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Secrets of Sir David’s cameraman
Gavin Thurston has been filming shows with Sir David Attenborough for 30 years. Now he shares his fascinating untold stories in a new book charting his wildest adventures
10 JUNE 1972
My adventures with wildlife photography began with the school choir’s annual trip to Dudley Zoo. My Auntie Mary lent me her Box Brownie camera for the day, and now two weeks later I’m standing on the pavement outside Boots the chemist, having spent all my pocket money on getting the roll of 12 photos developed.
This is what a nine-year-old boy captures on film at his first attempt: an overexposed shot of our front door, a rather silhouetted camel, three elephants by a fallen tree... and the picture that is to change my life. Cuddles, a male orca or killer whale, is almost fully out of the water and his glossy black nose is touching a plastic ball hanging on a rope above the small pool.
I will later learn that orcas – incredible, intelligent animals – should never be kept in captivity. But seeing one so close, and capturing that splitsecond forever by pushing a button, instils in me the beginnings of a passion that will one day lead me around the world to see animals in their natural habitat.
28 FEBRUARY 1991
Filming a documentary about the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, my colleague Richard and I spot a pride of lions that have taken advantage of some shade from the midday sun... by crawling right under one of the Toyota Land Cruisers used for tourist safaris. The lions won’t budge, and the tourists get stuck there for hours. Later, I leave Richard standing guard over his camera on the crater’s eastern slope, as it takes a sequence of time-lapse photographs. I drive to another spot to set up another pair of cameras, but as I return to the Range Rover I can see that something is not right. Richard is about 600 yards away, and he keeps looking up at me and then away. I grab the binoculars. To my horror, directly behind him is a lioness. My heart is pounding, and in the panic I can’t find reverse. So I freewheel backwards down the hill towards him, then jam the brakes on and slam it into first gear for a U-turn. With adrenaline rushing, I drive straight at Richard across the grass and pull up next to him. ‘That lioness has been watching me for a good ten minutes,’ he says as he climbs aboard. ‘I was kind of hoping you might bring the car back down sooner.’ I really can’t believe how calm he is, but by staying still he probably gave off an air of confidence and courage.
11 MARCH 1995
My tent is on a ridge 12,000ft up in the Qinling Mountains in China where we are filming a documentary about giant pandas. The ridge is so narrow that part of the tent is hanging out over a 400ft scree slope. I lie very still in my sleeping bag, afraid that I’ll roll out and wake up at the bottom of the hill. But I can’t sleep. All I can hear through the night is the crunch, crunch, crunching of a giant panda working its way through its bamboo dinner.
As the morning light comes up, I pull on my boots and slip out of one tent to crawl slowly to another – the canvas hide I’ve set up to watch for pandas. Silently lifting the flap, I climb in and lace it up behind me. Very slowly I roll up the front of the hide and poke the camera lens out. To my joy, just below me, the panda I’d heard crunching through the night has cleared an area about 30ft across. She’s in the middle of it and God, I am so excited to see her. She is sitting almost facing me and, casually leaning back, she grabs a bamboo stem which she holds to the side of her mouth like a flute. The crunching starts again, and I start filming. After
an hour, a tiny cub comes crawling out of the bamboo thickets. It rolls and tumbles around its mum, looking for attention, before squeezing in and sitting on her lap. This is TV gold, but more than that, it’s the ultimate wildlife experience for me. And it gets better. Giant snowflakes begin to fall, floating side to side like feathers and settling on the bamboo leaves. The baby clambers off mum’s lap and climbs a tree, crawling out onto a branch about 30ft up and directly in front of my camera. Every shot looks like a picture postcard now. Then, to my horror, the baby falls out of the tree and I hear a sickening thud. Mum doesn’t seem at all concerned, but it’s at least an hour before her baby reappears, looking fine. It climbs up again, falls out again, and repeats this several times. ‘Oh my God,’ I think, ‘no wonder they’re going extinct. As well as having a limited diet, being persecuted by humans and suffering habitat loss, they’re also blimmin’ stupid!’
1 FEBRUARY 1996
Despite filming many kinds of animals all over the world I have never seen a whale, so I’m excited when a BBC producer contacts me about a documentary following the longest migration on Earth – that of the grey whales from the Bering Sea in the Arctic to the warm lagoons of Baja California, Mexico. There’s just one catch. This is a last-minute job, and the only boat that can take us is a German tourist ship. ‘Er, basically, Gavin,’ says the man from the Beeb, ‘it’s more of a spiritual voyage. The tourists have hydrophones and listen to whale song and so on. The other thing is, er, it’s a naturist boat. So I just wanted to ask, are you happy to be naked for three weeks?’ There’s a long pause, and he adds, ‘Obviously you can wear a wetsuit for the underwater work.’
I thought it was a hilarious idea, especially when you consider what the behind- thescenes ‘making of’ footage would involve. Sadly, another boat offered us a berth and the producer booked us onto that.
28 OCTOBER 2000
I have an idea. I’m in Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Congo and I want to film a swamp-dwelling deer called the sitatunga. Man has hunted them for centuries and they flee at the first sight of me, but I’ve noticed they don’t bat an eyelid when a gorilla approaches.
My idea is this: I’m going to dress up as a gorilla. A producer hires a suit from a Bristol fancy dress shop and flies out with my disguise in his suitcase. I put it on, and pick my way
A CRACK IN THE ICE WAS SOON A CHASM
across the marshy ground towards the antelope. My colleagues think it’s hilarious, but the sitatunga see nothing odd about me at all. I can’t quite believe it. While I pretend to forage like a silverback, I get some intimate shots of these calm, colourful creatures. I am over the moon.
20 MARCH 2001
Protected by marsh and swamp, the Goualougo Triangle in the Republic of Congo is one of the last areas yet to be exploited for hardwood by logging companies – or any other humans. Scientists have discovered a population of ‘innocent chimps’ that appear never to have seen humans before, and I’m here to film them in the hope that the government can be persuaded to turn this area into a national park.
When naturalists first found this ape colony, the chimps were as surprised as the people. Instead of running away in fear, they approached the scientists in bewilderment. Then they climbed into the trees and settled down, resting their heads on their hands to watch patiently, as if to say, ‘We don’t know what you are, but we’re going to watch and find out.’
Our pygmy tracker has a trick for attracting the chimps. He makes a high-pitched, nasal, plaintive call that sounds, he says, like an injured duiker – one of the smallest of all antelopes, just slightly bigger than a Jack Russell. Chimps sometimes hunt them, and an injured one would be an easy meal. Within 15 minutes, we start to hear distant chimpanzee pant-hoots. Soon, two stocky apes appear and stop in their tracks when they see us. They were expecting an injured duiker, and instead they’ve found a film crew. They stare at us, their faces clearly saying, ‘What the bleep are you?’ I’m sure they have never seen people before.
It’s an incredible experience. I film with the tripod low to the ground, moving very slowly, while the apes climb a tree and settle onto a branch to watch us – holding hands to reassure each other. I can see why they’re called innocent chimps: they’re oblivious to how dangerous and destructive men can be.
A few months later, I’m thrilled to hear from Congo that the Goualougo Triangle will not be invaded by logging companies. The decision was swayed in part by our film.
JUNE 2001
Sir David Attenborough has a way with words that can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. We are filming for his The Life Of Mammals series in the Conkouati-Douli National Park in the Republic of Congo, in the mangrove swamps where orphaned chimps have been released into the wild after being raised by humans. The chimps are excited to see us as they know our pirogues, or canoes, usually bring food. As David’s canoe reaches the shore, a five-year-old chimp called Belinga rushes up enthusiastically and nearly capsizes the boat, before taking the great naturalist by the hand and leading him ashore. The next 20 minutes are just magic, as David sits on a fallen branch and hands palm nuts to Belinga, who wields a piece of hardwood the size of a baseball bat to crack them open.
For the next piece ‘to camera’, David stands in chest waders with the waters of the lagoon up to his waist. Dotted around him are delicate white waterlilies and, as he speaks, the chimpanzees walk and wade their way behind him through the waters. This, David explains, may be how our ancestors took their first steps upright. I am close to tears as I film. To have Sir David Attenborough in front of me so eloquently explaining a part of evolution, while behind is a vision of the origin of early man: the image and sound of those 25 seconds will stay with me forever. This is another one of those days when I appreciate that my job is full of incredible experiences.
2 MAY 2004
I’m filming in Indonesia for a series called Deep Jungle, and our goal is to get the first video shots ever of the Sumatran tiger in the wild. Tigers are endangered worldwide, but the Sumatran population is critically low, with as few as 400 left at large. We will need all the luck and skill we can muster, so at the insistence of our local drivers we have the expedition blessed by a local witch doctor. Traditional healing and magic is still treated very seriously here, but I confess that at first I was just humouring the villagers by filming the ceremony.
After 15 minutes, my attitude has changed forever. The witch doctor has sung, chanted and danced himself into a trance, and now he’s on all fours, pawing the gravel like a cat sharpening its claws. Then he begins to snarl and growl. Having filmed animal behaviour for nigh- on 20 years, I’m used to seeing how animals move. This man is now moving and behaving just like a cat, and there’s a wildness in his eyes as if he’s possessed. It’s as though he really has turned into a tiger.
Afterwards I stride down to the dry riverbed, still trying to process what I have just witnessed. As I round a corner of the river, I look downstream and see walking up the far bank a brownish cat, about the size of a small Labrador. I get a good look at it as it approaches. Then it looks up as it hears the others coming downstream, and jumps up the bank to disappear into the forest.
I call to our English guide, Jeremy, and describe what I’ve just seen. Gold- brown to fox-red fur, spots and stripes on its chest. Mottled black and white lines across its cheeks and a solid-looking tail with a black tip. Jeremy is immediately jealous: he tells me it was an extremely rare golden cat and he has never seen one. Perhaps the witch doctor’s magic is working already.
Nearly two weeks later, something triggers one of our camera traps. I inspect the footage and, as expected, it was just a bat. But I keep spooling forward, and then I see it – the tiger. What a magnificent animal, regal and elegant, walking straight towards the camera, sniffing the air. It pauses and walks out of frame to the right... straight across our second camera trap. It stops right in frame, at the base of a tree. Oh, those beautiful stripes. Success.
13 NOVEMBER 2004
African bees are killers. When one stings, the rest start swarming to attack, attracted by a pheromone that the sting emits. There are two recommended tactics: either calm them down with smoke, or run like hell.
What the bees really like, as I now discover to my alarm, is human sweat. They lap it up for the salt, and then they tell their mates. If you’re sitting in a tree platform 30ft off the ground as I am, waiting to film elephants in Gabon’s Lope National Park for the ITV series
Deep Jungle, this can be a problem. The bees aren’t being aggressive but they have found their way into my shirt and, if I accidentally squash one it will sting me.
After five or six hours, I count 80 bees on the camera alone. There are 100 on my left arm and another hundred or so on my body. Even if the elephants turn up, I won’t be able to film them. I’ve got nothing for making smoke except mosquito coils, a burnable insect repellent. It doesn’t repel the bees, though – they’re not bothered. I decide to radio for help, knowing that I can’t risk simply climbing down from this height with bees stinging me all over. I’ll have to be lowered on a rope. Sure enough, as soon as I start to move, the pain begins. As I reach the ground, I unclip the ropes and run like crazy for the nearest stream.
The effects of so many stings is weird. My heart is pounding, my skin is tingling, and as I splash water all over me I’m pulling out every bee sting I can see. Still, I’ve been lucky. A large glass of single malt later helps restore the calm.
APRIL 2010
The opening to Frozen Planet is to be introduced by Sir David Attenborough at the North Pole. I join him and the production team to take off from Spitsbergen in a high-winged Soviet Antonov jet, which seems a relic of the Cold War. The camp maintained by the Russian military at the top of the world is surprisingly comfortable, with a scattering of heated, insulated tents and an outdoors Portaloo-style toilet. The Russians clearly have a sense of humour because they have cut a hole in the ice and put up a sign - ‘Place for the Washing.’
The GPS on my phone tells me we are travelling at about three knots, or walking speed, even when we are lying in our tents. That’s because the sea ice is floating and moving. We’ll use GPS to try to locate the absolute geographic North Pole to shoot David’s intro, but by the time he’s finished talking we might have shifted several hundred yards on the ocean current. After filming is done, I’m alarmed to notice a crack in the ice near my tent. I head to see Igor at the information desk but he doesn’t look too concerned. But I’m worried: we arrived on a 30-ton jet, and I’d like to think this ice is solid.
Four Russians with an ice drill saunter over, puffing away on cigarettes as they bore down to test the thickness. After about three feet, seawater comes surging up. The Russians raise their eyebrows and shrug. They’re not too worried. But I’m glad to leave – and aghast when I learn later that the crack soon opened up a 20ft chasm along the runway, before splitting the camp in two. The Russians dealt with this by floating to safety on an ice raft, and then bulldozing a new runway. I doubt if they even put their cigarettes out.
3 NOVEMBER 2014
Sitting in an acrylic sphere nearly a quarter of a mile below the surface of the ocean is a weird sensation. It’s like being in an underwater dreamworld. This is the first filming trip for an episode of Blue Planet II, simply called The Deep, and we’ve come to the coast near Cairns, Australia. I’ve been diving for 15 years but I have never been in a submersible and I’m ten times deeper than I’ve ever dived. The shell is more than 6in thick to withstand the incredible pressures, but visibility is perfect from all angles.
We lower ourselves into the threeman Triton Nadir through a hatch on the top. With a pilot and two passengers, plus controls and cameras and our packed lunches, it’s pretty cosy for an eight-hour dive. And before you ask, no, there is no toilet.
Our mothership’s sonar has picked up an unusual layer in the water that we suspect might be a huge shoal of lanternfish, migrating to the surface at dusk to feed. We hope to join them, ascend with them and film their bioluminescence – the eerie, almost neon glow they give off. But for two weeks we dive and see no lanternfish. A swordfish inspects us, and for a moment I think it’s going to try and run us through. Squids squirt ink at us. But no lanternfish.
I was naive to think it would be easy. The deep sea is far more inaccessible even than outer space because of the immense pressures – 100 times greater than at sea level if you descend just one kilometre or 1,100 yards. When you cross the oceans on a cruise liner, remember that 95 per cent of the sea floor below you has never been explored.
Journeys In The Wild: The Secret Life Of A Cameraman, by Gavin Thurston, published by Seven Dials, £16.99. © Gavin Thurston. Adapted by Christopher Stevens. To order a copy for £ 15.30 call 0844 571 0640. P& P free. Offer valid until 21/ 09/ 2019.