Mountains hit new heights

A wildlife series films animals and people living in extreme environments, writes Sarah Marshall

Extending thousands of metres into the sky, mountains are home to an interesting mix of wildlife and people. But what does it take to survive and thrive in such extreme conditions?

A new BBC2 wildlife three-part series, Mountain: Life At The Extreme, explores the wildlife and people who live in three of the most famous ranges – the Rockies, the Andes and the Himalayas.

Steve Greenwood, who produced and directed the first episode, gives us a taste of what to expect.

What was the biggest challenge you faced during filming?

“Getting to places – particularly in the Himalayas and the Andes. For the filming of a segment about glacier birds, who live 5,000 metres above sea level in the Andes, it took the team 10 days to get there – mainly because they needed to acclimatise to the altitude.

“These places are also incredibly remote. We needed to transport about half a ton of equipment and had to use pack horses or other hardy animals. It’s the only production I’ve ever heard of where there’s a line in the budget for the hire of yaks.”

Big cats feature in all three episodes. How tough were they to track?

“Animals are few and far between in these environments and most have evolved not to be seen, so you have to be patient – often in extremely demanding conditions.

“We filmed pumas in the Andes, cougars in the Rockies and snow leopards in the Himalayas. I was filming the cougars. People can spend a lifetime in the Rockies and not see them. I was in Montana having a coffee with one of the wildlife cameramen out there, and he told me of a cougar using a deserted ranch to stash its kills.

“So we set up camera traps and spent months tracking the female cougar. Eventually we managed to get some footage of this extraordinary animal bringing a kill into the ranch and eating it inside – something I’ve never heard of before, and I don’t think has ever been filmed.

What other surprising wildlife encounters did you capture?

“In wildlife films, you want to have some animals people are familiar with – like the grizzly bears and cougars – but we also try to film some animals that people have never heard of and might be surprised about.

“There’s a tiny little animal called

a salamander that’s about the size of a newt and they live in ponds in the Rockies, formed when snow melts in the mountains. These ponds are around for two to three months before they dry up. The salamanders mainly feed on insects, but sometimes there’s not much food available, so they’ve evolved to metamorphose into cannibals. Their mouths get wider and they grow sharp teeth, so you get these ephemeral spring ponds full of little cannibals wanting to eat each other.

“In the Andes episode, there’s a sequence about a frog that lives in the cloud forests of Ecuador. It was only discovered a few years ago and only lives on 10 trees. It’s called a shape-shifting frog, and it has the ability to change the shape of its skin. Biologists have no clue about the mechanism. “One of my aims is to get kids turned on by nature – and those sorts of stories appeal to the 10-yearold in all of us.”

The programmes also look at humans who’ve made their home in the mountains. What sort of person chooses to live in this environment? Clockwise from main: a puma with two cubs; the Peruvian Andes; mountaineer Hilaree O’neill

“All the people we met shared a real understanding of the fickleness of mountains. Whether it’s the Lake District or the Himalayas, you’ve got to treat mountains with a huge amount of reverence and respect; you never quite know what will happen in 10 minutes’ time.

“In the Rockies episode, we filmed a remarkable man called Jeff Shapiro, who is a wingsuit jumper. He goes to 3,500ft high clifftops wearing a wingsuit and jumps off.

“Hilaree O’neill is this fantastic woman we filmed in Colorado. She’s a mountaineer and extreme skier who’s been around the world filming in some of the toughest places; she climbed Everest and the mountain next to it in 24 hours with a sprained ankle.

“But she’s also a wise person. She talked about being afraid in the mountains and admitted she sometimes thinks, ‘Oh my God, I just want to get out of here; will the mountains please let me go.’

“You need to have that feeling that, if you take a wrong step, it could all go wrong, because ultimately, mountains have no sympathy for us.”■

“It’ s the only production I’ ve heard of where there’ s a budget for the hire of yaks”

Mountain: Life at the Extreme continues on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm