My wild queens
The women risking lives to show off matriarchs of natural world
IT was an urgent call of nature which led Vanessa Berlowitz to one of her hairiest – and most undignified – moments in the wild. A former star of the BBC Natural History Unit, she is the toast of wildlife film-making worldwide with her new National Geographic and Disney+ show Queens proving a massive hit.
She has worked more with Sir David Attenborough in the field than any woman and survived coming face to face with elephant-killing lions and a charging grizzly bear.
But she nearly met her maker when filming in Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago for BBC’s Frozen Planet.
Vanessa was staying in a remote small hut with two male crew members, “desperate for a pee at 3am – it’s still daylight because it’s so far north.”
She says: “I’ve got all my outdoor gear down by my ankles because at that point they didn’t design outdoor clothes for women.
“You had to literally take your skidoo suit virtually off, and unpeel five layers of thermals. So I was down to my knickers and thermal vest and just had this awful feeling of something watching me over my shoulder.
“I looked behind me and there was a very emaciated female polar bear probably within 30 metres – and that is far too close at any time of year.
“This was summer, probably the most dangerous time to meet a polar bear because there’s very little food. A female is particularly dangerous if she is also feeding young cubs. So this was about as dangerous as it can get.
“I didn’t even bother pulling up my pants and waddled as fast as I could – with my pants around my ankles – back to the cabin. I was so panicked I fell through the door which gave a nasty awakening to the men who ended up staring at my bare bottom.
“I was hyperventilating and saying ‘polar bear, polar bear’. They helped me get the door back up and we sent firecrackers out the windows to scare her off. That was probably the closest I’ve come to being eaten.”
Narrated by Hollywood star Angela Bassett, Queens is a seven-part documentary series which celebrates the female leaders of the natural world.
One dramatic episode features the sisters from a formidable pride of lions clash with a hyena clan led by a devious queen in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater.
Heartbreakingly, the documentarymakers managed to capture hyena infanticide on film for the first time.
Vanessa, 53, says: “It was a brilliant demonstration of Machiavellian, conniving behaviour that showed how the would-be queen, Ayisha, was waiting in the wings for her moment to seize power by killing the next heir to the throne. In other episodes I loved seeing our badass orca grandmother kill a great white [shark] with a single blow to the side.”
But the females weren’t just in front of the camera lens. Having seen few women succeed in the industry while she was moving through the ranks, Vanessa has made it her mission to change that in the future.
She says: “Coming up through the BBC, there’s no way I can say I have faced anywhere near the obstacles the women from other countries that I worked with on Queens have had. However a lot of women who came in at entry level never quite seemed to get promoted. The minute they wanted to have kids there wasn’t a place for them as more senior directors.
“I got very senior at NHU, I was given unbelievable opportunities, I worked with Sir David more than any other woman has, I worked on all the biggest series like Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, the Life Of series with David.
“But I did look around and go ‘why am I the only woman on location?’ [it] inspired me to change it.”
Bristol-based mum of one Vanessa now runs Wildstar Films with co-founder husband Mark Linfield, 55, and when she got the commission to make Queens ( from a female commis
sioner), she recruited some of the very few female natural history film-makers with the relevant experience.
This included her Mexican mentee, cinematographer Tania Escobar, who incredibly filmed bonobos for the first time hundreds of feet up in the jungle canopy, while swarmed by killer African bees in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Vanessa says: “No one had done canopy work with bonobos. It was something about Tania’s calmness and gentleness, she was accepted as one of the females in that group. That’s not to say she’s not the biggest badass out there, her office is 100m in the air being bombarded by electrical storms and huge swarms of bees.”
Vanessa was born in Syracuse, New York State, her dad was a visiting professor in architecture, her mum a housewife. The family moved back to the London when she was very young.
He developed multiple sclerosis, and she grew up in Bournemouth, Dorset, where there was a treatment centre, with Vanessa helping with caring. It was watching Sir David’s Life on Earth which “blew me away when I was kid” and convinced her she wanted to work with wildlife.
She began working for the BBC’s Natural History Unit and worked with the great man.
She says: “It took me a long time because it was a privilege.”
Travelling the globe with him, she adds: “The time at the North Pole was his first, for his 90th birthday and it was wonderful to see someone at 90 still so excited to be somewhere new.”
Despite putting her own life on the line many times to bring incredible wildlife films to our living rooms, it was a much more familiar creature which scared Vanessa the most.
She says: “The most frightened I have been was meeting child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when we were going were going to do a shoot where chimps wade between islands bipedally in a way that gives you a glimpse of our early human story.
“I’d gone overland with a cameraman called Gavin and we were travelling on top of a goods truck, sat with all our food, all our equipment on a tarpaulin and we got stopped at a road point by child soldiers.
“They were high on heroin and all carrying large machine guns. They must have been average ages 14 to 18.
“I was in my late 20s. They started pushing me around. The lead guy said ‘come with me we need to talk to you more’. I was feeling pretty anxious.
“Gavin was amazing and thought so quick and said ‘don’t go near her, she’s riddled with diseases, that’s why she’s so old, and hasn’t had kids. Here why don’t you take the booze?’.
“He started pulling all our beer, wine and crew alcohol off.. that’s the closest I have come to real harm.
“A grizzly bear came on a full charge at us in Alaska once and I felt fear but nothing like with the child soldiers. I find animals easier to predict. They don’t want to kill you for no reason.”
■ Queens is on NatGeo on Sundays at 8pm and is streaming on Disney+.
It was wonderful to see David still excited to be somewhere new at the age of 90
VANESSA BERLOWITZ NATURAL HISTORY FILMMAKER