It's the stuff of video legends: studying polar bears at close range for long periods; even filming them in the middle of a seal hunt. How? Polar bears live on the sea ice of the Arctic, for most humans a hugely remote and inhospitable region. They travel thousands of miles over the course of a year. And, well, they're very large, carnivorous animals. Getting too close could mean going from watcher to lunch.
John Downer and his technical wizard Geoff Bell were born for this mission.
Animal Planet: Top Polar Bear Videos
Bell is a remote-controlled aircraft hobbyist with passion for gadgets and Downer is a videographer always looking for a new way to document the world from the animal's perspective. Working with the BBC's famed Natural History Unit, the two have developed all manner of revolutionary techniques to provide animal footage that others deemed too dangerous or preposterous to try. When Downer wanted to record a bird in flight, he didn't just mount a camera and wait for one to fly by or use a wind tunnel. No, he reared a duck from the moment it hatched, and then took it para-sailing with him. The camera mounted to Downer's helmet caught the bird's first flight of its life.
To film wild tigers in close range, Downer taught elephants to carry cameras disguised as logs. To capture the famed wildebeest migration of the Serengeti, under the stomp and trod of thousands of hoofs, Bell mounted a camera in a protective housing and coated it in dung so it would go unmolested.
Downer says their most difficult job has been the polar bears and has tested their espionage capabilities. Bell developed a series of "spy cams," some of which could be operated remotely, and some of them left on the snow and ice to be retrieved later, triggered into action by nearby movement or heat from the bear's warm body temperature. There was a snowball cam that could roll along the ice in stealthy pursuit of a wandering bear; an iceberg cam that floated at the surface and watched as polar bears swam from ice floe to ice floe and sought to catch seals; and a drift cam, that was shaped to appear to be part of a snowdrift in the hope of catching the moment when a mother and cubs emerged from their den.
The footage they have captured over a period of two years opens a whole new window onto the polar bear's world. It has to be seen to be believed, and can be tonight at 10PM ET on Animal Planet's new program Spy on the Ice.
Tags: Animal Behavior, Mammals, Television
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