An ox-eye view, 1900

IF YOU’VE SEEN Spy in the Wild on BBC One, you’ll know how wildlife filmmakers can ‘infiltrate the animal world’ by concealing cameras inside decoys. But the Beeb wasn’t the first to do it. Brothers Richard and Cherry Kearton blazed a trail back in 1900, when wildlife photography was in its infancy. Farmer’s sons from Thwaite in the Yorkshire Dales, they didn’t have sophisticated animatronics. What they did have was a taxidermied ox. Inside this cramped and easily toppled hide, one brother would operate a camera protruding from the head. They followed this up with a remote-firing sheep cam and an artificial rock, which they tested out in the Potts Valley near Little Asby in Westmorland. Incredibly, their madcap deception paid off and the Keartons wowed audiences of the time with their intimate images of wild animals in their element.