Killer Shots Deadly 60

My name's Steve Backshall...

..and this is my search

for the Deadly 60.

That's not just animals that are deadly to me,

but animals that are deadly in their own world.

My crew and I are travelling the planet

and you're coming with me every step of the way.

(Deadly!)

'Deadly 60 is all about giving you a sense of the spectacular,

'showing you animals in their natural environment

'and revealing hidden elements of their behaviour.'

Argh! It just bit me right through the chainmail suit!

'Over the years, we've seen unprecedented animal dynamism,

'been on some hardcore adventures

'and had some fairly close calls...'

He's tasting my face.

Wa-hay!

But every now and again, we need to bring you animal behaviour

that happens in ways the human eye simply cannot appreciate.

Then, we turn to technology

to bring you killer shots.

These scintillating images have only been possible

through the use of hi-tech equipment,

taking human beings to places we've never been before.

We've come to this film studio to look at some of the fancy kit we use

to show you wildlife doing stuff that happens in total darkness,

perhaps painfully slowly,

or maybe phenomenally quickly.

Using hi-tech, we can slow down reality,

even freeze moments in time.

Some of the most sophisticated and exciting killer shots

in wildlife film-making come from this simple-looking box of tricks.

But don't be fooled by its appearance.

This is a Photron camera.

It's one of the most extraordinary bits of hi-tech you will ever see.

This machine has the ability to take a millisecond of real time

and slow it down so it lasts an eternity.

That's important because it enables us to see the world in the same way

certain animals would do, perhaps a bird of prey or a fly,

that has a different perception of speed to human beings.

So we have a special Deadly 60 experiment to show you

this camera in full effect.

OK. Time for a Photron's perspective on how the world works.

Let's have a look.

So...

All of this has happened in the blink of an eye.

Look at that! That is just exquisite.

Watching it slowed down

to approximately 80 times slower than reality.

Every single droplet of water almost hanging motionless in the air

and then dropping out of frame

like some giant kind of constantly moving crystal. Gorgeous.

And if the Photron camera can do that with a humble water balloon,

imagine what it can do with the behaviour of wild animals.

And one wild animal I've been wanting to film with this camera

for nearly a decade was...

the most frightening fish on Earth, the great white shark.

In certain locations, great whites attack by breaching,

launching their whole body out of the water as they smash

seals in their jaws. But it's all over in milliseconds.

So to really get to grips with what's happening

in this remarkable predatory moment, we wanted to slow it down.

So we headed to Gansbaai in South Africa,

the great white shark capital of the world.

This is essentially a fake seal.

It's got polystyrene with wetsuit rubber on top.

We'll drag it behind the boat and hopefully, a great white shark

will sense it and come racing up from the depths and try and hit it.

That's the plan, anyway.

So, this allows us to focus on where the shark's going to strike,

giving us a much better chance of filming it with the hi-speed camera.

The breaching attack of the great white shark is so fast, blink

and you miss it. So, Johnny, the cameraman, will have this

on his shoulder, pointed at our decoy. Then when it happens,

I have to hit this trigger button.

The image then gets recorded on this laptop.

Hopefully, if we get it right,

we should see the whole thing beautifully slowed down

so that you can fully appreciate the strike.

It's a pretty tall order though.

All we need is for a shark to hit the decoy at the right minute,

for me to hit the button at the right minute,

for Johnny to have the focus perfect,

with the shark in the middle of the frame, and it'll be great!

So, I think we're also going to need a bit of luck.

As the decoy's moving across the surface of the water,

it's creating very much the same kinds of vibrations

as a real seal would if it was swimming

and the shark can detect those.

It has a special organ that runs down the length of its body

called the lateral line. It picks up tiny vibrations in the water.

But once it gets close, it's going to switch to using its eyesight.

In the last few metres, it'll focus in on its target

and then hit it with incredible, explosive power.

Well, that and 300 razor-sharp teeth.

Yep.

It looks like our fake seal has worked!

Ready for another one?

Yep.

It's down.

That was incredibly impressive, but it was a massive, massive animal.

What do you reckon, Johnny? Shall we have a look?

Let's see what we've got.

Oh! Wow!

Superb. Absolutely superb.

The high-speed camera perfectly illustrates the immense force

that the sharks use to hit their seal supper.

The shots are sublime.

But Johnny's a perfectionist and reckons we can still get better.

Well...

That was it. That was almost a complete breach.

The tail was flung out of the water, it hit it.

Now we've just got to see what happened.

'At normal speed, it barely registers.

'But slowed right down, it's so dramatic

'it simply leaves us spellbound.

'For a second, this gigantic oceanic predator is almost defying gravity.'

Oh! That is absolutely extraordinary!

John boy!

-Teamwork, man.

-Teamwork! How about that?!

That is extraordinary.

I mean, it is just out of this world that an animal of THAT size

can throw itself bodily, fully out of the water.

Can you imagine the power it must be generating?

That truly is one of the most extraordinary predatory methods

you will ever, ever see.

And seen in super slo-mo.

Look at this!

It's happy days. Shall we have another go?

STEVE LAUGHS

You genius! You genius!

In super slo-mo, you can see the shark's scything tail

generating enormous momentum,

the chomping teeth, the thrashing water...

It's awe-inspiring.

And it's not just sharks that have been captured

with this extraordinary camera.

Slowed down, you can see that a chameleon's tongue

actually grips a hold of its prey, almost like our hands would.

Some of the simplest things can look surprisingly beautiful.

We've seen how salmon catapult themselves up waterfalls...

And how perfectly-positioned bears have to be to catch them.

When filmed at high speed, you can see the way a boomslang snake

uses its tongue to taste its world.

The two forks work independently, trailing through the air,

then down on to the branch, picking up invisible scents

that their prey may have left behind.

The camera's revealed the pace and precision a kingfisher employs

as it hammers into the water to retrieve small fish.

And that a sprinting cheetah spends more than half of its time

completely airborne!

A puff-adder strike

is normally over and done with

in a fifth of a second, so

we wouldn't usually see the detail.

But slowed down, we can appreciate it in a whole new way.

They have hinged fangs which swing forward like a switch-blade,

stabbing into its prey before it retreats to safety.

So, that's fast things slowed-down.

Now for slow things speeded up.

(Deadly!)

This is a time-lapse camera.

It can be set to run for hours, days, weeks, even years.

And then the results can be speeded up to a pace

that us human beings can truly comprehend.

Or it can take real life, like this...

and just give it a bit of zip.

Come on, guys! Get a move on.

Time-lapse camerawork reveals subtle things

that take too long for our eyes to see...

with magnificent results.

From seeing spiders constructing intricate silken webs...

..to revealing border disputes between coral,

something you could never appreciate in real time.

They may look like stationary rocks on the sea bed,

but corals are actually living creatures that feed at night.

They also defend and extend their territories like this.

The polyps project their guts out and digest their rivals alive.

We've captured carnivorous plants called sundews

catching and slowly digesting their prey.

And huge starfish hunting.

The sunflower starfish is a metre across

and has an appetite for brittle stars and urchins,

which it uses its feet to taste for.

When we condense hours to minutes, you can see that the brittle stars

are pretty accomplished at avoiding being munched.

Sand dollar sea urchins, on the other hand,

aren't so good at escaping,

so they cluster together as a defence.

But even en masse, they're no match for the sunflower starfish.

It ejects its stomach over them and liquidises their soft parts

until only their white skeletons remain.

As well as revealing predatory behaviour,

time-lapse photography is also great for demonstrating

the beauty in the passage of time

and the transition from day to night.

But filming in the dark requires an altogether different piece of kit.

One of the big challenges that we face with wildlife

is that so many animals are really awkward

and choose to be active and come out at night when it's completely dark.

So one thing we can do is use spotlights.

But obviously, it can be quite fierce

and sometimes, it'll stop animals actually doing their natural thing.

So what we can also use is one of these.

This is an infra-red camera and it sees

in a whole different spectrum.

So, if I lose that light there...

..we can see Ash, the cameraman, waving there,

and Simon, the sound recordist,

even though it is totally pitch-black.

So, filming in infra red enables us to see animals

and they can't see us, so they just go on doing their thing.

And it's enabled us to get some truly cracking shots.

Infra-red light has a different wavelength to visible light,

so we can't see it.

The technology's portable, so we can take it anywhere.

We can set up infra-red lights in the wild

or rig them onto vehicles,

then use special cameras to capture the shots.

There's a multitude of hidden hunts that go on when night falls.

Loads of carnivores go to work under the cover of darkness.

So with these cameras and lights, we've been able to capture action

that would otherwise have been completely missed.

It's also revealed some fascinating activity in the depths of a cave.

Mountains of bat droppings maintain a living carpet

of flesh-eating cockroaches and beetles.

Gross! Any baby bats that can't yet fly

and are unlucky enough to lose their footing don't stand a chance.

Another piece of equipment that's saved my bacon

hundreds of times over the years is this.

It's fairly simple, really. It's just a camera with a motion sensor.

But the great thing about these camera traps

is that they're always working. We can be back in our hammocks

or in our tents snoring away, but this carries on watching.

Any animal that passes through the motion sensor

is going to get photographed, often with spectacular results.

We used camera traps in Peru

when trying to see a black caiman out of the water.

So, these here are camera traps.

What we're going to do is probably tie these to some trees,

put them all around this area here and then

put some bait down at the centre there.

We'll set a trip line up around here.

And anything big that comes in here to check out that meat's

going to trip the cameras, and hopefully, we should get some shots

of them on these.

It's a beautiful, still, windless morning

and we're just heading back to the camera traps,

they're in the bushes ahead of us.

There's quite a heightened sense of anticipation among the team

as to what's going to be on the cameras.

We can still see the cameras, they've not been eaten by anything.

The trip wire's gone.

Meat's gone!

No way!

OK, let's have a look at what we've got.

This is really exciting.

We've got something on here.

Been triggered by something, but I can't see anything.

CREW: Is that the end of the tape?

Almost. Into the last five minutes and there's nothing there.

Oh!

Look at that!

That's fantastic!

Right at the end of the tape.

Look at that, it's a huge black caiman, look at the size of it!

You've got to see this, guys. You've got to see it.

'At over four metres long,

'this giant must weigh more than all of us put together.'

You wouldn't want to be going swimming in there.

No, no. You really wouldn't.

Black caiman are the largest members of the alligator family.

A really broad, flattened snout,

very, very powerful around here, which allows it to use those jaws

with great strength, wrenching its prey around.

At the moment though, it's just slinking off,

back into the water with our meat.

That is an absolute triumph.

We've shown you how we film things that happen extraordinarily slowly,

at lightning speeds,

in pitch darkness...

..and when we're not even there.

Now for a bit of kit that really turns up the heat.

Every now and then, we get a chance to use a really impressive toy,

something like this thermal imaging camera.

Conventional cameras see using light, but this picks up warmth.

So, if I set it running,

I've got a way of showing how this works.

So...

now the camera's looking at me and it should see

my hands and my face, which are exposed, as very bright colours,

as whites and yellows. But the parts of my body insulated by clothing

should be darker, kind of blues and purples.

In front of me, I have a glass of cold water,

so that should be dark blue.

But if I take a kettle of very hot water...

..you should see an instant change.

This camera is really effective

for tracking animals at night.

It's also very good for telling which parts of the animal are warm

and it gives a really good idea of how some predators

see their moving prey at night.

Certain snakes, like pythons and pit vipers,

have special heat-sensitive pits in their faces,

usually on the lips or between the nostrils and the eye.

These are actually incredibly sensitive to warmth

and many of their prey species -

animals like this mouse - are always warm.

As they move around,

they're just giving off heat that the snake can sense

and our thermal-imaging camera allows us to see

pretty much what those snakes must be perceiving.

Even in the dead of night, an animal like this is easy game.

The rattlesnake is superbly camouflaged,

so almost invisible to other animals.

But because of its special thermal pits,

it can see its prey, even in the dark.

To the snake, this packrat stands out from its background

like a bright light.

As long as the snake doesn't move,

the packrat won't see it,

so it just has to wait until the rat comes close enough.

Then it strikes,

injecting its lethal venom.

The rat tries to escape,

but it leaves a trail of heat with every footstep.

The snake can just watch and wait

for the venom to take effect, then move in for its meal.

Cameras nowadays can be unbelievably small

and that has many different advantages,

one of which is that you can get very, very close to animals

and be nothing like as intrusive as you would be with a huge camera.

So, I have here a rather wonderful

dead leaf mantis.

Now, Nick, if you just focus in on those raptorial forearms,

hopefully, by getting close, you should be able to see

all of the barbs that run down the under-side of those legs,

the chief weapon of the mantis.

It's just lunging out into the air at the moment,

almost striking towards the camera.

It's just fabulous, it's such an intimate view of this bug,

that normally you'd never get a chance to see.

We can, though, go one stage further

because this particular species has something very, very special

it does, in response to a threat.

So, if I make it think...

..that there's a predator around...

Here we go. Look at that.

These are called flash colours

and that's the display of this mantis

which it'll use to intimidate and frighten off any predators,

and they are absolutely beautiful.

On the underside of the four wings,

you can see those eye spots. When those come up,

it kind of makes the predators think that a much larger animal is there

and frightens them away.

What a wonder-bug! And our minicam

gives us a perfect intimate view.

Gorgeous.

Some of these cameras are so manoeuvrable and inconspicuous

that we've got them into rather unlikely places.

It's like having a tiny cameraman

filming whilst hidden in the shadows.

We've watched birds of prey bringing in food for their precious young.

Skullcam has spied on vultures coming in to feast.

There have been cameras inside termite mounds and hornet nests...

..and on a snake.

Plus, we've had intimate probecam shots inside a scorpion burrow,

showing a mother scorpion giving birth.

On Deadly 60, we always want to try and bring you with us

wherever we go. Now, obviously, with a camera that's that size,

it isn't always so easy.

But luckily, modern cameras are so small,

so rugged, so tough, that they can be fixed pretty much anywhere.

Onto a plane, a train, a bike, a kayak, even onto my helmet.

Basically, it means that the technology is doing the hard work,

so he doesn't have to, and he can go and have a cup of tea.

Using these cameras, I've given you a taste of white-water kayaking...

..mountain biking...

..flying around the bush...

..climbing trees...

tangling with all sorts of animals...

trying to hover like a kestrel...

climbing rock faces.

'With cameras like these, I can take you anywhere.'

Oh, my goodness! Oh!

'But it's not just me that we fix cameras on to.'

Our final killer shot gives us an opportunity

to get the ultimate insight into an animal's world.

Modern cameras have got so tiny,

they give us opportunities that ten years ago,

would have been simply unthinkable.

This is Ellie, she's a goshawk.

Now goshawks are a resident native bird to the UK

and one of our most spectacular birds of prey.

But this particular bird has been trained to fly wearing

this tiny harness and a camera that fits on to this

and is no bigger than my little finger.

That points forward so that as Ellie is flying through

the densest of woodlands, the kind of places she'd be hunting,

it gives us the chance to see as a goshawk would see

and fly as a goshawk would fly.

This tiny little wonder is our miraculous onboard camera.

It sends a signal through this antenna here

to this satellite dish and you can see, there,

the little camera looking at me.

All we need to do is to mount that on to the back of Ellie...

I'm going to let you do that, Lloyd,

cos I've a feeling she'll probably take my fingers off.

Yes, she's happier with someone else doing that, I think. Thank you.

Good, right, so what I'll try and do is pop it on

-so that it's just about there, like so.

-Wonderful.

And now the camera's looking right down the nape of Ellie's neck

and is going to see exactly what she sees

as she goes soaring through these trees.

Ellie's been trained to fly with this camera,

so once it's attached, it won't hold her back,

and she can go about her deadly business.

'Now, that really is a bird's eye view!'

Woah!

That was absolutely remarkable.

Right, let's have a little look at our hero,

or should I say heroine, in action.

Here she goes. Launch, the head drops,

a few swift beats of the wing

and then just banking and weaving in amongst those trees

and, at the last minute, you just see, she's coasting in

and then the wings flare back and she stops

and everything goes absolutely crazy. The amount of action

at that exact moment is incredible.

She's gone from about 30 miles an hour to a complete stop

in the space of under a second.

But all of that force would have gone into the prey,

all the force from the flight is just going to hit the prey

and really, it's going to be all over within seconds.

Advances in filming technology are not just about pretty pictures.

They show us things that we'd never see with our eyes alone.

Killer shots offer us a totally new perspective on the wild world.

So all of this kit is what it takes to capture

and fully appreciate the Deadly 60.

Without this equipment, there's so much we wouldn't see.

With it, we reveal biology, behaviour and beauty,

and we're constantly learning incredible new things

about our planet.

John boy!

'Join me next time, as I continue my search for the Deadly 60.'

Here they come. Oh, back up, Graham, back up!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd