Get to know the many species of ‘Dogs in the Wild’
Viewers may see some of their beloved family pet in the canines in a new PBS documentary series, but “Dogs in the Wild” are most definitely a different beast.
Airing consecutive Wednesdays beginning Feb. 8 (check local listings), the three-part series titled “Dogs in the Wild, A Nature Miniseries” travels to every continent save Antarctica to follow some of the 37 species within the canid family in their natural habitats, ranging from the familiar such as fox, wolf, coyote and dingo to the lesser knowns like dhole, takuma, fennec and the maned wolf.
The photography is exquisite as it captures these animals and their expressions, body language and behaviors, which are not all that different from those of domestic dogs. But these are predators that hunt for survival.
And that proved challenging for the photographers in shoots like the one in the Sahara for the fennec, a squirrel-sized canine with rabbit-like ears that can go for days and weeks without water and is a master at not being detected in its barren desert surroundings.
“They’re so, so shy,” explains producer Rowan Crawford, “and they’re living in a place where there’s no cover so getting anywhere near them is very difficult because they know you’re there before you know they’re there. So they were really, really tough to find and really, really tough to film and to film anything meaningful with them because they are so hard to follow. You know, they kind of hear you, smell you, come out of their burrow and disappear.”
The film posits that canids are probably the most adaptable animals on the planet, able to acclimate not only to extreme environments like deserts and the Arctic but also ones in flux. Such is the case with fox and coyote, which have managed live side by side with humans in cities.
“We filmed a family ... of coyotes living on the edge of Minneapolis,” Crawford says, “and they’re living an urban life, basically. They were probably one of the hardest species to film because they’re just so incredibly good at being hidden even in the kind of urban location where they had a den. You know, they had pups so they were breeding and living right alongside people and staying so unbelievably out of sight. It was incredible.”