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“I’d rather bump into a tiger in a forest than an elephant,” says Gordon, 44, best known for his camerawork on Big Cat Diary, Spring watch and Planet Earth Live.
“Elephants are immensely powerful and some of them have had very bad experiences with people in the past, so they take out their vengeance on people that get in their way or they see as a threat. Elephants are one of the animals you have to be most afraid of.”
So he had to gather his courage to film the big beasts up close over six weeks in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park for one of two new uplifting documentaries, Gordon Buchanan: Elephant Family & Me.
Although he worked alongside an expert from The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Benjamin Kyalo, who the elephants knew and trusted, the team still had a few hair-raising moments during filming.
“We had a few cases when we had to dash back to the safety of a vehicle, when you’re taken unawares by the elephants,” recalls Gordon. “And there were breathtaking, heart-stopping moments of thinking you’re in mortal danger. On one occasion, four enormous elephants – huge male super-tuskers – were hiding in a bush down by a water hole and I was absolutely petrified the whole time they were there because I thought, ‘At any point they’re going to realise I’m metres away hiding in the bush with no protection.’ But they moved away and I was left elated with the magical experience.”
Gordon’s aim was to film an elephant family in order to showcase their struggle for survival in the face of widespread poaching and loss of habitat.
The largest-ever survey of African savanna elephants, the Great Elephant Census, released last summer, shows a catastrophic loss: just 352,271 remain in the 18 countries surveyed, down 30 per cent in just seven years. The smaller African forest elephant is also being poached mercilessly, its numbers down to less than 100,000.
Gordon decided to study a mother elephant, Wendi, and her new baby, Wiva, up close. “The issues and problems elephants face are best seen when they have a baby – you see them at their most vulnerable,” explains Gordon.
There was an added problem with this pairing – not only was Wendi, at 13, young to become a mum, but she was also an orphaned elephant and, as a result, had not picked up any mothering skills from her own mum.
“It didn’t come naturally to her,” reports Gordon. “If she were a human mum, I think the other mums would be quite critical of her! Before we arrived, Benjamin said that some other mums had tried to take Wiva away from Wendi – they were like elephant social services. They recognised she didn’t know what she was doing, but she managed to hang onto it.
“Ultimately, Wendi was supported by some other elephants and we see that it’s not down to one individual. The whole family did it together.”Gordon promises that the overall message of his elephants film will be positive, as befits a Christmas documentary. “There’s enough tragedy in elephants’ lives with poaching and habitat loss that this will be very joyful,” he says.
“It’s a celebration of all things that live in the snow and ice,” explains Gordon. “I have a huge amount of respect for those animals, great and small, that can do the impossible and live year round in one of the toughest environments on the planet.
You think of nature as being fragile, but the forces of nature are epic and can do amazing things, and to create species that survive in places we struggle in is amazing.”
The documentary mixes new footage with archive to bring us animal tales that surprised even an expert like Gordon. “For example, I thought I knew reindeer fairly well, but I didn’t know that they see in ultraviolet,” he explains.
“They’ll look at a snowy landscape and something like a white wolf will show up as a dark form. Their vision has adapted to see predators and food like lichen.”
He marvelled at how other animals have evolved, too. The body shape of arctic wolves – they have enormous feet like in-built snowshoes and a streamlined body with long legs and narrow shoulders – helps them to leap through deep snow.
And polar bears’ incredible vision, sense of smell and hearing mean they can hear rodents under snow and dive under to nab them.
Gordon’s yearlong – and brave – endeavours behind the camera mean that he’s delivering two gifts this Christmas: an intimate look into the lives of both elephants and polar animals in films that celebrate the wonder of our wildlife and at the same time champion conservation efforts, since polar animals are also under threat from climate change.
“The more we can engage with these creatures,” explains Gordon, “the more we care about them and the more inclined we are to help protect them.”