Stunning photographs from David Attenborough TV series Planet Earth II show how crew captured documentary magic
HALF a billion people around the world watched Sir David Attenborough’s 2006 nature series Planet Earth, and it was showered with awards – so ten years on, his production team on the sequel had to go to extreme lengths to try to better it.
The amazing scenes in the new series – which began last week with 9.4million UK viewers, beating The X Factor – were filmed in 40 countries over two years, clocking up 117 location shoots.
Producers risked their lives and even endured underwear-eating rats to bring some of the most extraordinary wildlife footage ever seen on TV.
Tomorrow night, BBC1 viewers will be treated to a world first as four rare snow leopards are finally caught on camera.
For Justin Anderson, who produced tomorrow’s episode, Mountains, the shoot literally left him breathless.
He revealed: “I had to come down and spend a couple of days sitting in a hotel with an oxygen cylinder.”
Justin was helped by an array of hi-tech gadgetry, including 30 ultra high-definition camera traps to help locate the rare creatures – which are so thinly scattered that one leopard will inhabit 100 square miles of mountainous Indian terrain.
Sir David said of the daring shoot: “It’s the most moving sequence and also very, very beautiful. It’s never been seen before.”
Here we detail the risks that Sir David’s team took to capture previously unseen wildlife and how they used new technology to make unprecedented discoveries.
TO get a golden eagle’s eye view a miniature camera was strapped to the bird’s back, while a world champion paraglider flew down the mountain using a special parachute to get immersive motion shots.
Hidden cameras that recorded in pin-sharp 4K resolution captured footage of everything from grizzly bears to lions and snow leopards.
Stabilised camera rigs allowed the crew to film jaguars hunting in water from boats, no matter how choppy the water got.
Military-grade thermal cameras were used to film in cities at night, capturing urban leopards hunting pigs in Mumbai, unnoticed by the city’s human inhabitants.
THE crew camped under the stars for their entire time in Botswana – five months spread over two years – as they filmed swamp lions hunting buffalo.
They were surrounded by hyenas, crocodiles and hippos and while in the swamps they went barefoot so they would feel a potentially deadly crocodile beneath their feet.
They also filmed in Brazil, where they battled the native spiders.
Emma Napper. producer of the Jungle episode, said: “The crew shared a single room – and a plague of spiders.
“And there were rats, which I don’t mind, but they did eat through my underwear.”
SIR David’s intrepid crew managed to film bobcats as they hunted ducks and squirrels in the Rockies.
The scenes which were filmed in a gruelling five-week shoot, were another first.
In France, catfish are seen catching pigeons bathing at a river’s edge. The fish thrust themselves towards the birds, grab them in their mouths then drag them underwater.
In the desert, sand grouse collect water for their young at waterholes but a pair of goshawks have learned to wait around and pick off the grouse as they arrive.
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The goshawks appear to have realised that even if the grouse know they are there, they cannot afford not to drink in the extreme desert heat.
After a month in Madagascar, the team feared they would never find a locust swarm – only then to discover one of biblical proportions, below.
With new technology such as drones and cameras that minimise shaking, the team got right into the heart of the swarm.
A HARVEST mouse’s nest in Norfolk was captured by the cameras for the first time thanks to a bit of kit called a macro crane arm camera fitting.
It allowed the crew to follow a female mouse into her tiny nest a metre off the ground and film her babies. Adult harvest mice weigh less than a two-penny piece.
In the Namib desert in southern Africa the crew filmed its distant cousin, the golden mole.
This rarely-seen creature lives beneath the sand, is the size of a ping pong ball and is completely blind.
EXTRAORDINARY new footage shows a desert lion in Namibia having the most dramatic fight with a giraffe ever filmed.
Producer Ed Charles said: “They managed to get access to this pride in Namibia, true desert lions which live right in the sand dunes. The sequence they shot shows the lions trying to take down a giraffe, which was epic.”
On a far smaller scale, male glass frogs are only the size of fingernails but are shown karate-kicking wasps away while they spend two weeks protecting their spawn.
AMAZING glowing fungi, above, were captured on camera in Brazil for the first time thanks to new low-light cameras.
Among other new discoveries, the Araguaian river dolphin was only identified in 2014 but Sir David’s team spent weeks tracking them down, also in Brazil, and filming them from the water and air using stabilised, boat-mounted cameras and drones.
The crew also managed to film desert bats for the first time as they hunted highly poisonous death stalker scorpions at night.
IN New York and Mumbai the team took hyperlapse videos – where time-lapse footage is sped up – showing how peregrine falcons and leopards live unseen alongside humans.
In Kazakhstan the crew were delighted to discover critically endangered saiga antelopes in calving season.
However, while the team were there, they saw 150,000 of them die as a virulent disease swept through the population.
The Planet Earth team feared they had witnessed the extinction of an ancient species.
