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Guillemots dive under the water in the Canadian Arctic – Doug Allan\/Getty Images<\/p>\nThis interview was originally published in the October 2019 issue of BBC Wildlife.<\/p>\n
In a career spanning four decades, Doug Allan made a name as one of the world\u2019s top wildlife camera operators, with credits on many of the BBC Natural History Unit\u2019s series.<\/p>\n
He was best known for filming in extreme environments, including in polar regions, mountains and underwater.<\/p>\n
From polar bears and walruses to emperor penguins, gorillas and great white sharks, his work won five BAFTAs, not to mention several Emmys.<\/p>\n
In the words of his old collaborator and friend David Attenborough: \u201cWildlife cameramen don\u2019t come much more special than Doug.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doug was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. His assignments were usually about three to six weeks, or longer in remote locations such as the Antarctic. Some years, he spent as much as 230 days away filming. In an interview from 2019, BBC Wildlife features editor Ben Hoare caught up with him between shoots in Bristol.<\/p>\n
Guillemots dive under the water in the Canadian Arctic – Doug Allan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
What was the most satisfying shoot?<\/p>\n
For Planet Earth [2006], polar fixer Jason Roberts and I went to film polar bears emerging from their den in February and March. I\u2019d done that before but, for this series, we were granted permission to go to a fabulous place called Kong Karls Land, a protected area 200km east of Svalbard.<\/p>\n
The BBC had been trying for years to persuade the Norwegian authorities to allow a visit, ever since two scientists, based in the Bogen Valley, watched 28 polar bear dens emerging in one season. That\u2019s a really high density.<\/p>\n
The Norwegian authorities finally said: \u201cOK, you can go, but only two people, only two helicopter flights \u2013 in and out \u2013 so you\u2019re going to have to take everything you need in one trip. And no snow machines.\u201d<\/p>\n
My initial reaction was, what a pain that\u2019s going to be, but it ended up being the greatest experience, because when you\u2019re forced to walk, you really become immersed in the environment.<\/p>\n
You learn to \u2018read\u2019 the snow. If you do it right, it\u2019s like walking on a pavement, but if you don\u2019t, you end up to your knees in \u2018softies\u2019.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also the possibility of meeting a polar bear\u2026<\/p>\n
We were staying in a cabin and had regular visits from polar bears, because it was located where the sea ice meets the land ice.<\/p>\n
All along the shoreline there are cracks, which the seals use to stick their heads up to breathe, and the polar bears know that.<\/p>\n
Any bear hunting within a few miles downwind is going to smell you and come looking, so we got frequent visitors to our cabin. It was magical.<\/p>\n
Just the bears and us \u2013 totally simple. There are few chances of a shoot like that nowadays. The style of filming today is much more cinematic, with more sophisticated equipment.<\/p>\n
And your most frustrating shoot?<\/p>\n
Looking for snow leopards for Planet Earth. I had already done a six-week shoot for an independent film about snow leopards.<\/p>\n
We had discovered a rock where the leopards scent-marked, and we had success with some remote-camera footage. But, to me, that\u2019s not the same as seeing it for real.<\/p>\n
So, Planet Earth came up with a share of the costs to let me try again. This time I spent much of my five weeks in a hide, peering at a path that wound over the mountainside, hoping a leopard would use it.<\/p>\n
In all that time, I only had one snow leopard visible for one hour. And it was asleep for 50 minutes of that! Hardly BAFTA-winning stuff!<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the Planet Earth researchers had found another location in Pakistan. Cameraman Mark Smith and assistant producer Jeff Wilson went to try there.<\/p>\n
After three weeks, they had some excellent material and were scheduled to fly home. But, due to bad weather, their plane was cancelled.<\/p>\n
Rather than kill time at the airport, they went back up to the valley. And that\u2019s when Mark filmed the full snow leopard hunt with the slips and final jump into the river \u2013 the classic sequence that everyone knows and still talks about.<\/p>\n
Is patience the greatest virtue of a wildlife film-maker?<\/p>\n
People always say to me: \u201cYou must be very patient.\u201d I reply: \u201cFact is, I\u2019m being paid to be patient!\u201d<\/p>\n
Like anyone, I don\u2019t like waiting for delayed buses or trains. When it comes to animals, however, patience comes easily. I\u2019m sure David Attenborough would say the same.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a difference between patience and tenacity. Patience is a kind of passive thing, whereas tenacity is where you\u2019re always asking yourself: \u201cCan I do more? Can I get up earlier? Is there a better place to be?\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though it\u2019s a rubbish day and raining, you are going to go out and sit there. If the weather clears, you\u2019ll be in position. You won\u2019t film anything from inside your tent or cabin.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s been your hairiest moment?<\/p>\n
I was snorkelling off the ice-edge up at Baffin Island in 1996. I had just finished taking some stills of guillemots diving. I was treading water, looking around for where the birds might pop up, when something grabbed me. Tight.<\/p>\n
It was like somebody had wrapped their arms around my thighs. I looked down and saw the top of a walrus\u2019s head under my right arm.<\/p>\n
I pushed hard, hit it on the head and, luckily, it let go. It was a youngster and thought I was a sleeping seal.<\/p>\n
Walrus usually feed on mussels and clams on the seabed \u2013 they waft their flippers to sweep away the mud, then put their lips down and suck the flesh out. But, occasionally, they go looking for seals.<\/p>\n
And the easiest seal to catch \u2013 polar bears take advantage of this as well \u2013 is a seal sleeping at the surface. A seal swimming in open water is too fast for a polar bear or a walrus.<\/p>\n
But when seals go to sleep, they just bob up and down like bottles. Now a walrus slips underwater and swims so it\u2019s below the seal, which is silhouetted against the sky. A perfect target.<\/p>\n
My Inuit friends explained in more detail how walrus kill the seal. They grab it higher up the body, pin its flippers to its sides, so it can\u2019t swim away, then bend over and suck the seal\u2019s brains out.<\/p>\n
Walrus can really suck. A walrus in an aquarium in the Netherlands had no problem sucking the big plug out of the bottom of its pool.<\/p>\n
You know how people in Africa are scared of hippos in the water? Well, walrus are the Arctic equivalent. I\u2019ve never met a good-tempered walrus. They\u2019re always grumpy!<\/p>\n
And the funniest?<\/p>\n
Normally on a shoot, we try to get back to civilisation with a few hours to spare, maybe have a shower, and pack the kit properly before the flight. But we once got held up by a blizzard in Svalbard and I just had to chuck everything together.<\/p>\n
Now, one of the other things you miss when you\u2019re on a cold shoot is a comfortable toilet. So, I made my way through the airport restaurant to find one\u2026 and fell asleep on it!<\/p>\n
I woke up to an announcement in Norwegian, which sounded like the last call for my flight. But when I went to open the door to the concourse, it was firmly locked.<\/p>\n
I began pulling at the door, and started banging and shouting. Then I turned around to see four faces looking in. I\u2019d gone the wrong way and had been trying to kick my way into a broom cupboard!<\/p>\n
Every time I returned to Svalbard, there always seemed to be somebody at the airport who\u2019d point and giggle, remembering the madman making all this noise in the toilet.<\/p>\n
How has wildlife filming changed over the years?<\/p>\n
One of the standard bits of kit now is the Shotover, a stabilisation system that enables you to use a very long lens from a helicopter, boat or moving vehicle.<\/p>\n
You can be in a Land Rover and track alongside African hunting dogs when they\u2019re at full pelt, and the Shotover will give you a steady image.<\/p>\n
While I\u2019m familiar with new equipment, it\u2019s not my strength. What I enjoy using are my field skills, my feel for the animals, and figuring out how to do things on my own for the first time.<\/p>\n
Partly because of health and safety considerations, and partly because the kind of image that you\u2019re expected to bring back is just different, the crews these days are bigger.<\/p>\n
Back in 1994, I filmed great white sharks breaching to take their prey. With film, there was no way you could let the camera run, roll after roll, getting nothing.<\/p>\n
So, we had to be ready and waiting and as soon as we saw a shark burst out, we\u2019d press the trigger. But your reaction times always meant that you missed the instant that the shark actually came out of the water.<\/p>\n
Now, with digital cameras, there is cache recording. Your camera is constantly recording and then overwriting, so it never misses anything. You can set the camera to \u201810-second pre-record\u2019, wait until you see a shark jump, then press record and it will keep the previous 10 seconds of footage.<\/p>\n
You have the entire breach, from the moment the shark\u2019s nose emerges until it splashes down.<\/p>\n
What has been your most life-changing encounter?<\/p>\n
One of the first shoots I did was with narwhals for Trials of Life [1990] \u2013 David Attenborough\u2019s third big series. We went to this remote location at Baffin Island in August, when there was open water.<\/p>\n
From the shore, I could see the narwhal gathering every afternoon about a mile offshore \u2013 too far to swim. So, I borrowed a kayak and paddled out to this spot, where I managed to ease myself out of the seat and slip into the water.<\/p>\n
With the kayak tied onto me with a length of rope, I could drift around on the surface, and hopefully the narwhal would come close enough to film.<\/p>\n
These narwhal were females \u2013 I didn\u2019t know at the time, but they are friendlier than males. On the third day, this mother came up with her little calf and became really, really friendly with me.<\/p>\n
She swam in close, I dived underwater and she came down with me.<\/p>\n
When I ran out of film \u2013 you only had 10 minutes in those days \u2013 I eased myself back into the kayak and started paddling back to shore. And she was right there alongside me \u2013 so close, I had to lean out with the paddle to make the stroke properly. She followed me all the way back to shore.<\/p>\n
It was my first realisation that there were wild animals willing to be friends with you, that wanted to be curious about you. That was my first experience of it, with an animal that was pretty rare.<\/p>\n
People had said how difficult it was to get close to narwhal, and my experience was completely different.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-90073042-scaled.jpg\")
Arctic fox on the sea ice in Svalbard – Doug Allan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
What have you always wanted to film but haven\u2019t?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m more conscious these days about the impact of flying and about my own carbon footprint. Should we, the wildlife film-makers, have addressed climate change much earlier? We\u2019ve all been watching it happen.<\/p>\n
So, I would like to make a film about climate breakdown in the poles. I\u2019ve seen it first-hand \u2013 you see how less predictable the ice is, you see how the ice is breaking up early in summer, being less reliable.<\/p>\n
Spring is arriving sooner. Rain is coming when there used to be snow. Fewer polar bear cubs are being produced, and more cubs are dying when they\u2019re young because they\u2019re lighter when they come out of the den, so they don\u2019t survive as well for the first six months.<\/p>\n
The Arctic is ice \u2013 basically a frozen ocean surrounded by land. And the amount of ice is changing dramatically. I could show you graph after graph\u2026 it used to be about 8m thick on average in winter, now it\u2019s about 5m.<\/p>\n
The ice used to cover seven million square kilometres in summer, now it\u2019s between four and five million. You can\u2019t visit those regions for over 40 years and not be scared about what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n
I fear we\u2019ve lost the battle with the Arctic. It is going to be a radically different ecosystem in five to ten years\u2019 time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This interview was originally published in the October 2019 issue of BBC Wildlife. In a career spanning four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-594225","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}