years working on has also been nominated for Best Wildlife Programme.

This was all great until I read that, for the Best Photography award, my competition consists of two little known series; Frozen Planet and Human Planet, and Madagascar is also up against the behemoth that is Frozen Planet…

I’m currently trying to decide whether to remove the champagne from the fridge and put it back on the dusty shelf where it usually lives or order another bottle.

Exciting news from the Royal Television Society yesterday:

I`m delighted to now be able to inform you that the judging of the RTS 2012 awards has been completed. This year we had more entries than ever before and the good news is

The following has  been nominated:

John Brown for Natural World: Empire of the Desert Ants in the Best Photography category.

 

Makes all the 3am starts and scrabbling around in the desert worthwhile. The awards bash is in a couple of weeks, it’s going to be a challenge to keep 20,000 ants in their party frocks under control on the red carpet.

 

 

 

We had a great evening out at the V&A in London yesterday. My friend Simon Peers had a private viewing of his incredible spider silk textiles – a flat panelled piece and an astonishing cape. The panelled piece has already caused quite a stir in the US, spending time on exhibit in the New York Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Museum of Art, this was the first public viewing of the cape.

Simon’s work has had some great publicity on the UK press over the last few days – the fact that it has taken over 1 million (large!) spiders, and 8 years, to create these beautiful works of art has really captured the public’s imagination. It has been known that spider silk is the strongest natural fibre – with a greater tensile strength than steel – for many years, but despite a range of attempts, nobody other than Simon has managed to figure out how to collect and weave it in any meaningful quantity.

I have been really fortunate to see both of these pieces under construction over the last few years – I always stay with Simon and his family on filming trips to Madagascar, and Simon’s workshop is in the ground floor of his home. The process of collecting the spiders (which are later released into the wild), extracting the silk, spinning, designing and weaving is nothing short of alchemy. To turn boxes of seething spiders into this incredible cloth which seems to glow with its own inner light has a real fairy tale quality.

Simon has written a fantastic book about the history of weaving with spider silk which features some of my photographs of the process. The exhibition runs at the V&A for a couple of months and is really worth a visit – while you are in London check out the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy too, incredible and inspiring.

 

Our latest Natural World film – Madagascar, Lemurs & Spies – is finished, here is some fantastic advanced publicity for the film in BBC Wildlife Magazine: