Hundreds of penguins stranded on cliff earlier than wonderful factor occurs | UK | News | EUROtoday

Bertie Gregory might scarcely consider his eyes. While making his fascinating new collection, Secrets of the Penguins, the British Emmy and BAFTA award-winning cinematographer witnessed a fully astonishing instance of animal behaviour. In the method, he grew to become the primary individual ever to seize it on movie.

Bertie was monitoring a colony of tons of of younger emperor penguins in probably the most hostile situations this planet has to supply. The director was braving phenomenally difficult temperatures of -54°C. It was so freezing, sheets of ice had fashioned on the penguins’ coats.

The director had been filming the chicks for a lot of weeks as they trekked throughout the bitterly inhospitable Ekström Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the coldest place on earth. They had been heading in direction of the Southern Ocean to take their first swim and switch into grownup penguins.

What occurred subsequent, although, was totally breathtaking. The director, 31, says that it was undoubtedly, “Not in the script. Penguins famously don’t read the script. It’s very annoying, actually! They go, ‘I’m not going to do that, but I’m going to do something even more crazy instead!’”

Talking completely to the Daily Express, Bertie continues: “Normally young penguins take their first swim by jumping off the sea ice, which is a one or two-foot-high drop, and that was what we planned to film. [But] one group of several 100 chicks had taken a wrong turn on their way to the ocean and found themselves at the top of this enormous, 50-foot-high ice cliff.”

Unsurprisingly, the stranded younger penguins froze on the cliff’s edge. This unexpected state of affairs was clearly terrifying, however they took the plunge into the unknown anyway.

“What’s crazy is these penguins haven’t swum before,” Bertie says. “This is the first time they’ve even seen the sea, and there are no adults showing them the way. That’s why they took the wrong turn.

“It’s like taking your kids for their first swimming lesson, and you’re told that the instructor has not turned up today, and they’re not starting in the shallow end – they have got to jump off the Olympic diving board. But that’s exactly what these chicks did. Absolutely bonkers!”

What drove the birds to take such a death-defying leap of religion, then? “Penguins forge these bonds of friendships, so as soon as one jumped, the rest of them must have thought, ‘Oh yeah, Barry survived. We can do it too.’”

Bertie, who has beforehand shot stunning wildlife movies Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story, Planet Earth III, Frozen Planet II and Seven Worlds, One Planet, was mightily impressed by the chicks’ sheer fearlessness.

“Some of them jumped off very gracefully – a 10 out of 10 judge score from the Olympic diving judges. But some of them got zero points for style. They just fell over backwards,” he says.

“What was going through my brain at the time? This had never been filmed before, so I didn’t know if the chicks could survive a fall from that height. We’d watched these chicks grow up, and I was definitely emotionally attached to them. And so, it was initially not a very enjoyable experience.”

But as he watched by a lens, his coronary heart in his mouth, one thing unbelievable occurred.

“I realized they had landed safely in the water. To me, the coolest part was not when they jumped; the coolest part was a few moments later when they popped back up to the surface having made an enormous splash.

“Penguins instinctively know how to swim. So all of a sudden, when they hit the water, this switch just went off. They went from being a flappy mess to, ‘Oh, hang on, I am designed to be one of the world’s greatest free divers.’”

Almost instantly afterwards, they had been holding their breath and diving down. “Emperor penguins dive deeper than any other bird. They can go down to 500 metres, and hold their breath for 20 minutes,” provides Bertie. “It was an amazing moment to witness. I thought, ‘Wow, what a secret we’ve managed to capture!’”

This gorgeous second isn’t the one world first filmed by Bertie and his staff. His collection uncovers many secret penguin behaviours which have by no means been caught on digital camera earlier than.

We might imagine we all know all about these broadly beloved birds – there have, in any case, been many collection about them earlier than. But Secrets of the Penguins, whose government producer is Academy Award-winning director James Cameron, reveals there’s way more to those cute creatures than we ever imagined.

Another extraordinary behaviour filmed for the primary time ever within the documentary is a second of nice tenderness between a few bonded grownup emperor penguins. Having courted by mimicking one another’s actions in probably the most touching method, the pair put together to take care of the one egg they are going to produce annually.

Remarkably, in emperor penguin society, it’s the fathers who incubate the egg till it hatches. If the egg spends greater than 60 seconds on the ice, the chick inside will die. So its father should take the egg from its mom and hold it off the ice in a featherless patch between its legs referred to as a brood pouch.

Bertie’s staff shot a pair practising the handover of the egg from mom to father with a snowball. It is a never-before-seen sequence assured to make the hairs on the again of your neck stand on finish.

The selflessness of the daddy after he receives the (actual) egg is outstanding. As he’s battered by the 120 mile an hour winds, he forgoes meals as he sits on the egg for 2 months whereas the mom regains her power by searching at sea.

At the identical time, in an act of astounding cooperation, 5,000 fathers huddle collectively to insulate themselves and shield their eggs. Bertie calls it “one of nature’s great spectacles.”The director shot one other excellent sequence for Secrets of the Penguins within the Galapagos Islands.

“Galapagos penguins have basically learned that, rather than hunting for themselves, they can get a much easier meal if they just follow big brown pelicans around.

“The pelicans will dive into the water and grab a huge mouthful of fish. But while they sieve the fish out of the water, they are stuck and can’t fly away,” he says. “These tiny little birds come zooming over to this massive pelican and start stealing the fish out of the side of its beak. I loved watching these sassy little creatures mugging a pelican!”

Drawing on the experience of 70 scientists and wildlife filmmakers, Secrets of the Penguins was a gargantuan enterprise. It was shot over a interval of two years, in such various locations as Cape Town, Namibia, and South Georgia, in addition to Antarctica and the Galapagos.

The three-part collection, which is offered on Disney+ and can air on Nat Geographic Wild on Sunday at 9pm, was typically exceedingly exhausting to make. Bertie spent 274 gruelling days taking pictures within the Antarctic.

One shocking second stood out the hardest. “I went 51 days without a shower because with the tent I had the only way of having a shower was a bucket outside, and I just couldn’t face being any more cold than I already was,” he laughs. “Fortunately, there’s less bacteria in Antarctica than there is in the UK, so I didn’t smell bad until I got home!”

Secrets of the Penguins faucets into our ardour for these innately charismatic birds. “They look like they have little tuxedos on, and they’re hilarious to be around. They’re comical and clumsy, and they’re always tripping over and falling on their faces,” smiles Bertie.

He believes we heat to those creatures within the coldest location on the planet due to their very human capability for friendship.

“They have these incredible bonds, not just between males and females, but between males. But the bond I love most is between the chicks,” he says. “When the chicks are five months old, they’re abandoned by their parents, and you think they would be alone, but they’re not. They’ve got each other, and they form these awesome little friendships.

“Just like human friends, they gain confidence from each other, and they overcome obstacles together. As soon as one of them figures out how to do something, the rest of them copy it. It’s wonderful to watch.”

In the collection, a tiny deserted chick is shielded from the icy wind by a phalanx of his friends. The filmmaker says: “His parents might have gone, but his friends are standing by him. You can’t help but get attached to these birds. They’re so cute and you really get to know them as individuals.”

Secrets of the Penguins exhibits us many new and really shocking points of their lives. “The takeaway is that I hope people enjoy the magic of the penguin,” Bertie observes. “I thought I knew penguins coming into this project. But I was so wrong.

That is clearly why he is able to put up with filming for so long in such exceptionally harsh conditions.

“Exactly,” Bertie laughs. “Showers – who needs them?”

All three episodes of Secrets of the Penguins can be found now on Disney+ and can air on Nat Geo Wild on Sunday at 9pm.