Environment / Unusual Organisms

The BBC team behind the much-loved natural history series BLUE PLANET is back, this time with an 11-part series celebrating the vast and varied wildernesses of PLANET EARTH. The first episode (“From Pole to Pole”) is disappointingly disjointed, but then the magic begins. Each of the 10 remarkable hours that follow is devoted to a different habitat—mountains, deep ocean, deserts, ice worlds—and to the animals who have learned to survive there. The BBC’s cameras plunge over the lip of the world’s highest waterfall, drop down the deepest cave shaft, and float beside the summits of Mount Everest and K2. We see pink river dolphins presenting stones as gifts during courtship and (in tense slow motion) a great white shark leaping from the water to close its jaws on a seal. The series airs at various times on April 22, 23, 29, and 30 on the Discovery Channel.

DISCOVER’s Kyla Dunn spoke with producer Huw Cordey (“Caves,” “Deserts,” and “Jungles”) about what it took to gather the shots for a series five years in the making.

(All images courtesy of the BBC)

The Cave of Swallows in Mexico is this enormous cave chamber that would fit the Empire State Building in it. It just takes your breath away. The only way down was either to use a parachute—which is really only open to utter nutcases, let’s be fair—or a rope the width of your index finger. I remember thinking, “What am I doing? This is madness.” The most terrifying thing about the cave is that it’s shaped like a bell, so you start off next to the wall, but the wall starts to disappear away from you. Soon you’re in the middle of this enormous opening where you can barely see the bottom. It’s 1,300 feet, straight down.

Yes. With millions of bats roosting above it. These bats fly back and deposit their waste after a night catching insects. And that is the nutrient base for the cave system. So you’ve got dozens of different species of animal living off the bat guano. Large predatory invertebrates like these giant centipedes, rather frightening in their size—about 6 inches long—that feed on other invertebrates. It’s a very unusual food chain. It took five days to get that shot of the mound. You’re knee deep in bat pooh. Several hundred thousand cockroaches are on the mounds, getting into your clothing.

I was very keen on filming these wild Bactrian camels that nobody had ever filmed before, certainly not in midwinter when they come together in groups. We trekked across Mongolia using GPS to find the Gobi Desert—camping at minus 30 degrees Celsius [–22ºFahrenheit]. In the summer, it would be around plus 45ºC [113ºF], but in winter you get the snow blowing in from Siberia. This camel is able to cope with the vast swings of temperature. There’s no other animal on the planet that can survive those extremes.

A wild Bactrian camel is one of the rarest mammals on the planet. And incredibly sensitive to humans. Often they’d spot you from about 4 kilometers [2½ miles]. Then that would be it. They’d run off and you wouldn’t see them for two or three days. We had only six filming opportunities in two months.

How has technology changed the way you make your documentaries?

The technology that’s taken this series to a new level is this incredible gyrostabilized helicopter mount. It allowed us, for the first time, to be far enough away from an animal to film it without disturbing it. Previously in natural history aerial shots, you saw animals running like the bloody wind away from the helicopter. Now you can see the animal in context. For instance, the desert lions in Namibia. Suddenly you see the scale of their challenges. That endless dune field? These three animals have to find their food supply in this. And it just speaks volumes.