Sky 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 filmmakers, 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?

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.

Our skies are alive with birds.

Unlike most animals, birds can move in all directions...

..often very quickly,

and constantly changing direction.

They frequently live in remote, isolated pockets of the world,

and filming them can be a unique challenge.

I've always been impressed with the skill

required of our cameramen to film these creatures

and there is no better exponent of this craft than John Aitchison.

The islands of the South Pacific are rich in birdlife.

French Frigate Shoals is only half a mile long but amazingly,

home to over 300,000 birds.

For a bird lover like John this is paradise.

He spent two weeks here filming young black-footed albatross

as they learned to fly.

Albatrosses are fascinating birds.

They live for a very long time, they live in extraordinary places.

They live always in very remote islands or at sea.

The point of going there was that at a very specific time of year

the young albatrosses grow to the point where their wings are ready

and then over about two or three weeks, all of them go.

A young albatross learning to fly and survive on its own.

But what you don't realise is that to get this shot, John was perched

on a rickety makeshift scaffolding tower resting on the seabed.

I suppose it was about five or six metres high, maybe,

and I just stood on there every day with a camera set up

watching for the albatrosses coming out.

It was only a building scaffolding tower,

it wasn't built for sitting on the seabed.

And I thought it would sink in on one side and tip.

And so when the waves picked up a bit sometimes

and were slapping underneath the planks, I was wondering about

whether it was actually going to fall over quite often.

So it kept me on my toes, really.

Especially as John wasn't here just to film the albatross.

He was also here to film tiger sharks...

..eager for an easy meal.

It's one of those dilemmas you have as a cameraman,

it comes up sometimes where there's a hunt.

You're supposed to be there filming what happens.

I can't intervene. It wouldn't make any difference anyway.

I have very mixed feelings about this

because I don't really want to see the albatrosses eaten,

but that's what I'm here to film.

You can't help wishing that the albatrosses will get away each time.

I have a little cheer inside when they do.

There's a shark right in the shallows.

Phew, that was a lucky albatross!

It is easy to see it in human terms when one animal is hunting another,

but it isn't right to see in those terms. The sharks have a role,

they have to eat, but at the same time you can't help empathising.

John has been perfecting his craft for over two decades.

His first big break as a cameraman came in 1994

when he filmed the wildlife of the Ythan Estuary

12 miles north of Aberdeen.

It was the first programme where we could go somewhere

and live there for a long time. It was nine months in one place,

living alongside this beautiful small estuary.

It's the sort of place that over nine months you can get to know

almost every stone, every turn in the river,

everything that happens there.

It was a lovely experience, actually, it became,

became part of us, I think, in that time.

This precious coastal environment

is home to nearly half of the UK's bird species.

During his time here, John was able to film some rarely seen behaviour.

The Ythan's famous for its eider ducks, and I'd never seen

any film of an eider actually removing the down from its body

and filling the nest - we had no idea what it even looked like.

And after really quite a long time in a hide,

the duck that I was filming then did this

and she sort of stropped her, her breast and plucked out

this amazing down.

It just fluffed up into this beautiful cloud of grey down.

It was a such an intimate moment. She was doing this delicate thing

and I was right by her, I was probably six or seven feet away.

She didn't mind at all. She was oblivious to me in my hide.

It was wonderful. It was such a revelation.

Working in Aberdeenshire made John decide to move north of the border permanently.

He chose to make his home in Argyll on the west coast,

surrounded by dramatic landscapes and abundant wildlife.

Scotland just had everything that I was hoping, really.

It's got such fantastic wildlife.

It's quiet, it's beautiful.

For a wildlife filmmaker, you can't do better.

I think living close to nature is crucial for me, really.

It resets my balance being able to go outside,

see what the weather's doing, see what the tide's doing,

hear the geese going over.

I've very often found film ideas just by being here.

Over the years, John has made several short films about his home

and how it inspires him.

It was the wildness of this landscape that attracted us to it.

We found it exhilarating and new

because, of course, we had no history here at first.

But our neighbours did,

and two in particular shared their love of this place with us.

Every part of it meant something to them, had some memory attached.

They told us all the best wild things they'd ever seen here.

The moments which gave them joy.

With so much wildlife on his doorstep,

John always has his camera at the ready.

There is one sleek, secretive creature

he particularly likes to film -

the otter.

I love filming otters, they are just the most beautiful animals

and they are always interesting.

They are very clever, they play a great deal.

Otters are quite difficult to spot but when you get your eye in,

you get better at it.

They didn't know I was there. The wind was ideal.

It was just blowing my scent away and the cub was very small.

It was about the second smallest cub I've ever see here,

so I'm really pleased.

A close friend of John's who lives nearby

is fellow wildlife cameraman Mark Smith.

His busy schedule takes him all around the globe, but like John,

Mark chose to base himself on the west coast of Scotland.

Here in Argyll, the landscape is just beautiful on a day like this.

The mist rising off the loch.

For me, you come back from often pretty hard trips

and you know, you are able to just relax in this place.

A particularly taxing trip for Mark came whilst filming

one of the world's rarest birds of prey - the striated caracara.

More commonly known as Johnny Rook,

they are found in significant numbers on the Falkland Islands

and it was here that Mark and his wife Jane based themselves.

We were there for five months, just me and Jane living there

with those animals. It was just a fantastic experience.

The Johnny Rook,

they're the most amazing birds I've ever seen in a way

because they are completely curious.

They don't have any fear of mankind at all.

From a filming point of view, it is an absolute joy.

You can walk anywhere in this amazing landscape,

and look around and think,

"All I need to have is an animal in there,"

and you turn around and there are six of them behind you,

just dying to get into the shot.

We really loved working around them, but at the same time,

they would destroy anything that you left out.

Every day before you left the camp, you had to secure everything.

You had to take every little thing inside, zip it up,

secure all the guy ropes because when you left,

they would just come and try and destroy your camp.

Their strategy for survival is investigate everything.

There may just be a meal in it for them.

Some birds have more conventional strategies for survival.

Every winter tens of thousands of these barnacled geese

fly south from the cold Artic to spend it here

at Loch Gruinart on the island of Islay in Scotland.

The drama of the birds taking flight in the early morning

requires John to be constantly vigilant.

They went quite early but it's just so spectacular,

you never know quite what's going to happen.

Flying birds are quite difficult to film, they move very quickly.

They are moving in three dimensions so I have to keep focusing.

I have to keep them in focus all the time.

Meanwhile ,you are trying to keep them in frame, you are trying

to keep the composition nice. There is a lot going on.

And it is quite hard, it does take a lot of practice.

There is a lot of tension actually when you are here

because what I have to do is I creep in in the dark.

I have to not disturb the geese, I have to wear dark gloves

so that my hands aren't bright. I have to keep the camera

just above the level of this bank here so that the geese can't see me

and as the light comes up, you never really know

quite what's going to be there.

It's just great, it's so exciting.

These geese winter on a peaceful RSPB nature reserve.

But you don't always have to travel to wild locations

to get the best shots of birds.

Sometimes it can happen in the most unexpected of places.

I was trying to make a short film about kestrels.

I particularly wanted to film a kestrel hovering in slow motion,

and actually it turned out the best place to get at the eye level

of a kestrel hovering, rather than looking up all the time,

was on a motorway bridge.

The kestrel was just hovering there with its eyes absolutely

fixed on the mouse, completely focused.

It could have been hanging on a string,

it was as though it was fixed in space.

Its wings and its tail doing all their work,

which you could see really clearly.

It was a picture I was particularly proud of, actually.

It was something that showed very precisely what kestrels can do

in among all this man-made chaos of the motorway.

This uncanny ability to spot beauty in unnatural environments

was a valuable skill for John on one particular trip to Delhi

to film black kites.

I'd never been to India before, so I was really excited

when I was asked to go and film something in India.

But what they didn't tell me was that the very first thing

on my first day was to go to this massive dump outside Delhi.

In that chaotic, stinking, rotten environment,

there's food, mainly bits of meat from the slaughterhouses.

The kites are instantly focused on that place.

All these kites in slow motion just streaming in picking up stuff

and flying off again chasing each other was spectacular.

It was one of the most strong experiences I think I've ever had.

We had to take a change of clothes and throw away the clothes

that we were wearing cos they were so disgusting afterwards.

Boots and everything.

I thought I'd be filming the Taj Mahal or something.

I was on this huge rubbish dump, but it was, you know, memorable.

Mark has had to endure some aromatic environments of his own

to get the shots he needed.

None more so than when he was trying to film white bellied eagles

catching fruit bats deep in the Australian outback.

We got in there and of course like everything you get there

and the reality is pretty different to what you imagined

it would be, and you've got this hawthorn scrub,

which is about 20 foot high and you're walking through it,

and there's a constant backlit drizzle of bat urine coming down,

so you're basically surrounded in this scummy mess for most of the day.

Not only that, it's really ugly, because it's just hawthorn scrub

the whole time, so you can get close-up shots of the bats,

but there is no way you can ever see any eagle do anything.

You looked at it and you thought,

"How on earth am I ever going to film this?"

The solution was to build four tall scaffolding towers

so Mark could be closer to the eagles.

He and the producer had to build them at night

to avoid scaring the bats away.

It was the most amazing thing, 30 feet up the scaffolding tower,

in moonlight, with the starlight, and occasionally bats flying around,

desperately trying to fix these things together.

Despite the testing conditions,

Mark was able to capture these spectacular shots.

The end result was just great,

and we managed to get that shot of the eagle coming straight towards

the tower, picks up this bat, gets it in its talons and goes off again.

So, it was kind of worth it in the end.

Filming the wildlife in our skies from above the ground is one thing.

But filming birds from below ground level is another matter altogether.

I think one of the strangest things I've been asked to do was to film

in what they call the shallow grave at an RSPB reserve in Norfolk

called Snettisham, which is a really special place, actually.

It's an absolutely wonderful place.

Snettisham is the scene of one of Britain's great wildlife spectacles.

The wash, which is a huge area of mudflats and estuary,

fills up with water and there are a huge number

of wading birds that feed on the mud when the tides out, especially knot.

if you looked at a knot, you would say it was

a medium-sized, greyish, fairly nondescript bird.

But when they gather together they're just sensational.

John was looking for a new approach to film the knots,

one which would give him a unique angle.

His shallow grave would do just that.

If you dig a hole in the beach and put the camera in the hole,

and lie down, which is very uncomfortable and difficult,

then you are at the eye level of the birds,

which is about that high off the ground,

and that view transforms things completely.

Well, it's quarter past four.

I'm in the shallow grave.

I've got eight layers of clothes on,

two layers of plywood and half an inch of gravel.

I hope it's worth it.

It certainly was.

Hides are brilliant, because when you're in a hide,

you're not a person any more,

particularly lying down in a hide like that on a beach.

As far as the birds are concerned, there's no person there at all,

so they just came in and landed all around me.

They were touching distance away completely oblivious and that's just

such a special experience, it's so rare to have that happen

and then of course the view from it.

The patterns that they made the way that they shift around.

It's almost like a liquid flowing over the beach.

Birds are easily scared so hides are invaluable when filming them.

They allow cameramen to secretly capture their most intimate moments.

A hide helped Mark become the first cameraman ever to document

in detail a rare Scottish bird of prey, the sea eagle.

It was 1994-95 and there were only ten pairs

of sea eagles nesting in Scotland then

and so the big challenge really was the pressure involved

because we had got permission to do that after a lot of work

and so it was quite stressful

because we really couldn't afford to mess up.

To add to the pressure, Mark could only set up his hide

when the parents were away from the nest hunting.

Otherwise he risked scaring the eagles off the nest completely.

You only had 20 minutes to go in, put the hide in and get out again

and then it came to the time for filming

and you've got to go in for the first day and sit in there

so you go in there very early morning and I was sat there

for the whole day in the worst cloud of midges I have ever seen.

And you're sat there as quiet, as quiet as you can,

and you've got the camera,

and you've got the little opening with the lens poking through.

Suddenly, bang, right on the nest, you have this huge sea eagle.

It was the most amazing feeling.

It feels as though she's looking right at you,

so you're just sat there.

You're almost unable to breathe because you feel that if

you make any movement at all, she's going to find you.

They're looking straight at a reflection of them in the lens

and if they make a movement or if you move the camera, they see it.

Over three hours or something like that,

she eventually got used to the whole thing

and then she would start to feed the chick.

Sometimes you know that what you have got is great,

all that time you have spent is kind of worthwhile

and you get an amazing shot.

Filming birds close up requires a huge amount of patience

and skill and the results are often striking.

But the patterns big groups of birds paint on the sky's canvas

can be equally mesmerising.

This memorable sequence came when John filmed a flock of starlings

with fellow bird lover Bill Oddie at the River Severn in Gloucestershire.

You couldn't choreograph a show better than the starlings do it.

They just come in loosely and they start to fly a little bit

and more come and more come

and then you get a really big flock comes.

And eventually you end up with 10,000 or 20,000

or 100,000 all in one place.

Then they start these incredible evolutions, these shapes.

it's like some other creature that's just morphing in space.

It's almost like some mathematical thing.

The excitement of that show coming together and then ending

so beautifully when they spiral down and they drop down into the reed bed

and the show's finished and you know that's it.

It has to be the end of the film, it has to be the end

of what the starlings have done, it just worked perfectly.

Filming the patterns of nature is a trademark feature of John's work.

Back home in Scotland,

John explains how he captures these beautiful patterns.

There are lapwings. What's so special about this is that lapwings

have become really rare in Britain and there are hundreds there.

So there is this beautiful flock now.

Two flocks, really. A big flock and a small flock

which have just merged

and the colours are just coming up in the sky.

And this shifting, drifting pattern of lapwings against it.

I am really looking for how they fit in a larger picture.

So the frame moves all the time, I'm following the flock around.

I'm not really filming individual birds,

but I'm trying to anticipate where the whole flock is going

so that the composition stays nice the entire time.

It's quite a difficult thing to do because they are shifting themselves

relative to each other and the flock compresses and expands all the time.

I have to anticipate quite a lot

but when it works you get a lovely sense of flow and of movement

which is something that is almost unique to birds, really.

This sense of how they use the space,

how they're in this three-dimensional space.

There aren't that many places that are as wild as this

in terms of what lives here any more.

On the west coast of Scotland, particularly on the islands

like this, you've got so much variety and natural habitat left

that you do get these big flocks of birds like this

you just don't get in many places any longer.

There is a wonderful quality to the light in the west, I think,

because there are big skies. It's open in that direction.

There is no light pollution, there is no town,

there is nothing on the horizon, really.

As a photographer, it's a fantastic place to work.

It's always inspiring.

Next time, our cameramen are in the oceans

sharing the water with sharks,

filming flying fish,

and the biggest animal in the world.

I've waited a long time to see a blue underwater,

and that was just magic!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd