Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
CREATURE FEATURE
These clever little meerkats have filmed themselves at work and play as part of an extraordinary new documentary series that has wild animals carrying the cameras. By Christopher Stevens
A brilliant new documentary from Gordon Buchanan has wild animals turning the cameras on themselves
Film- maker Gordon Buchanan is interviewing candidates to take over his role as cameraman. ‘Hi,’ he greets the first hopeful. ‘What are your qualifications? You’re a meerkat – good. Are you old enough? No! Get out.’
Unoffended, the applicant scampers off. The next arrival is more suitable: his name is Fat Boy, and he’s hyperactive even by meerkat standards. Gordon wants to slip a tiny collar around Fat Boy’s neck, to film life in Africa’s Kalahari desert as seen by its most lovable residents. These little creatures are wild, though they are accustomed to the scientists studying them.
That doesn’t mean Fat Boy will sit still. Technician Chris Watts, who has developed the miniature video lens, tries repeatedly to attach the camera. Every time, Fat Boy stands still until the last instant and then twitches away. Finally, he allows Chris to click the collar into place. Gordon watches with mixed feelings. ‘As a cameraman,’ he murmurs, ‘I’m giving my job to a completely different species. I’m trusting in technology – and a meerkat.’
This is the revolutionary premise of his latest documentary, Animals With Cameras. After living alongside gorillas and wolves, letting them learn to trust him, this innovative naturalist has devised a way to obtain more intimate footage. Using collars, harnesses and extrastrong waterproof glue, he attaches state-of-the-art recording devices to nine different species, including chimps, devil rays and penguins, in a three-part BBC1 series.
‘I want to see the world from an animal’s point of view,’ he says. ‘They can take us places that a cameraman like me cannot go, and show us sides of their lives we have never seen before.’
The show lives up to its extraordinary promise immediately, as Fat Boy gets into a playfight with his cousin. Dust flies as the two mischievous meerkats pummel each other, and the collar-mounted camera makes viewers feel as if we’re right in the middle of the scuffle. Fat Boy’s auntie, Eve, is better behaved. After she sits meekly for her collarcam, she digs up a juicy grub and carries it in her mouth to one of the babies. Later she heads underground to see her newborns. And this is where the film becomes really ext r a o r d i na r y. Despite weighing barely more than an ounce, the camera has an infrared lens that can see in the lightless burrow. As Eve dives down one of the 20 boltholes into the maze of tunnels hundreds of yards long, we can see her paws deftly avoiding dozens of dung beetles. The meerkats tolerate them because the insects keep the place clean. Unlike the camera, Eve cannot see in the dark, instead using her whiskers and sense of smell to navigate. The camera battery lasts two hours, but the journey through the tunnels takes so long that the BBC team had to programme a delay, so it wouldn’t start filming until the animal was snuggled up with her babies, deep underground. The easiest animal to fit with a cam- era was also the most difficult to retrieve it from. Fur seals off the southern coast of Australia, on Kanowna island, were happy to lie still while Gordon and a local scientist used a special glue that wouldn’t harm the seals to fasten the video box to their backs. But fur seals spend up to 80 per cent of their lives in water so when they come ashore, they might be on a completely different part of the island. They could also dislodge the cameras by knocking them on rocks and if their fur moulted, the cameras would drop off.
‘ It was a huge worry,’ Gordon admits. ‘If we couldn’t retrieve the cameras then we didn’t have any footage – or a show!’ One seal did bring back her camera, and the pictures she captured were remarkable enough to rewrite much of what was known of fur seal behaviour. ‘We’ve learned more from two hours of underwater filming than we have from years of dive recorders,’ one scientist enthused. ‘We’re seeing what they see.’
The shots solved a major mystery: how they avoid their main predator, the great white shark. The killer fish circle Kanowna constantly, looking for
prey, and sometimes seals return with bite marks in their flanks, tokens of a narrow escape. But mostly the sharks go hungry, which puzzled scientists.
When the camera-seal hits the water, the answer is revealed. She takes evasive action by diving to the seabed. Great whites like to ambush prey from below, so seals on the ocean floor are safer. Fur seals can hold their breath for eight minutes and, when the show’s star does surface briefly for a gulp of air, the picture shows her constantly rolling as she looks for sharks in all directions.
The most dramatic finding comes from collarcams on baboons at a farm in South Africa. The greedy monkeys have been raiding the butternut squash harvest and the destruction caused in a single night is extraordinary. Before long, the harvest is gone and the farm out of business. ‘It’s like being invaded by ninjas,’ says scientist Leah Findlay.
Farmers have tried planting walls of thorn trees to keep baboons out, scattering the ground with rubber snakes, erecting electric fences and employing guards. Nothing works. But for a few weeks every year the baboons disappear. With Leah’s help, Gordon traps half a dozen baboons with butternut bait and a rusty cage. The animals are tranquilised and fitted with cameras.
The footage reveals a surprise. Once a year baboons gorge on the fruit of the lala palm. They enjoy it so much that they scoff every morsel. If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. After seeing the footage, the farmers plant acres of lala palms. Next year, the baboons will stuff their faces on their favourite fruit, and leave the harvest in peace.
Getting a good meal isn’t so simple for Odyssey, Shylo and Wonder, cheetah orphans on a reserve in Namibia. They’ve been handreared by conservationist Marlice van Vuuren since their mother was killed when they were a day old. Now the cats are learning to hunt.
Using a strap made on a 3D printer, specially tailored to the shape of a cheetah’s head, Gordon mounts cameras between the ears of Odyssey and his sister Wonder. The footage reveals the trio’s problem – they are too ambitious. On their first filmed hunt, the three cats seek out a herd of gemsbok, an antelope with long and lethal horns. Boldly, they stalk and chase a calf. At first the gemsbok scatter. But within seconds the antelope charge the predators. All that Odyssey and his sisters can do is make a run for it. Very undignified...
For Gordon, the most exciting challenge came in the mid- At la nt ic Azores islands, where scientists study devil rays –a f ish tha t looks like a bat, yet is related to the shark. The team fitted trackers by freediving, without scuba tanks, down to the rays on the seabed. ‘To know they’d take our cameras to places we couldn’t go – it opened up a world for us,’ says Gordon. ‘As we bobbed about on the surface in a yacht, the rays showed us their world.’
The first glimpse is like a CGI film shot. The rays swim in formation, never overtaking or jostling, as perfectly spaced as jets in an air display. Many of the females are pregnant. Rays give birth to live pups after a year-long gestation, and several of the mothers-to-be are close. The raycam picks up something never captured before: a baby wriggles inside its mother, making her skin ripple.
The shoal goes into a steep dive, racing towards the ocean bed more than half a mile below. They are hunting plankton, but the water is so cold that they can only stay for a few minutes. The rays are soon heading for the surface, to sunbathe. And here the camera records another unknown behaviour. When a devil ray is chilly... it shivers!
Gordon’s favourite animals were the chimps. At a sanctuary in Cameroon, he met four- yearold orphan Kim Bang. She was immediately interested in Gordon’ s gadgets. ‘Great apes are as fascinated by us as we are by them,’ he says. Kim Bang quickly understood Gordon wanted her to wear a camera, and she liked looking at her reflection in the lens. But when she tired of carrying it, she pulled it to pieces. Chimps are up to four times stronger than humans and even the biggest rivets couldn’t withstand her powerful fingers.
The camera captured known behaviours, such as nest-building, from the animal’s viewpoint. Some activities, such as teeth- brushing, feel very human – even if chimps use a stick, not a toothbrush. But one experiment was new. Brought up in the safety of a reserve, Kim Bang had never seen a snake before. But to live in the wild, she has to learn how to avoid them. So the scientists hid a rubber snake in a tree and waited for her to discover it.
Kim Bang knew instinctively to be wary. Skirting it carefully, she sounded the alarm and then looked more closely. The chimpcam revealed she never took her attention off it for a moment... until she realised it was a harmless toy. Kim Bang didn’t know it, but she had just taken a giant leap towards the day she can live free in the forest. Animals With Cameras starts on Thursday 1 February at 8pm on BBC1.