#wildlifefilming

Waiting for the birth of a little one is perhaps the most exciting, and indeed nerve-wracking time of any man’s life. It can be, and in most cases is, a happy occasion - but it can also be stressful, and one thing I can say with absolute certainty, is that not knowing exactly when your little bundle of joy will arrive only serves to add to this stress.

Now I accept that with any normal pregnancy there is some degree of the unknown. Nervous anticipation noticeably increases as the due date nears, and then explodes exponentially when that date almost inevitably passes by with no sign of the new arrival. Knowing that your life could change at any given moment, forever and beyond all recognition, does add a certain frisson of excitement to the daily grind - but what happens if you don’t know when the baby you’re so eagerly anticipating is due? And more to the point, what happens when you don’t know if the expectant mother is even expecting? That’s the problem currently faced by the BBC’s Planet Earth II “Deserts” team…

Opening a film on the world’s deserts with the birth of a baby elephant seemed like such a good idea at the time. There’s something very symbolic about one of the world’s thirstiest animals being born from a watery womb into the driest arena on Earth - plus let’s face it, when tasked with making a film for a BBC1 audience, you can’t go far wrong by opening with a baby elephant tottering around on wobbly legs.

It seemed straight forward enough - we’re so used to seeing elephants on television that it shouldn’t be hard to get a birth, right? Well, as it turns out, wrong. Now I’ve never been much cop at the research side of my job, but even I found out pretty quickly that filming an elephant birth is tricky at the best of times, let alone in the desert. A quick ring round some of the world’s foremost elephant scientists, and wildlife television legend Martyn Colbeck who’s made a career of filming elephants (and has perhaps seen more births than anyone else alive - a grand total of three) revealed that it is perhaps one of the hardest things to film in natural history.

First, it is very difficult to know when a female is pregnant without either an in-depth internal examination (which wild elephants tend to object to), or a regular and detailed chemical analysis of their excrement to monitor hormone levels (which I tend to object to). The second problem is that even if you can be 100% certain that a female is pregnant, you won’t have any idea when she’ll be due - and with a gestation period of two years, that’s one hell of a filming window. Even if you know the exact date of conception (for which you’d either have to be very lucky or weirdly obsessed) and extrapolate from there, the due date’s not exactly set in stone. Problem number three is that even if you get lucky and are there at the exact moment the calf pops out, elephants are very secretive when the moment actually happens - they almost always do it at night, in dense cover, either away from the rest of the herd or surrounded by them. The most likely result would therefore be (at best) some black and white nighttime images of something glimpsed between a tangle of vegetation, or a throng of tree trunk sized legs. Plus, let’s face it, how many people actually want to see an elephant’s waters break?

A newborn calf just days old however, now that is cute. People have seen small elephants before - but one just two or three days old, still tripping over its trunk and forming the all-important bonds with its mother that will help it survive in the harsh, dry world it has just been born into? Now that’s something I want to see.

So that’s where we are now - waiting expectantly for a birth that we don’t even know is coming. Luckily we’re in regular touch with the NGO “Elephant Human Relations Aid” that’s based in Namibia and works closely with elephants, local communities, and the Namibian government to reduce human/elephant conflicts in an ever-crowded world. They have teams that monitor several herds in the Ugab region of the country day in, day out, and so if a baby is born, they’ll be the first to know about it. Thankfully in this case the age-old philosophical question “if an elephant gives birth in the desert and no one’s there to see it, does it make a mess?” doesn’t apply.

We’re still going to have our work cut out for us. Herds of desert elephants contain far fewer individuals compared to herds found elsewhere in Africa, so there will be fewer potential opportunities for us. However with 18 months left on our filming window, and with the expert help of the dedicated EHRA researchers, I feel we’ve got as good a chance as any.

How quickly we can scramble a crew out to film a calf that’s just been born is a different matter… It takes time to secure kit, book flights, obtain visas and permits, and of course you can’t exactly book a cameraman on retainer for a year and a half on the off-chance you might need them at the drop of a hat. So that’s now our challenge - getting a team out to location to film a calf in its first two or three days of life, before it loses that real newborn look. It won’t be easy, but I hope we’ll be able to do it.