Land Wild Cameramen at Work

Scotland.

A paradise for wildlife, and a cameraman's dream.

This country, with its rugged mountains and endless coastline,

has produced a generation of the best wildlife cameramen in the world.

For decades, five film-makers, all rooted in Scotland,

have travelled the globe to bring home incredible images,

shaping our understanding of the natural world.

How did these men learn the incredible skills needed

for catching the natural world in action?

What is it that prepared them for travelling the globe

and enduring the toughest of environments?

BEAR GROWLS

In this series, these five cameramen will share their extraordinary

stories, and the secrets of their trade.

Secrets often learned from filming wildlife

in the wildest parts of Scotland.

But this time the camera is on them.

When filming land mammals, large and small,

our cameramen must take on every kind of environment.

Through jungle,

savannah,

mountains and forests,

they track some of the planet's most remarkable creatures.

My career has rested on the resilience and ingenuity

of men like these.

The shots they capture

give us an intimate insight into life in the natural world.

HOWLING

Scots-born Gordon Buchanan is an expert at forging

relationships with land animals.

He has filmed some of the planet's rarest and most dangerous animals.

Sometimes getting too close for comfort.

I've got a bear, I'll show you how close it is.

Too close!

Gordon is famous for his work with big cats.

In the grasslands of the Maasai Mara in Kenya,

he spent time following a family of leopards.

Filming these shy animals takes skill and patience.

Leopards will do their utmost to stay out of sight,

so if you do manage to find a leopard, it is incredibly exciting

because, you know, just getting a glimpse of the animal,

you know that it's special

and if you're able to stay with it for a length of time,

you know that every second that you're with it,

it is an intimate moment.

Spending extended periods of time getting to know big cats

is a unique privilege.

Gordon had the good fortune to film Bella the leopard for three years.

I got to know this one cat, and it was amazing. It was like seeing

an old friend when I went back there.

On this one occasion, because we were hooking up with Bella every

single day, we knew that she hadn't eaten for four days, and that's

sort of getting to the point where the survival of her cubs, her own

survival depends on her being able to run something down and catch it.

When it comes to watching something like a leopard hunt, you know, it is

fantastic because you are seeing one of these rare spectacles, something

that is incredibly difficult to see and even harder to film.

Those are the shots you kind of go to bed at night-time

just kind of smiling to yourself and kind of, I suppose, quite smugly

because the chances of messing it up are really, really high.

Gordon first learned about wildcat behaviour in his native Scotland.

His big break came when he spent a year filming wildlife,

including Scottish wildcats, in the Cairngorms.

It was probably one of the most challenging years that

I have ever had. I definitely learnt to become a filmmaker, I think just

in that period of time, because I had to make these three half-hour films,

and having never done that before, I was just learning on the job.

His mentor at the time was naturalist Dick Balharry.

15 years later, they meet again in the Cairngorms.

I remember when you came here, you were so keen,

and really up for everything, and strong and able,

"Where are they?" sort of thing. "We'll go and get them!"

How do you feel when you come back here to see this land

and then compare it to your sort of world...you know, jaunts?

I could spend a happy day up in the Cairngorms,

as happy as I would be in the jungles of Papua New Guinea,

but I think there's something special about Scotland

and I don't think that's just because I'm Scottish. There is

a sort of magic and a mystery to a lot of what Scotland has to offer.

And the more I travel, the more I see that Scotland is unique.

These special landscapes feed a passion for wildlife.

They proved an effective training ground for another

Scotland-based wildlife cameraman, Mark Smith.

From the icy wastes of the Antarctic

via the Australian outback,

and the remote Falkland Islands, Mark has filmed all over the world.

But it was Scotland he fell in love with, and decided to make his home.

I wanted to come up and live here on the west coast

because I think it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

I'll go on filming trips, you know, to Africa or to Asia

and spend six weeks sort of banging your head against a brick wall,

trying to get the shots to look nice and the light is so harsh.

And then you come back here and you think,

"Why aren't there more films made around here?"

Because the quality of the light is just fantastic.

And you go into some of these forests and some of these woodlands

and it's the most beautiful, beautiful thing that you've seen.

Much more beautiful than the place you've often been out away filming.

Like Gordon, Mark learnt the essential skills of wildlife

film-making in the Scottish Highlands.

He spent seven months in beautiful Glen Affric near Loch Ness,

tracking and filming red deer.

We got a camper van and just kind of immersed ourselves in the place.

Spent time with the animals and get to know them,

sort of get inside their head a bit.

Mark has returned to Glen Affric to see if he can find his old friends.

Everybody thinks that, erm, filming wildlife in Scotland or the UK

is kind of easier for some reason,

but actually it's completely the opposite.

Most of the animals here are often very frightened of people

because there's a lot of people in the country and they're often

being hunted, and so really, starting to film in Scotland

is a great kind of training ground about getting close to animals.

If you can get close to a lot of the wilder animals in Scotland,

then you can probably do it in most places in the world.

Red deer, generally, they can be the most difficult animals,

you know, ever to film.

And, erm, there's another one coming.

Fantastic.

So that's two of them. There's one behind, yeah!

That's three of them. Nice.

Oh, he's even nicer, this one.

They're just looking over the top at us.

Northern Pakistan in winter.

A most unforgiving landscape with challenging terrain.

But home to the rarely-seen snow leopard.

The snow leopard was kind of the holy grail of wildlife film-making.

There had been films made about snow leopards, and good films as well,

but they'd always been in places where it was almost impossible

to get close to them.

You didn't really sort of feel intimate with the animal at all.

We turned up in this place after some extraordinary journey,

some kind of Boy's Own adventure, getting over these 12,000 foot passes

to get into this valley in winter.

Christmas Day was spent on a fruitless search

for the elusive leopard.

Then five days later, he received some promising news.

We just got a report that there was a snow leopard up on the ridge.

We were too low where we were before,

so we are just trying to get some height to get a better view of it.

The people on the radio said it was just up

the valley on the cliff on the left here.

When I first saw that snow leopard, I just could not believe it.

You can imagine you're in this incredible mountain environment,

every hour of the day you're scanning this hillside,

these rocks for something that looks like a snow leopard.

And, after two weeks, three weeks of that you just think,

"This is never going to happen. These animals don't exist."

And then for your binoculars suddenly to be filled with

that animal looking straight at you, it was just extraordinary.

And actually the last thing in your mind at that moment is filming it.

For three weeks, he filmed the behaviour of mother and cub

in intimate detail but he still lacked the prized hunting sequence.

On the very last day of the shoot,

they spotted an injured markhor next to the leopard's cave.

We thought if ever it's going to happen, this is the chance we've got

to film a real proper hunt and we had about two hours left of daylight.

About three o'clock in the afternoon, she went to the corner of the cave,

looked around and immediately saw this markhor.

She went into this whole stalking up the hillside...

..and got to this point where she could obviously see the markhor

and she disappeared behind this rock.

And I'm looking through this view finder,

this black-and-white view finder right on the end of a long lens,

and you think, if you take your eyes off this rock now

and then she comes out, you'll never find her again because you cannot

find anything in that landscape.

And suddenly she went.

In my memory it took several minutes,

the whole shot's actually over in a few seconds.

It was an incredible feeling of achievement. Finally, you've done it.

And it's probably five seconds of real elation

before you start worrying whether it's in focus

and all the rest of the worries that you have after it.

Mark was the first person ever to film a snow leopard hunting.

Gordon Buchanan also bagged a filming first

when working in the unforgiving bamboo groves of China.

Pandas are famous for mating only rarely.

Some pairs only mate once in their lives.

Not surprising then, that the act had never been filmed in the wild before.

Pandas, China, bamboo - I was thinking it would be, I don't know,

maybe sort of big groves of bamboo with pandas in there somewhere.

No, this was sort of incredibly steep mountains

covered in the thickest bamboo ever and bamboo is

THE worst thing to walk through.

It snags on everything, it twangs back, hits you in the face,

it sort of trips you up. It is impenetrable.

So we get up to the top of the mountains

where the pandas were at that time of year and you just sit and listen.

If you could hear pandas off in the distance,

you could start working your way towards them.

They call across the valleys, males letting other males know

that they're there, females letting males know that they're there.

We really struck lucky, we just happened to be there

at the perfect time, and I managed to film this sequence.

It was so difficult going through the bamboo, that we had actually

ditched the tripod days and days before because it was impossible.

So I had shot that entire sequence on my shoulder,

which isn't ideal when you're shooting wildlife.

It's kind of on page one of the wildlife filmmaker's handbook,

use a tripod.

But sometimes the behaviour outweighs

the sort of technical quality of the images.

Wildlife cameramen need an in-depth knowledge of animal behaviour.

But they can't know every animal they're asked to film.

One day the phone went and the producer said,

"I'd love it if you could go off

"and try and film a colugo sequence for us."

And I said, "Sure, yeah, great!"

I thought, "I haven't got a clue what this is," and I thought,

"I'll try and get some more information."

"So where are you thinking of filming?" "Borneo."

"OK, good, we've got a sort of..." I didn't know what a colugo was.

I think I kind of quietly went over to my computer and tried to tap in,

"How would you spell colugo?" And up it popped.

"Yes, of course, people call them the flying lemur, don't they?"

"Yes, but they don't fly and they are not a lemur."

So suddenly I was looking at an image

of this really peculiar-looking creature.

Filming the colugo was a significant challenge.

It is one of the world's most camouflaged animals

and only comes out at night.

They blend in perfectly, you know,

these flaps of skin that go from their arms to their legs,

that kind of flap in against the side of a tree.

So when they are lying against a tree trunk,

they just become part of the tree.

They could be like 50 feet up in the trees and just sort of boing,

jump off the tree and glide.

So I thought, "God. OK, how do we do it?"

But then we just sort of began to understand the animal,

how they moved, what they were likely to do,

so the unpredictable became slightly predictable.

The sad thing about filming wildlife is that the moment the most

incredible things are happening, you are terrified of messing it up.

And, you know, it's a shame. I've been lucky enough to see

lots of incredible things, but at the time, I find

it's really quite stressful

because you know this has never been filmed before.

It's a unique piece of behaviour, so it has to be focused and composed,

and the camera has to be running and you have to make sure,

"Is that battery about to run out?"

So there's not that many things to think about but when you combine it

with something rare and unusual, it spoils the experience a little bit

to observe that, but then I suppose

if you've managed to record it on tape, then you've got

the rest of your life to sit back and watch it again and again.

A memorable shoot for Mark Smith

was with wolves in the sparse open wilderness of the Arctic.

The real challenge of filming these Arctic wolves

up on Ellesmere Island, in the high Arctic

was the fact that the landscape is so huge.

So you have to go through this whole process

of surveying your landscape, working out where you can go.

Say for instance, the river,

you have to work out how deep the river is.

The only way we could do it, we had to take our trousers off

and our socks and shoes and walk in this river to see how deep it was,

and put little cairns at each crossing point, this braided river,

so the next time you know you can just drive across and follow them.

When you're following this pack, they become very used to you.

I mean, they are quite naive, wolves, anyway.

They've not really seen humans before,

so you'd be going along with them as they are on a hunt,

so they are going fast through the landscape

and you are there trying to keep up with them

and at one point, the tamest of the whole pack came right up next to me

lolloping along, and she would be within three feet of the quad bike,

and she'd look up at me as if to sort of say,

"Why are you so useless? Why are you going so slowly?"

It was the most amazing moment.

A golden rule for wildlife cameramen

has always been to simply observe nature and never interfere.

Ignore me, ignore me. Ignore me, get away.

But when he was working on a series about

North American black bears, Gordon broke this rule several times.

Part of me, I just want to pick her up and give her a big cuddle.

The bears were being studied by controversial animal biologist

Dr Lynn Rogers, who adopts a more hands-on approach.

This is all part of Lynn's unconventional technique,

which is by giving a bear a few handouts,

that they'll let you touch them, so you can put a collar on them,

and follow them and observe the natural behaviour.

And to be honest, I was really dubious about it at the beginning,

but now I see it, it is quite incredible

what Lynn has been able to do.

Touching a wild animal was something that I never wanted to do.

I never wanted to get hands on, I was quite happy to watch and observe.

It took time for me to figure out what it was all about, and I saw

very quickly the benefits of this little system that was in place.

You know, what you could reveal about those animals' lives.

It's quite easy to forget what an amazing experience this is.

One must always remind one's self that they are big wild animals.

When one of the mother bears abandoned her cub,

Gordon was faced with a dilemma,

and one which took him into further controversial territory.

Should he intervene and save her life?

There wasn't an issue for me.

I could see that this was a bear cub that needed help,

and I thought, "Forget this. Forget this line."

By helping this animal, seeing it through a tough time,

just a couple of weeks, giving it a little bit of food

is going to make the difference between life and death.

We did everything we could to keep her alive and she survived.

A few years before getting close to the black bears,

Gordon found himself in a much more dangerous situation

on a night shoot in Sri Lanka.

He was surrounded by a group of crocodiles and leopards

who were fighting over a wild boar carcass.

About 12 crocodiles come in and had this massive tussle with the carcass,

and dragged it into this thick, thick, lantana bush

and you just couldn't see anything at all.

And I sat there and kind of weighed up my options, I thought,

"I'll maybe just encourage this carcass out of the bushes a bit."

At least to a place where I could see it and where I could film it.

So I walk, sort of picking my way between the crocodiles,

leant into the bush and grabbed a hold

of this huge pig's trotter and started pulling it out.

It must have weighed about, you know, easily 12, 13 stone,

and I sort of snagged and pulled it out and I just sort of looked up

and I had a head torch on, and just on this little kind of rock,

there was three fully grown leopards just watching me.

And I thought, you know, God,

I remember what our domestic cat was like

if you went anywhere near its food when it was eating.

I thought, "Well, in for a penny, in for a pound,"

so I just kept on pulling this thing and pulled it clear of the bushes.

And by the time I actually switched the camera back on,

the leopards were back on the carcass and happily feeding away.

I wouldn't say I was fearless

but I get a buzz out of doing things that are a little bit,

a little bit dicey.

Gordon was only able to capture this extraordinary sequence

with the use of an infrared camera.

Huge advances in technology have helped unlock

the secrets of animals' nocturnal behaviour.

Another piece of kit that has revolutionised wildlife film-making

is the camera trap.

The technology in a camera trap is really quite straightforward.

It's a passive infrared sensor, like you have in security lights,

and a camera in a waterproof box.

And they are...they are fantastic.

It gives you an opportunity to have a constant presence

anywhere you want 24 hours of the day.

The camera trap proved crucial when Gordon was working in Bhutan.

He went there to find out

if tigers were living high up in the Himalayas.

If they did,

their chances of survival as a species would be much greater.

These little camera traps, they are giving us

a little peep through a keyhole into a very rich environment.

A place that is more than capable of supporting tigers.

Come on, just once. I don't even want a whole tiger!

I just want a tail, a stripe, an ear.

Just something to tell me that tigers are here.

I just so wanted to find tigers there.

It was so, so important for the survival,

the long-term survival of tigers as a species.

Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh.

Oh, I don't believe it. Oh, God.

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Oh, gosh.

My reaction was just one of huge relief on so many different levels.

I was completely overwhelmed.

As a wildlife cameraman, there's a lot of sacrifice

and your family have to sacrifice a lot

because you're away from home.

And you only want to do that if it's worthwhile

and, you know, when we found these tigers, I thought,

no, this is almost... A lot of the absences,

a lot of the time I've spent away from my wife and my kids,

it's been worth it because we've done something really quite important.

The work of wildlife cameramen can help ensure

the very survival of a species.

These tenacious individuals work in difficult conditions

to capture enduring images of the natural world.

Images that can help safeguard its conservation.

I think you have to be quite stubborn to just keep going,

relentlessly each day, building a sequence.

A lot of it is tough,

a lot of it is physically very demanding, mentally very demanding,

and it's lonely and it can be... it can be boring.

But, on those rare occasions, and they are rare occasions,

when you look across your entire career, where you are able

to get what you're after and capture something interesting,

something unique, something never seen before on film,

that's when I realise that I do have the best job in the world.

Next time, our cameramen are looking to the sky,

filming flying devils in the Falklands,

black kites on a dump in Delhi

and sharks looking for an easy meal.

Phew! That was a lucky albatross!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd