Wildscreen Winners at DC Environmental Film Festival!

If you’re in DC this week, we’ve got a treat for you! Three of our Panda Award winning films will be screening on the 24th March, read on to see what’s in store…

Hippo: Nature’s Wild Feast was awarded the Disneynature Innovation Award at Wildscreen 2012 for its fascinating new way of exploring the less appealing aspects of life and nature in the African bush! We caught up with the shows producer, Sarah Peat from Tigress Productions, to get the lowdown on how you go about spending time with a 1 tonne hippo carcass…

We arrive in Zambia’s South Luangwa Valley in October at the peak of the dry season. The valley is a haven for wildlife. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, crocodiles, baboons, vultures and many other species congregate near the river – one of the only sources of water in an otherwise arid habitat.

October in this valley is known as suicide month for its crushing heat. It’s 40 degrees Celsius by late morning with ground temperatures reaching 60 degrees. Everything is dictated by heat. The dead hippo lies bloating in the sun. We have to work quickly to set up and start filming, otherwise there’s a very real threat that the carcass will explode as the heat expands gases trapped inside.

It takes three days to set up our kit. We dig holes into the riverbank to house our remote cameras, trenches are hacked out of the hard dry earth to bury camera cables and keep them safe from hyenas’ jaws. We move two tons of camera and sound kit between the river bank and the studio tent.

We start filming late afternoon on the third set-up day. The images from the river bank are streamed live to our website in the UK. As the sun goes down, we’re just starting to see animals approaching the site when the cameras freeze.  We have no control over them from the studio tent. Its dusk, a time when many animals become active and the cables and kit we need to look at are out at the edge of the river bank. Our two technicians, accompanied by armed scouts, identify the problem. A key piece of kit has malfunctioned. Fortunately, we have a replacement, which is rigged up in the dark. After a tense hour, we’re back up and running.

It’s a nail biting few days while we wait to see whether any carnivore strong enough to breach the hippo’s thick skin will arrive at the scene, hungry enough to do so. By now, the skin on the carcass is stretch taught with bloating; the smell is indescribable.

But when the action does kick off, it’s astounding.  When a clan of hyenas finally breach the carcass, Africa’s astounding food chain kicks into action. I’m torn between watching the studio tent screens as armies of crocodiles invade the carcass site and watching the reactions of our animal experts and wildlife guides and scouts. They have spent years observing wildlife but they’ve never witnessed anything like the action our cameras are capturing. Their exhilaration is palpable.

The price of working in this location at this extraordinary time of year is the heat. It takes its toll on both crew and kit. Our cameras start shutting down as temperatures peak at noon. The satellite transmitting our live feed struggles too. We decide to stop filming for 2 hours in the worst of the heat to give the kit a rest. The carcass should be safe because even animals avoid this searing heat, seeking shade and resting until everything cools down in late afternoon.

It takes just over a week for the carnivores and scavengers of South Luangwa to convert a 1 tonne hippo into little more than dried hide, stomach compost and a few large bones. In the coming days, the rains will arrive and transform this landscape, bringing a food bonanza in the form of grasses and leaves to the valley’s herbivores. The perfectly honed food chain continues.

You can catch Hippos: Nature’s Wild Feast at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital on the 24th March, and watch a trailer of it here.