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!

I promised myself not to include any more stories in the film.
I truly decided as I had the feeling we already have to many for a 50min production.
…But how can you keep your promise if you happen to come across a cool behavior that has been rarely filmed or if ever?

So, here is the story:

We were after the Key deer rutting in the noseeum infested mangrove of the Florida Keys (the mosquitoes are kind and nice creatures compared to these ones) but it seemed we were late, the bucks finished the fight. Too bad.
But then we just saw a little grey bird that was walking silently under the bushes… and then all of a sudden he picked up a land crab! A big one, I mean.
Wow, I thought it looked very cool and could add a nice cutaway, so we made some slow motions.
I didn’t guess that we’re going to end up spending more than a week on that little meadow in the mangrove. The scene started to be a wildlife hotspot with all kind of animal interactions. A curious deer came to the bird, then the racoon turned up foraging for the leftovers of the crabs, lizards were hunting for the ants that also came to the tiny crab pieces left behind the heron’s hunt.
And then one deer just picked up the shell of a crab and ate it loudly crunching.
I couldn’t beleive it.
Maybe they like the salt or the calcium? Anyway finally beside our crab eating juvenile Yellow Crowned Night Heron we got a crab eating deer as well. And it only took eight days sitting in the heat!

Well, it’s shocking to see that my last post is dated February 2012… and soon the year is over! It has been a busy one with the usual ups and downs of wildlife fimmaking. Plus a family moving from Sweden to Florida to shoot the Everglades film that I am working on until 2014. I was thinking about restarting the blog a couple ot times but somehow I have been waiting for a big thing to post. But what the heck is a big thing?? Missed a couple of opportunities for sure…

So, instead of waiting and always postponing the next post I just start again right now. And I promise regular updates in the coming new year…

Here we go. Deer carcass story.

I heard from a biologist, who is a great photographer as well, that iguanas eat carcass. It was hard to beleive as they are herbivorous lizards, the kind of salad eating beasts. But he has even documented and published it!

Well, I immediately started to vision a scene with vultures and iguanas competing for the carrion… or at least the two species interacting. It’s always cool to have such behavior in a wildlife film.

Here are the preparations, remote camera, dead deer, blind.

I have spent two days in the tent and I was lucky enough to have an iguana already in the second hour! Well, then for one and a half day nothing, only vultures and of course the nice smell of the dead animal (I was under the wind) and warm beer. I have a feeling that I know the secret how to really enjoy holidays!

And here are some shots from the blind, raw footage. Turkey vultures and a Black spiny-tailed iguana at a Key deer carcass.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I am often wondering especially after two weeks of packing, just like now, that hey, come on we are making “only” some pictures!!

But devil is in the details and every piece of kit must be checked for instance such nuance things like safety pin (to attach curtains  hanging in the windows of the blind to cover the lens) or the perhaps more obvious new viewfinder of the camera (had to donwload a new firmware from Sony’s website…)

So, this has been going on for quite a while but now the stuff is about to be shipped to FLA, USA… The shoot starts soon and I’ll be back in the swamps feeding the mosquitoes again! Hurrah.