Swimming with Crocodiles

The team

Interesting times were had and interesting people were present on this shoot.

Ben was delightful and very down to earth, despite his considerable celebrity status, of which we were completely oblivious until he had left Botswana.

Adam Britton, our unassuming scientist, turned out to be as tough as nails and, thank goddess, calm in the face of danger and unforeseen circumstances. He had an interesting trip. Within a minute of his being underwater for the first time we were confronted with a large panicked / angry / curious (still haven’t decided which yet) crocodile within a foot of his elbow. Thankfully he remained calm and emerged with all limbs intact. Had he been like most other mortals - who at the very least would have flailed around a bit when faced with the same situation - the outcome may not have been so happy. Very well done to him.

Adam and Brad

Adam had yet another interesting, and very possibly completely unique, experience on a following dive. We believe he can now be the only person on the planet to claim to have been taken for an underwater scuba ride by a crocodile. This was completely unintentional I must add, and was all in the name of science. It is amazing how much we learnt about crocodiles with him on this shoot, both from his experiences, the science we undertook and his incredible wealth of knowledge.

After filming at Nxamaseri, the crew (sadly apart from me – due to a whole host of circumstances) went off to Australia to film episode 2. Filming there went well and the programmes are due for release in February 2012. We look forward to seeing them.

Moving on

Brad at Nxamaseri

This is the start of the new blog. All the blogging to date was a very personal blog done during our time at Earth-Touch when we were living in Moremi Game Reserve. It was my sanity saving measure during times that were simultaneously the most personally trying and the most exciting, fulfilling and interesting.

Now that Brad and I are ‘on our own’ in the big wide world it has become increasingly clear to us that we need to get our heads out of the sands of Botswana where they are currently buried and get on with establishing a public profile. The continuation of this blog is an attempt to do this. This will still, however, remain largely a personal blog as this is really the only way I am comfortable writing.

Here is a little retrospective of the past 2 years.

At the end of 2010 we left Earth-Touch and shut the Moremi Camp. We were sad to leave both Earth-Touch and Moremi as both were home to us. However we had things to do and places to go and got on with doing it so had little time to mope around. When we left Earth-Touch the crocodile filming that we had pioneered in the Okavango Delta and that we had kept under the radar (so as to prevent a bun-fight while we were filming the Earth-Touch documentary) was just started to be heard about in the industry and it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of it. The crocodile documentary that we had been filming for Earth-Touch “Diving with Crocodiles” had been snapped up by the Smithsonian institute and was heading into the post production stages. We felt we could then open it up to interested production houses and got an incredible response.

As the crocodile diving season is short (only 2 months of the year) we had a limit as to what we could do so elected to go with BBC 2 and Spungold TV. We had made contact with an Australian scientist, Dr Adam Britton, and Spungold had suggested a presenter in the form of Ben Fogle, who, much to their horror, we had never heard of.

And so it was that June and July 2011 were taken up with this.

9 June (Tues)

Rained all night. Brad leapt out of bed at 5.30 saying he was off filming, which I thought was particularly odd as he usually has a lie in when it rains. Needless to say, when I emerged at about 7 am after having done the usual battle of dressing the kids I found him at his edit station, hard at work.

It is freezing and windy and we are all huddled in the office tent doing our respective work. This carried on for most of the day. That night we had to bath the kids in the ‘living room’ because it was so cold. There was no question of not bathing them as they were all muddy from head to foot, like little warthogs and they hadn’t bathed the previous day due to the storm. They loved the bath ‘indoors’ and there was much laughter and hilarity.

8 June (Mon)

Went filming. Found the lions early in the morning eating a male lechwe on dead tree island.

As usual I put Keita to sleep just after lunch at about 12.30. While we were lying there having her bottle we could hear the 3 boys (who no doubt had set some heinous trap for her or had some diabolical thing planned) chanting her name. She smiled around the teat of her bottle and very importantly shouted “Guys, I am just having a little dudus. I’ll see you later guys”. Too cute.

 We had a very unexpected big storm in afternoon which produced a beautiful rainbow and lots of diversion for the kids.

 

5 June (Fri)

We headed out filming before light the next morning so had to survey the lion damage by torchlight. They had ripped the inverter off the electric fence power supply, torn up all our underground cabling, chewed it to shreds and broken the electric fence in two places.

Mid-morning we went to Jesse’s pools for a picnic. As we got there about 60 elephants were drinking and another large herd was waiting to come through. We went to the usual spot and literally as we got there the herd started moving off in our direction. We sat quietly in the car watching as the various herd paraded close past us and through the water. The children were well behaved, even they appreciated the spectacular sight. The elephants were very relaxed and meandered through, dusting and playing and it was wonderful to see. We spotted the baby with no trunk or tail who Brad had previously filmed. He must have been attacked by lions and then rescued when he was a tiny baby. He now looks to be about a year old and his trunk has healed, but is very short. He can only eat by grazing on the grass with his mouth, which is probably not sustainable in the long run because a) he will eventually develop tusks and b) he is a boy so will invariably have to leave the matriarchal herd and be solitary. It is debatable whether bulls will look after him the way the females would.

On our usual route past the plover’s nest, the eggs of which we had so diligently protected from errant drivers by placing a log between them and the road, had hatched. We drove past and saw 2 tiny bundles in the nest. The one looked like a newly hatched plover and was doing all the things a newly hatched plover does, but the other was more like a bundle of damp feathers and looked as if it was breathing its last.

We attempted a full moon shot – tried to get a full moon and heat haze but moon was too pale and heat haze didn’t really work. We tried to create one by lighting a fire in a tin underneath the lens. Humphry was tasked with this, and it was quite a serious task as Moremi is bone dry and any carelessness could result in the whole place going up in flames. Thankfully it didn’t happen.

That night Frannette, Karen and I watched Sex and the City wrapped up in blankets on the Lamu bed while the boys pretended to work in the office tent. Pricka and Legae (who doesn’t speak any English) started watching but gave up, shaking their heads, about a third of the way through the film.

4 June (Thurs)

Last night the lions wreaked havoc in camp and terrified the majority of the crew. At precisely midnight the 5 lionesses announced their presence with a chorus of roaring, thereby ensuring that everyone in the camp was awake and listening. They then proceeded to pad around, occasionally rustling past a tent or sniffing audibly centimetres from ones head. The 5 sub-adults were not quite as considerate. This was far to good an opportunity to pass up, and while the lionesses were relatively well behaved, the youngsters spent their time investigating what there was to play with. The first thing in their path was the power box for the electric fence, which sits under some solar panels. They spent a few minutes chewing this before deciding to make off with it, in the process ripping all the wiring out the ground and disabling the fence. In so doing, one of them got a shock, which persuaded them all to move on to the next thing. That thing was Graham and Penny’s tent. A loud bang indicated that they had knocked over the water bucket outside the tent after which they broke the perimeter fence around the office, store and living areas. Clearly they were having great fun.

By now Keita was awake and in her fuzzy, 2 year old way, was trying to hum herself back to sleep. Every time she did this she got a sharp elbow in the ribs from either Brad or I. We were both very aware that the curious cubs would investigate this unusual sound. After 3 pokes in the ribs she looked like she was about to cry. Anyone who knows anything about lions knows that a crying baby (of any type) immediately attracts their attention and their predator instinct comes to the fore. We had no urge to pique the curiosity of the lionesses, nor the two large males who were invariably lurking somewhere on the periphery, but thankfully she fell asleep (with a pillow over her face) without creating a scene.

After a while, loud roaring by the males indicated that they were moving off northwards, much to everyone’s relief. Finally everyone was able to settle down and get some sleep.

 

29 May (Fri) – 31 May (Sun)

We went to Maun this weekend as a standard supply run and to get Ozzy to a vet. We felt that if there was something we could do to help him then we should do it now, rather than leave him to suffer for the rest of his life. The trip got off to a bad start when Rio was feeling very car-sick so we had to stop. A while later he threw up in the car and on himself. A while after that I realized that I had lost my bracelet when we stopped the first time, and we figured it was worth going back for it, which we did to no avail. After that Keita screamed for about 30 minutes and refused to go to sleep. Thankfully that was the end of the drama though and the trip actually panned out ok. We were expecting the worst because we were smuggling Ozzy out to take him to the vet, but he got through the gate and the vet fence undiscovered and he arrived in Maun not much the worse for wear.

Rob the Vet diagnosed that he indeed had 2 broken legs, the left which had healed already and the right, which had broken in 2 places, he strapped. He also filed his beak. The logic is that perhaps if we keep filing it, it will grow back straight. This was quite upsetting for the little bird.