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A real monkey? Pull the other one!
This little chap is just one of the robotic creatures fitted with cameras that captured intimate footage of animal behaviour for a compelling new series. But it didn’t always go according to plan...
‘One of the real tortoises became a bit over-amorous’
At first sight they look exactly like the real thing – cute, cuddly and in some cases terrifying creatures of the wild. It’s only when you take a closer look that you realise the stars of BBC1’s brilliant new wildlife series Spy In The Wild are nothing of the sort. The monkey, orangutan, crocodile, ostrich and 30 other ‘creatures’ that take centre stage in this stunning series are extremely lifelike robots, with miniature cameras fitted where their eyes should be, designed to record previously unseen behaviour in their real-life counter pa rt s. And like all the best spies, they’re believable enough to infiltrate the herds, packs and families of the most elusive animals and bring back top- secret information.
The person behind this remarkable series is John Downer, a wildlife film-making veteran who first used miniature cameras concealed in inanimate objects 16 years ago.
Lions – Spy In The Den in 2000 introduced viewers to Bouldercam, a camera hidden in a leaf-covered rock that captured intimate footage of a pride of lions in Africa, and since then similar projects have brought back ground-breaking images of elephants, dolphins and polar bears. In 2013, no fewer than 50 robotic penguins spent nearly a year among the real characterful creatures to capture their behaviour as never before in Spy In The Huddle.
But this new series takes the robots’ involvement to a whole new level. ‘Spy In The Wild is about interaction between the spy creature and the real animal,‘ says John, the executive producer. ‘When the animals are convinced the spy creature is real we see the development of a relationship between them that you wouldn’t get to see with any other style of filming. ‘And that’s what this series is about, animal behaviour, in particular its similarity to human behaviour. So much animal behaviour is like our own, which is inevitable really because we’re animals like they are, just more developed. But seeing our behaviour mirrored in the natural world, as we do in this series, is fascinating and revealing. To some extent, we’re investigating the origins of our own feelings.’ The 34 spy creatures used during the fivepart series range from tiny robots including Spy Caterpi l lar to squirrels, wolves and huge beasts like Spy Orangutan and Spy Crocodile. But few seem likely to capture viewers’ hearts quite like Spy Monkey, a robotic baby langur monkey, who generated some sensational footage for this week’s opening episode. Spy Monkey is picked up by a teenage langur at a temple in Rajasthan in India and rocked and cuddled like a real baby langur, before being accidentally dropped from a great height. He lies motionless on a hard stone floor, prompting the 120-strong troupe of langurs who occupy the grounds of the temple to gather round, believing the baby is dead. As if at a funeral, they’re quiet, mourning the loss. ‘They’d been making quite a lot of noise and suddenly this calm came over them and they started hugging each other,’ explains producer Matt Gordon. ‘Then a gust of wind blew through our hair and through the fur of the langurs and we thought to ourselves, “We’re capturing something truly remarkable here.” The monkeys were mourning like humans in a way scientists had never seen.’
Crucial to any shoot are the first few hours of infiltration, when the group of animals the robot has been placed into will either accept the stranger in their midst or reject it – and quite possibly destroy it. Placing Spy Pup into a litter of wild dog puppies in South Africa caused the production team huge concerns. ‘The scientist we had with us laughed and reckoned that within one or two minutes it would be ripped apart,’ says producer Rob Pilley. ‘But we’d made sure that it precisely mimicked the wild dogs’ body language. We made it capable of everything from submissive gestures to the “play bow”, the dogs’ invitation to have fun, as well as giving it a wagging tail to win over the adults.
‘Huw Williams, the specialist camera operator who was controlling Spy Pup, worked furiously on the switches that controlled the creature when it first joined the pack, wagging its tail, making it bow, moving its ears back and forth, to make sure it gained approval as it was checked out. There
were a few anxious moments but finally it was as if the lights had come on in the wild dogs’ eyes. Their heads went back and they started wagging their tails, and we knew Spy Pup [right] had been accepted.’ That particular mission wasn’t a total success though. One of the younger wild dogs pulled the fur off Spy Pup’s tail and for a while just the wire beneath it carried on wagging. But the team managed to extract the creature from its new ‘family’ and get the fur back in place before any of the real dogs noticed. Setbacks like that were remarkably unusual during the three years it took to make the series, with only a handful of the creatures damaged in action. Spy Tortoise was more vulnerable than most when it was placed among a herd of African elephants in Amboseli in Kenya. The robotic Leopard Tortoise – a creature native to the African Savannah with marking on its shell like a leopard – literally got under the elephants’ feet to record the creatures, but could just as easily have been crushed. Somehow the technology survived and was able to record unique footage of a baby elephant less than an hour old suckling on its mother for the first time and taking its first steps. All the robotic creatures in Spy In The Wild were made specifically for the series and designed by teams in Japan, England and Switzerland. The largest and most expensive ones, such as Spy Orangutan and Spy Crocodile, each cost more than £10,000 to build, hardly surprising when you realise how much work went into them. Spy Orangutan needed thousands of strands of thick red hair to be individually woven into his body, while Spy Crocodile, designed by technicians at the Biorobotics Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, was a masterpiece of design and innovation that took almost a year to construct. ‘They X-rayed the skeleton of a crocodile and then built it bone by bone using carbon fibre,’ explains producer Philip Dalton. ‘Then they added muscle layers and skin. Eventually they had a walking, swimming, waterproofed version of the real thing.’ All the creatures had eye cameras disguised as eyeballs fitted, and many of them had computer-operated “voices” that were programmed to utter a range of sounds and calls. ‘The sounds had to be precise,’ explains Philip. ‘We used a Spy Crocodile hatchling beside the River Nile in Uganda and it had to emit the sound of a newborn as it was picked up by a surrogate “mother” and carried in her mouth. If we’d accidentally given it the voice of a six-month-old crocodile, the response it got could have been very different and much less accepting, and if we‘d really got it wrong and given it aggressive sounds rather than neutral ones, sounds that generate issues over territory for example, we could have lost it completely.’ More than 8,000 hours of footage were shot in the making of the series, a combination of film taken by the spy creatures and also by traditional long-lens cameras. On occasions, both methods came up trumps on the same shoot. In the forests of Senegal in West Africa, the presence of Spy Bush Baby prompted a baby chimp to behave like a small child, curiously knocking on Spy Bush Baby’s false eyes before carrying the robot off for some energetic play. ‘He seemed baffled but fascinated by it,’ says John Downer. ‘He couldn’t seem to decide whether to use the bush baby as a pillow or give it a cuddle. He refused to share it with any of the other chimps, which was unusual because chimps don’t normally have possessions.’ But the footage that came later, taken via a long lens, shone an even more remarkable light on the behaviour of chimpanzees. An older chimp is filmed playing with a tiny kitten, the offspring of a genet cat found abandoned in the forest. He’s gentle and kind to the creature, showing extraordinary empathy. As the narrator of Spy In The Wild, David Tennant, speculates, ‘Maybe this is how human pet-keeping began.’ Says John Downer, ‘We were filming in Senegal for two months, from dawn to dusk, and it got to the point where the chimpanzees were so used to us they forgot we were there. We witnessed behaviour that was so human I felt like we’d been transported into the world of prehistoric man. At one point a fight broke out and the chimps were throwing sticks and rocks at each other. This was raw, human emotion right in front of us and some of the most remarkable animal behaviour I’ve ever seen.’ If the chimpanzee bust-up is slightly terrifying, other scenes in Spy In The Wild will have you chortling. Spy Tortoise had an unsuspecting encounter while filming in Kenya. ‘One of the real tortoises took a shine to the robot and became over-amorous,’ chuckles Phil Dalton. ‘First he got barged and then... well, you know.’ James Bond would have been proud of him.
‘Our scientist said Spy Pup would be ripped apart’
Spy In The Wild begins on Thursday at 8pm on BBC1.