In my humble opinion the most exciting thing in wildlife filmmaking is witnessing and recording extraordinary behaviors that were not filmed before or perhaps weren’t even known for scientists! Our audience has seen enough from the animal kingdom, viewers are hard to surprise. Still we need to deliver something outstanding…
But besides this, honestly, I’m so excited myself too about filming such behaviors in the wild that I must admit often my fingers start to shake when pressing the Rec button in such situations! And I feel happy that we were lucky to film some amazing wildlife actions again for the Everglades film.Perhaps the most interesting is the story of the tool using alligators. I heard this from my colleague, Florida-based wildlife filmmaker Mark Emery with whom we spent quite a time at a rookery.
During nesting season there is a shortage of available nesting material and egrets take risk to pick them up from the water surface. It seems that alligators are aware of this and they position and balance sticks on their snout as bait. We filmed as gators catch birds this way, I guess we filmed it first time ever. I mentioned it to a scientist, Vladimir Dinets who has seen this in other places too. He went more into the subject and came out with an article.
Another behavior was one of my dream shots too, to capture alligator and manatee interaction – underwater. After all they share the same habitat during winter (warm springs) so there must be some kind of encounter. And indeed there was! But finally this clip didn’t make it into the film, so I insert it here:

Just like the iguana story…
Iguanas are invasive species in Florida and thought to be vegetarians. Read more…

Well, the Everglades film is ready, we are packing and leaving from the location. It’s hard to leave behind all the friends that we made here and a place that we fell in love with so much.
I started with this project… oh my god… back in May 2011 and now it’s January 2015! We moved here with my family and my daughters started the school in Florida. Can’t beleive it!
But there was no other way to spend so much time out in the wilderness to capture rare or even never before seen animal behaviors (I will post about these soon). But maybe one day we return, at least I have some plans…

Now we start to focus on our new adventure in a totally different region of the planet, as our next project takes us to the icy highlands of Norway and Sweden.
Posts coming soon!

We were shooting owl chicks  in the Everglades when a guy stepped to me and politely asked if I am that Hungarian wildlife filmmaker. It just turned out that he followed me on Facebook. In that moment I realized there are people out there who are truly interested what and how we are doing.
And immediately I felt a bit embarrassed about being so reluctant with my blog. Simply we had too busy times – but this may not be a good excuse if somebody started a blog.

We are already editing the film in Hamburg, Germany though still there will be a couple of weeks of exciting shoots back in Florida.

Anyway, at least I managed to upload lots of photos to my public Facebook album regularly.
So as a compensation to the visitors of this blog, here is the link to those photos.

I really hate the emotional rollercoaster side of the wildlife filmmaking…
In July I was so happy to find her nest in a hammock forest.

The “Queen” as we call her…
She hasn’t got babies last year so hopes were high that she was going to become a mother this year and we could follow her adventures of raising gator babies in the cypress dome.

We started to check back on a regular base from the 22nd of August to catch the moment of hatching. We drove out every morning around sunrise and spent some time out there.
Gator hatching usually happens at dawn so if there was no activity until late morning we left.
She got used to us so so much that she didn’t care about us anymore and we could approach the nest very close… I mean really very close. It’s always so touching to earn the trust of a truly wild predator! You just stand there, she stares at you as she could read your mind… well, at least she knew well that we didn’t mean any threat.  Actually I think at some point she even might have been quite bored of us!
But as September was approaching I felt that something must be wrong, but I just couldn’t give it up and I always extended the deadline of shutting down the whole operation.
Then 25 days after that we started the checking, she has abandonded her vantage spot. Finally we could walked up right to the nest and opened it up.

Well, the eggs were bad, never have been fertilized… 25 days, 5100km (3200miles) driving for nothing…
You still want to be a wildlife filmmaker?!

Anyway, I think we will tell the real story of this female in the film not making it up as if the babies were hatched.
Also the summer sunrises in the Everglades were unforgottable, we captured more than enough of them for the film.

We just have finished two busy weeks with timelapsing in South Florida.
83.429 exposures… countless cups of coffees… 75 timelapses in total in just 14 days.

Here is a short Making Of how we attempt to capture the changing sky in the vast Everglades.

Wow, I’ve just checked back and it was in March when last time I wrote a post here. Too bad…
Well, not because I became reluctant but simply there was no time, spring was very busy in the Glades. And seems there is no rest in summertime either…
But at least I regularly manage to upload some photos to Facebook for my colleagues and now I made these Making of photos public on this link, please just click on the photo.

…And meantime Wild Hungary got its 29th festival award, this time in Poland!!

My two little daughters already have met him during a short kayak trip when actually I was not there. They even named him Zozo which is my nickname because they thought he looked like me… gray and old. Thanks, girlz’…
But somehow he was always hiding when I was around. Not yesterday when finally I met him too, face to face. Almost like looking in the mirror, yep?
So here he is, an American crocodile, the king of Nine Mile Pond in the Everglades. Will be tough to get a story with this amazing piece of motionless but living rock…

Today’s alligator shot. The water is getting shallower and the poor fellows have smaller and smaller place. Well, not that poor because the fish are trapped too, so soon the gators will get plenty of food!

Dry season supposed to be here in South Florida but instead it’s been raining already for 3 days.
So, unfortunately I have time to write a post…
The Osprey nest that I started to film isn’t going to work this year, it seems the pair gave it up. I guess they just have chosen a bad place as it happens to be in the middle of a popular kayak route. Even worse, when it’s windy in the Keys, as it is so often in these days, their tiny bay is still well sheltered and fishermen show up in herds. And oh lord, they don’t see anything over the tip of their rods and often I saw them cruising right to the nest without noticing it’s there…
So, I was not surprised that the birds got fed up. Shit happens in wildlife filmmaking, actually I just feel it does too often… But I checked the other nest that we scouted with Chad yet back in early January and guess what? It works even better, the birds are there, can be filmed from four different angles – in fact it’s five if we get it from underwater as well.

Here is a short making of, Janne shot the super slomotions while I was closer to the nest sitting in the bushes in seawater. (Note the shot at 0:55, it’s not hunting, the bird cleans its feet after feeding. Cool isn’t it?)

Vultures are a problem in the Glades…

This is what happens when you forget to cover your car at Anhinga Trail (or elsewhere).

They like warm hoods on cold mornings and the delicious rubber parts for breakfast.

Be careful where and how you leave your car…

So, otherwise I am back in the Everglades, filming Ospreys and still trying to track down a cool bunch of gator babies in one of the cypress domes.

Unfortunately our nice female alligator doesn’t have any this year.

Too bad, she is really friendly and nice, isn’t she?