On the wild side

Helen Hobin rock-climbs, swims and scuba-dives to prepare for the physical demands of her job as a wildlife camerawoman. But sometimes, out on shoots, “random blokes” walk past and ask why she is carrying heavy equipment. “‘Hey, I’m a camerawoman, that’s what I do,’” she responds. “I just crack on.”

Her eyes light up when she tells me about her work on Frozen Planet II, currently airing on BBC One. It is the sequel to the 2011 wildlife documentary, narrated by David Attenborough, set in some of the coldest places on the planet. “I’m absolutely thrilled to get to do the best job in the world, getting to study animals through a lens and trying to tell stories about them,” she says. A particular highlight was following hunting pumas in Patagonia.

We see a clip of Hobin in Greenland at the end of the first episode: the small crew is camping in the freezing cold, besieged by mosquitoes. Hoping to capture a glacier carving, they use all their senses to predict when chunks of ice are about to fall into the sea. Hobin says she got “really, really obsessed with the glacier”—to the extent that the sound of her sleeping bag brushing over her ears began to sound, to her, like ice falling. “I felt like I was going mad.”

Travelling to remote locations for months at a time, members of the small crew became highly dependent on each other. “I think working in natural history, ironically, there is a sort of natural selection of the types of personalities that get to go on these shoots,” she tells me. “I think if you’re not a very nice person, you probably won’t be asked to spend two months with a producer out in the middle of nowhere.” Conditions can be tough: Hobin found it hard to switch off in the 24-hour daylight in Greenland and recalls a horribly choppy boat trip to a sub-Antarctic island in the Antipodes, 850km from New Zealand.

But it is worth it to get the perfect shot. In Mongolia, after a month of waiting, “getting to finally see a Pallas’s cat coming towards me in the morning light was just like magic. And in that moment, I didn’t feel the cold… I wasn’t concentrating on anything but the filming and the cat.” The camera crew locates the wildlife with the help of experts who have spent their lives studying each specific animal. When the grumpy Pallas’s cat disappeared, Hobin realised her right hand was so cold it was stuck on the camera’s tripod and had to be prised off with her left.

Watching Frozen Planet II from the safety of home, I found it hard to look at a baby bison being ravaged by a bear,

or a fluffy white seal being left behind by its mother. I ask Hobin how she copes with seeing these realities of the animal kingdom up close. “What actually tends to hit me hard is if it’s something to do with a manmade situation, or an animal is suffering because of something that wouldn’t have happened without human intervention,” she explains. Albatrosses mate for life in the Antipodes, and Hobin felt particularly upset to see widowed male albatrosses waiting for their partners to return, many of whom never will—female albatrosses are increasingly killed in long-line fisheries.

Hobin took a winding path to get to where she is, via an English degree at the University of York and a stint as a runner on Britain’s Got Talent. She hopes she can inspire young girls watching. “If nobody’s told you yet, you can do it. You can be a camerawoman, you can be a biologist, you can be a vet… The natural world is an incredible place to spend time.”