The idea was disarmingly simple but, like many simple ideas, hard to execute.
Filming animals in the wild — whether to study their behaviour, or for a nature program, or for a combination of the two — has always been easier said than done. First, you have to find the animal. Then, having found the animal, hope that it’s doing something more than just sleeping. And, finally, be able to trust that when it does do something, the resulting images will be in focus, the sound clear enough to hear and interpret without having to mix in artificial effects in editing.
Why not attach a camera to an animal, then, and let it go about its day-to-day routine, relatively unbothered by human presence. After all, trap cameras — remote-controlled cameras in predetermined, fixed locations, triggered by movement or a sudden change in the light — have revolutionized both wildlife photography and zoological science.
In the summer of 2020, the resulting footage from wild animals fixed with cameras formed the basis for a PBS Nature docuseries, Animals with Cameras.
Despite initial misgivings — would it work? Would it harm the animals in some way? Would it affect the animals’ behaviour, and in so doing defeat the whole purpose of studying wild animals in their natural habitat? — Animals with Cameras worked. It revealed never-before-seen behaviour: cheetahs on the hunt, seen from their point of view; Magellanic penguins navigating life as a flightless bird; an orphaned chimpanzee learning about life without the benefit of its mother, and others.
Animals’ production team worked closely with researchers to design lightweight, attachable cameras that would be both unobtrusive and easily removed.
Now Animals is back with a second season, with close-up views of the lives of seas turtles, sharks and, in the Jan. 26 episode, kangaroos, fruit bats and other animals of the Australian ecosystem. The vantage point provided by these state-of-the-art cameras reveal answers to scientists studying these species in ways they might not otherwise be able to, and in so doing reshape conservation efforts to protect and hopefully save them. How do kangaroos survive being pushed out of their environment by urban development, for example? By better understanding the personal, private lives of endangered species, conservationists are better able to calibrate ways to save them.
The new episodes feature several on-camera firsts, from a male koala bellowing at night to assert its territory — the first time this behaviour has been witnessed in such close proximity — to the view from above an Australian cityscape from a fruit bat’s perspective.
This is not jaws-’n-claws sensationalism. For 40 years now, PBS Nature producer-filmmakers have prided themselves on pioneering an entire television genre, through bringing the natural world to millions of viewers in the US and across North America, in the same way David Attenborough’s early natural history programs shaped the way viewers in the UK and elsewhere viewed the natural world. Nature has won 20 Emmy Awards and three Peabody Awards during its decades on the air. Junk programming it is not. “I think the large amount of people enjoy nature programming are turned off by graphic/violent nature films,” veteran Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman tweeted — back in 2011.
“This series takes nature filmmaking and animal research to a whole new level by letting the animals be the cinematographers,” Kaufman told reporters prior to Animals with Cameras’ debut in 2020. “It was inevitable that this would happen eventually.”
The new episodes are hosted once again by veteran wildlife cameraman and motivational speaker Gordon Buchanan, who has said his life’s mission is to raise awareness of the fragility of the world’s remaining wild spaces and the species that live there. His previous works in the field include BBC One’s Life in the Snow and Elephant Family and Me, and BBC Two’s Tribes, Predators and Me and Life in Polar Bear Town.
“It’s an easy thing to say but actually the discussions over how we were going to do this were really lengthy,” Buchanan told reporters, at that same conference. “I suppose I got the best part out of it, because I got to go out to most of the locations and I didn't really have to do any of the planning of all these logistics. It was a lot of work just to convince scientists that we’d be happy to help them in their studies.
“In most cases, the scientists were really blown away — more blown away than we were by the images that we were able to get. So in the end, it was really quite rewarding. Because that’s a tough audience — a scientist, say, who’s been studying fur seals for more than 20 years.”
The experience allowed Buchanan to appreciate wildlife filmmaking in ways he hadn’t experienced before.
“As a wildlife cameraman, I've spent years trying to film a particular animal,” he said. “In most cases, they don't really want to be observed or followed. So, for any person, I could use my camera skills with a long lens and try to document their day, which I would be able to do fairly accurately.
“But if, say, instead we fitted that person with one of these cameras, we'd learn a lot more about that person and their day-to-day life. With animals, you're recording everything, every kind of intimate moment of that animal's life. . . . You get the sense of their world. It has revealed a side to theirlives that we’ve never rewally seen before. That’s what we setout to do —witness never-before-seen behaviour, and I suppose forge new relationships with animals around the world.”
Animals with Cameras: Australia premieres Wednesday, Jan. 26 on PBS at 8/7c.
©Paul Freimanis BBC Studios