Snapped on egg-cam ... what it’s like to be in a crocodile’s jaws
For parents of little monkeys everywhere, it will be the must-have toy of next Christmas. order your tortoise-cam now, before stocks sell out! The Egyptian tortoise with a video lens behind one beady eye proved the perfect toy for small chimps. And it was so realistic that, when it met a group of live tortoises, it was rapidly seduced by an amorous male. For the producers of Spy In The
Wild (BBC1), this wasn’t in the script. They hadn’t spent a fortune to develop a sex toy for randy reptiles. But the X-rated encounter was a sign of how brilliantly successful their ploy is.
By concealing cameras in perfect replicas of wild animals, they are able to get documentary footage that no telephoto lens could reproduce. Fake bushbabies, penguins, egrets and even eggs fooled the wildlife completely.
one astonishing film sequence captured behaviour no photographer would want to experience first-hand. A mother crocodile stood guard over her hatchlings as they wriggled out of the sand, and then scooped them up in her mouth to carry them to the river.
She took the egg-cam along with the rest, giving viewers a glimpse of what it’s like to be on the wrong side of her enormous gnashers.
Just one animal wasn’t quite fooled. An inquisitive, five-year-old chimp in the Senegal rainforest worked out that the glassy gaze of the tortoise hid a secret. He took it up a tree for further examination, refusing to let any other chimps play with it — and like an excited boy after his birthday, even took it to bed with him.
The spies witnessed other animal traits that until now were assumed to be exclusively human. When an elderly bull giraffe died on the savannah, his herd came to pay their respects — dozens of them, bowing their heads and apparently mourning over his body. They looked like relatives at a funeral. Just like people, many of them had trekked all day to be there.
The tortoise-cam saw it all — but a video device concealed in a fake langur monkey created an even bigger stir. one of the females picked it up, nursed it... and accidentally dropped it. To the monkey troupe’s horror, the ‘baby’ just lay motionless. It was dead!
Grief- stricken, the langur family gathered round to stroke its face gently, and to give each other long, comforting hugs. It was both heartbreaking and comical... as well as, for animal psychologists, truly ground-breaking.
What the show lacked was a segment at the end to explain some of the camera techniques, the way Sir David Attenborough summa- rises his Planet Earth series. It’s understandable that film-makers want to keep their trade secrets, but these glimpses behind the scenes help viewers to trust that the shots are genuine.
one segment, for instance, showed chicks in a hornbill’s nest: it was supposedly filmed by a mechanical egg that broke open to reveal a robot hatchling. But we could see the spy-bird too... so there must have been another camera in the nest. This isn’t meant to be a magic trick — tell us how it’s done.
There was no trickery about The Cruise: Sailing The Mediterranean (ITV). This was a straightforward advert for luxury cruises in general, and the royal Princess in particular.
Passengers pay thousands to sail from the Greek islands to the French riviera, while scoffing so much cordon bleu grub that on average each holidaymaker gains a stone in a fortnight.
Guests sat on balconies over sapphire water, toasting the sunset with champagne and vowed to keep cruising till the day they died. I kept expecting one to turn to the camera and say something like: ‘Book now for an amazing 20 per cent discount off your next voyage!’
There were moments of drama, of course. one family’s suitcases went astray, but the baggage turned up, so that was all right. And another chap went for a donkey ride during a stop on Santorini, and discovered he was allergic to donkeys. He got a rash!
It’s perilous on those high seas, you know.