In the spectacular Series
Wild Canada,
we saw our country as never before.
But how did the film makers get such amazing footage?
With skill, patience
and some unexpected help.
- This is a bear.
It's just checking it out.
- They braved the elements.
- It's so cold it's freezing the camera in place.
- There you go. Ah.
- They went eye to eye with wildlife.
And had some adventures along the way.
- That was the most spectacular
thing I have seen underwater.
- For Canada's premier wildlife
film maker Jeff Turner
it was the journey of a lifetime.
- I feel honoured and privileged to be here.
- Jeff how did you choose where to go and what to film.
- We had camera crews all across the country
both Canadian and British
we had 20 different cameras out in the field
and we shot hundreds and hundreds of hours of material
to try to tell the story of Wild Canada
- But then you like bears
- Yes
- Bears in every episode
polar bear, grizzly, black bear
even spirit bear
some of those shots were so intimate.
You must have had to use long lenses all the time.
- Actually no. We tried not to use long lenses
we tried to allow the animals to
come as close to us as we can.
That's where you get the very best material.
It's making them aware of your presence
and then allowing them to set the distance they're comfortable with.
And if you're in the right spot and the right situation
they'll come very, very close to you.
That's when you get those incredibly magical sort of moments.
An animal in its environment.
You understand the relationship right away.
- In Episode 2 of Wild Canada
we travelled from the pristine forest of the west coast
to a remote river near the Arctic circle.
On this trip with my son logan and crew,
we wanted to get close to the bear
and film them in really intimate ways.
The bears comes here to feed on salmon.
But before we even set up
we realized we've got company.
I know that by turning my back to the bear and looking away
I'm less threatening.
I want them to be relaxed and natural
but still allow me close.
The bear seems ok with us
and quickly get on with what he came here to do:
Catch salmons.
Allowing us to get some great shots.
Black bears are one challenge
but we've heard of a far greater one.
A place near the Arctic circle
where huge grizzly bears have never been filmed before.
It's seriously remote and risky
no film crew has even been here
it's a two hour helicopter ride from the nearest airport.
We'll be the only people around for 200 kilometres.
This place is made special
by the fresh flowing water
in an otherwise frozen landscape.
All due to an underground spring.
When heading to the cabin where we're going to stay
with Bill Timpany, the manager of this reserve
and his dog Smoky,
we immediately run into a big grizzly bear.
We start filming but we soon realize we've got a problem.
How are we going to get to the cabin without disturbing the bear?
- We have the little bear
the little male
that's come lay down between us and the cabin.
Who's going to sleep. So...
- We can't go home.
I just don't want make the bear feel like I'm displacing him.
Because I want him to feel comfortable in the camp.
As long as he behaves he's welcome
he's so far behaves.
His mom used to bring him and his sibling sister
into the camp for security a lot.
And actually nurse them quite a bit around in the yard.
So that's where he's getting this from.
Even if we have to put the camera ...
We'll have to go around...
maybe we'll have to go off the board walk,
and see if we can get into the cabin.
We're missing our cocktail hour.
It's kind of a disappointment.
- Tiptoeing around the bear in a relaxed way
seems to do the trick.
But you don't want to be too quiet.
- If anything calm them
we just talk real lightly they ...
They kind of ... feels ...
Well they hear us talking all the time.
A lot of time when you stop talking,
they get suspicious cause you know...
So sometimes I just hum,
and it makes them feel a little bit better it seems.
Humming: ♪ba ba ba bam babom babom ... ♪
♪Tala tala la tala la ... ♪
♪Ba ba ba bam babom babom ...♪
♪tala tala la tala la ... ♪
- Next day we head out to the river to start filming in earnest.
It's great to have Smoky around.
Not just for company,
he's here to read the bears
as strange as that might sound.
He can sense the mood of the bears
far better than humans can
so we watch Smoky
to help us judge how the bears
are reacting to our presence.
- So Smoky's role basically he's eyes and ears for us.
He senses bears sometimes and we don't.
If anything ever happened,
where the bear actually put us at serious risk
for some reason or another,
Smoky would basically distracts the bear.
- He would attack him. - He would basically attack the bear.
He might nip in the back, he might jump around.
He probably knows more about the behavioural part of it than I do.
He's looking at them when they're close.
He knows when they're thinking bad stuff.
And he'll act accordingly.
- Safe in the knowledge that Smoky had my back
I set to work placing cameras in the water
to see the bears and the salmon together.
And it doesn't take long for the first grizzly to walk by.
He smells the new object and investigates.
- He's a good bear. He didn't hurt it
he's just checking it out.
- The gentlest of bites is enough to leave a hole in our metal tripod.
Smoky is still calm.
So we know we're good to carry on.
And what we get to film surpasses our wildness imagines...
It's an ice bear wonderland.
Being able work this close to grizzly bears
is a real privilege.
It allows us to get shots
we couldn't get any other ways.
Our time here provided Wild Canada
with one of most memorable sequences
in the Series.
- Now that was a classic kind of wildlife shoot.
But there must have been other situations
where you needed to apply a new kind of technology.
- Yeah, absolutely, I mean, one of the curses in the way of wildlife film making
is that you're constantly raising the bar
every time you go out and do amazing,
next time you gotta to do it even better.
You know it's that sort of industry.
And yet at the same time technology,
improvement in camera, sensitivity, speed,
all those sort of things,
give you new options
to go back and look at wildlife
and see thing that you couldn’t see before.
An example is our the leaping salmon.
I'm sure lot of people have seen salmons leaping over water fall,
but until you see them at 2,000 frames a second,
it's really hard to appreciate what they're doing.
They're incredibly acrobatic and very graceful and beautiful.
You can watch and how the precision in which
they have to enter the water.
If they're off by just a millimetre it just spits them right out again.
It's really truly unique to look at wildlife that way.
- What about miniaturization of camera ?
- Well now it's another great tool
because now you could put camera in places and see thing you couldn’t see before.
An example would be our gardner snake
you know that gardner snake activity is happening down in pits
and you can't get down there yourself with a big camera.
But little cameras on the end of poles,
we could reach right down and get right at the snake level.
We see the world from their perspective without disturbing them
because again it's a very small compact thing,
and they carry on what they're doing.
That was another really unique opportunity for us.
- I thought flying squirrels were nocturnal animals.
How did you get those...?
- Likewise technology helps us out there.
Cameras are becoming more and more sensitive.
So what that means
with a just little bit of light added to the forest,
you can see nocturnal behaviour
that you couldn't see in the past.
It doesn't interfere with what the wildlife is doing.
And that's the ultimate goal of what we're trying to do
is to capture natural behaviour as close as we can.
- In making the Wild Canada Series
we travelled far and wide across Canada.
Off the coast of Newfoundland,
we attempted to film one of the most
challenging wildlife sequences of the Series :
The annual return of Humpback whales.
- This one is really, really close here.
- To cover this amazing event
we needed two camera teams.
A topside crew,
working from boats and using high-speed cameras
and an underwater crew,
who had a whole different set of challenges.
French cameraman Didier Noirot
is one of the world best underwater cinematographer.
- The sound of the whales underwater is something like really amazing
you can't see them.
They are just a few meters away from you.
I like to have some rocks where we can hide.
It's quite tricky down there
when you see three or four whales coming in front of you.
And they scoop the bottom like that...
you wonder how ...
it can end you day or so, hey hey.
I'd rather be a bit more concerned
with safety and all that.
So let's get everything ready.
We will arm and when we were ready to go...
We'll ah .... boom.
- There are millions of capelin here.
A spectacle in itself
and this is what the whales are here for.
But it's impossible for Didier
to see whales through all these fish.
However there are other creatures here
feeding on the capelin
there were a lot easier to get close to:
like the Atlantic cod.
The cod didn't seem to be afraid of Didier at all.
Their numbers have fallen over the years,
and it was nice bonus to get shots of them
see them feeding on the capelin.
But no whales for Didier this time.
Well not underwater anyways...
- We did not see them in the water.
They were close. Hey hey
we did not see them.
- Our topside crew was having the opposite problem to Didier.
The whales were almost getting too close to film.
- ... we are pretty sorted ...
- But while Didier was struggling to see Humpbacks,
he did manage to capture on film
something that have never been recorded before :
The spawning of capelin underwater.
Capelin normally spawn on beaches.
So to see them under 20 meters of water,
spawning on the sandy seabed is a first.
- The great moment of the day
was definitively the spawning.
When you see all those fishes coming down
and they go down they just shh.
But you can't really see.
It's so fast and there are so many
you don't know where to look.
So next time I will go with a long lens,
tight shot and very high speed at 240 frames
and hopefully the camera will reveal to our eyes
what we could not see this morning.
Scientists believe that this spawning behaviour
harkens back to the last Ice Age,
when see levels were dozens of meters lower
and this seabed was actually a beach.
The capelin continued to return
to this exact spot to spawn
while over thousands of years
sea level rose submerging the beach.
Unfortunately the spawning didn't
improve condition underwater
for trying to film the Humpbacks
- Very hard to see. Very hard to see
like they are 5 or 6 meters in front of you, that's all.
We heard a lot of whales again.
We just saw one white pectoral fin in the distance and that's it.
They were not far.
We were close.
But we failed again.
- And the visibility
wasn't much better topside.
Newfoundland's famously foggy weather
was plaguing Ben and Justin.
- I think we just should have a coffee.
- There's no competition with Justin.
He works from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning,
to 7:00, 8:00... 9:00 whatever
then he stops because the light is too high,
and then work again late in the evening you know.
He does like 16, 17 hours a day.
Me it's a total different way to work.
I work only from let's say 10:00 to 3:00 o'clock, you know,
Five hours a day.
- Eight hours. - And I rest...
Eight hours? Come on baby. It's a maximum...
- Finally the ideal condition converge
good light and plenty of whales.
Both crews are excited by this rare opportunity.
It's the final days of the shoot, so it's now or never.
- There's a whale in the back.
- Toe blake quick toe blake...
- ... that happen 10 seconds earlier.
- With their boat the topside crew
is able to move around the whales easily
to get the shots they need.
But Didier can't move around much.
He has to get to exactly the right spot
and this time he's done it.
The whales are all around him.
- I can't see ... ok it's still there 10 o'clock.
It's this one just here, it's really, really close here.
- Both crew are in the perfect spot now.
But with so many capelins in the water
Didier is not always sure exactly
where the whales are coming from.
Finally, after weeks of hard work,
the crew's efforts pay off
providing one of the most stunning sequences
in the Series.
- I think today was the day
that you have maybe one in your life.
I saw those white pectoral fin
coming straight in from of me.
I just had time to put my head down.
Three whales came right above my head like that.
That was just magical.
After that we were like ... In the washing machine you know
with eddies from the tails.
That was the most spectacular thing I have seen underwater.
- With Humpback whales it's being in the right place
at right time with the right weather and some luck.
But it wasn't always that way with all of the animals.
- No that's right. I mean,
It was one of the biggest challenges,
often times in a Series like this,
is finding new things to film.
Things that hadn't been film before.
You know we were fortunate that Canada still has a lot
of untapped wildlife in that regard.
And one of creatures we went after in this Series is wolverines.
Now wolverines are very reclusive,
quite shy animals.
You don't often see them around humans.
They live off quite remotely and in deep forest.
To get that footage we had a cameraman
that had to spend three weeks
living inside a little pup tent
just on the edge of this forest
and he had to peeing in a bottle
and he couldn't cook meals there.
And they've actually have never been filmed
in the wild in North America before us.
So for our Series to be able to do that was a coup for us,
and it took a lot of time and effort.
- A beaver lodge on a frozen lake in Québec.
Beneath the ice the beavers live a secret life
presenting the Wild Canada team
with one of its greatest filming challenges.
It's like February and bitterly cold.
Wildlife expert Luke Ferrell has spent months
preparing for the team's arrival.
Since the pond froze over,
Luke and his moccasins have been regular visitors.
Creating spies holes in the ice
close to the entrance of the beaver's lodge
- What you done here is kind of incredible
working out where to film the beavers
so we've got crystal clear water,
and digging holes and working out
where is the entrance of the lodges
and where their swimming channels are.
- Luke has been baiting his spy hole
with the beaver favourite food:
Aspen tweaks
- Is this from ...? - My bait
- Your bait - Yeah
I put some bait here and here.
- The crew has brought along a filming crane
which will allow Justin to control the underwater camera remotely
without disturbing the beavers.
- The beaver is probably one of the most iconic Canadian animal
and what we are trying to do here
is really see them in a way we haven't seen them before.
- Beneath this custom device the beaver's pond won't freeze.
But exposed to air at -30°C,
the surface of louke's spy hole soon ice over.
- The problem we're facing now
is that it's so cold
that the hole we have in the ice
is freezing up. Freezing the camera in place.
So Luke has got an idea of putting some foam
cover it with snow
and protecting most of the hole from above
so the camera will remain unfrozen.
- Since beavers in this area are
nocturnal the spy holes are
rigged with filming lights,
and Luke has installed
a wooden cabin to protect the crew from the elements.
- Luke has made, has prepared us a splendid shelter
and in the shelter we have
a heater.
And I'm slightly worry that the heater is going to warm up the ice
and we're suddenly going to disappear into the lake bottom.
- The first night of filming
time to light the lights
and now the waiting begins.
- So we've been in here for about 2 1/2 hours?
- About.
- About 2 1/2 hours,
and not a sign at all of any beavers.
So we're sitting and waiting.
- The team has to stay focused
so they're ready to hit the record button and adjust the camera position
whenever a beaver swims by.
- You always have this hope that everything is going to go
incredibly well within hours
and then the reality of the wildlife
film making quickly present themselves
and a few hours could at least turn into
a few days or a few weeks.
- The end of night one and nothing so far.
Time to go home, warm up and sleep.
Day two.
Justin is feeling positive
despite plummeting temperatures.
Out on the pond there's a problem with ice in the camera controls.
- Your job now Ben ... is to remove the ice.
- Woaaaah.
- It's bitterly cold and our heater is not working anymore.
- After a second fruitless night,
it's time for a change of crew.
- This is the water bottle we have in here,
is now filling up with ice.
That's was a good demonstration of how cold it is.
I think Luke is still awake, just...
You awake ?
- Yeah.
- He's awake he is keen as ever.
- With no gain in return for the pain,
morale is starting to sag.
Day six dawn even colder.
In spite of low morale,
the crew members have agreed
to give their ice vigil one more night.
It's make-or-break.
Without a change of fortune
they have to rethink their whole approach.
As usual the first task on arrival back at the beaver's pond
is to de-ice the camera control.
- We're in skunts in the hut again,
another cold night
of beaver watching.
We have made some adjustments there.
We got ... Luke's feet at the door.
- Yeah.
- So we have ... we can close the door at least
- Yesss - But ...
most importantly we have mister heater.
We're hopping that's gonna make a big difference because ...
it's getting down to - 30°C and beyond.
- Then just after sunset
there's a movement on the monitor.
A fleeting glimpse but hope at last.
- I think the ...
the heater may have brought us luck,
because we've been here for about what?
10 minutes?
- Maybe a little bit more - Maybe a little bit more ...
But we've seen the beaver leaving the lodge.
So we're pretty...
we're pretty excited about that, aren't we? Hey?
- Yeah.
But now we have to wait
to see if the beaver will come back in the lodge.
- Yeah, hopefully he'll come back.
- Sure enough, over the next couple of hours,
there's a pulse of goings and comings.
- Ok. I had a really good night tonight
I was a very great night.
Seven shots I think.
- Yes seven shots I think.
Five exits and two are returns, something like this.
- I think that tomorrow it's ... Keep a sequence going,
we're gonna move the cameras and try for some different shots.
- Boiled by their success the crew is back the next day
to put Ben's plan into operation.
The mood is helped by the warmer weather
up to a bearable -24°C.
Luke as collected a load more Aspen tweaks
to add to his under ice bate station
where the camera has now been repositioned.
Finally the team get their money shot:
A beaver collecting food from
its under ice winter pantry.
- At times it has been brutal even with the heater.
At times, most of the time, it has been amazing really to see
beavers in their natural habitat.
It's actually been a real... a real pleasure.
I'll remember it for a long time.
- In the end the team's valued efforts
resulted in just a handful of shots in the final film,
but as wildlife filmmaker are found of saying :
"If it was easy everyone would be doing it".
- You know in trying to get these incredible shots,
you must have also learned things
maybe that scientists didn't even know?
- Yeah that's true. You know scientists had known
beavers and Muskrats shared lodges.
But they was never any evidence
that Muskrats actually did anything inside there
until this footage of Wild Canada
We would take a little camera inside and slide it down this tube
and we would slide a light down the other tube.
But what was funny was that the Muskrats and the beavers
were constantly plugging the end of these holes because they thought ...
Well the're shouldn’t be a hole in my lodge there so ...
Actually the one shot of the Muskrat
is actually him looking and seeing that hole
and try to sort of pack some mud back into it so ...
- Was there any shot or sequence
or activity that you've always
kind of hoped you'd be able to get
that you actually achieved in this Series?
- Well, I mean for me personally,
I've tried over a number of years to film
the sequence of wolves hunting the salmon.
And that's something that years ago,
actually for planet earth, I was sent out to try to record
and no one ever actually film it before at that point.
You know in this Series, I kind of feel like we finally really cracked that one.
Im mean that we were able to really see for the first time that that behaviour.
We had dozens of shots of those wolves catching salmon.
And actually seeing how they eat the skin
was something we hadn't realize they did.
So that was a really remarkable to see
- Over the course of nearly two years filming
our Wild Canada team
has been privileged to visit
some of the most remote and beautiful places
in the whole country.
But for the Arctic episode
we knew we were especially lucky.
The crew of the scientific research boat the Amundsen
agreed we could come on board
during their annual summer trip to the high Arctic.
I joined the ice-breaker at the top of Baffin island.
- I am on the Amundsen
and we're heading north
further north than this ship has ever gone before.
We're passing through Cane Basin right now
on our way to the Lyincol Sea.
On my right over here is Greenland
on my left is Ellesmere Island
and we're passing in between these two
coming through one of the narrowest place
between these two countries.
- Extended period of scientific research
carried out in this area
are crucially important for understanding exactly
what's going on with the Arctic's ice system.
It was exciting for me to be part of this scientific expedition
that was charting virtually unexplored region of the Arctic.
With new technology like the Loki
I watch them identify different species
in the sea water
and actually being able to count each individual.
In real time it can monitor
how many individual organisms are in a tiny part of water.
Up to 200,000 at any one time.
They are also finding unexpected creatures.
- I'm sorry I just thought it was so cute
that I wanted to keep it. - Ha ha
- It's a pretty exciting looking critters down there.
- Yeah.
- This one looks like a pokemon or something.
- The vessel is now heading into completely uncharted territory.
No boat has ever travelled here before.
It's one of the last frontiers left in the world
and the team take the opportunity
to map the ocean floor for the very first time.
- It's august the 23rd and this is high summer in this part of the world.
And this place, this spot right here is a record.
This is about as far north as
either of these two expeditions
have ever come before,
Wild Canada and the Amundsen.
So it's kind of a special... a special day,
a special moment and
it's feel pretty fortunate to be here.
This is an incredibly beautiful part of the world and very spectacular.
It's very austere but very, very beautiful.
So I feel honoured and privileged to be here.
- This trip has been an incredible opportunity
for me to personally get a change to see
some of the most amazing wilderness
that still exist in Canada today.
I filmed all over the country this past year.
But nothing compares to the
stark beauty of the Arctic landscape.
And this is one of the main reason I was on this expedition
to be able to show the world
some of the incredible beauty
that is the Arctic today.
- You know most of us who live
hunkered close to the border with the United States
and it's hard to find true wilderness.
But it looks to me like in the Arctic
you really did find some wilderness.
- Yeah absolutely I mean,
It's one of the thing you know
my whole career I've spent in
wilderness and wild places
but I had never really experienced the
scale of it until we were in the Arctic on this trip.
To think that we got these
landscapes that still exist in Canada
we actually have never seen.
It's astonishing to me that in this day and age
there are places like that still on our planet.
- Now we think of the north of course as desolate,
cold, spectacularly beautiful, but empty.
But there are oasis of life in the Arctic,
- Absolutely
- where it suddenly boils with life.
- It's a landscape where you just have to look
a little closer to find the life that's there.
It's there it's always there.
But it's sometimes harder to see.
Those places where life abounds
around the marine environment.
They are spectacular, spectacular places.
- You know Canadians really do see themselves
as a country defined by its wildlife, its wilderness
and these amazing natural places.
You've brought that to us in a spectacular way,
and I think as Canadians we are really grateful
for seeing our country in this
very different way.
- I'm grateful to had the opportunity to have been able to do that.
Because you know I've travelled all over the world filming wildlife.
To have that chance to sort of do it in my own country
and to show, you know, the incredible beauty
and scale of this place,
is something that's been a dream of mine to do for my whole career.
To have that chance now to do that and share that with Canadians.
It been a dream come true for me.
Subtitle corrected and synced by HandyMan