A clan of chimpanzees drowsed in the fading light, furry chests rising and falling, fingers trailing carelessly through the dusk. The footage in Mammals was so intimate, it was as though we were part of the family. It is hard to see how camera technology will ever develop further than this. Will we soon be able to monitor the animals’ very thoughts?
It is such advances in filming equipment and technique that, 20 years on from The Life of Mammals, demanded the BBC Natural History Unit revisits an animal group that has evolved to master almost every habitat on our planet. That, and, as narrator Sir David Attenborough worded it, “the challenges they face in a world dominated by the most successful mammal of all: us”.
Even given cinematography’s extraordinary progress, it was a bold choice to open the six-part series with an episode focusing on what mammals do in the dark. But, as we should expect by now, Attenborough and the BBC team knew exactly what they were doing.
Indeed, the contrast between day and night heightened the storytelling. We witnessed the leopard, by day a fluffy pussy cat, but as darkness falls, a hot streak of pure nightmare, flowing from branch to branch as it stalked a sleeping baboon baby and its mother.
Sometimes we saw little but the glow of predators’ eyes – the laughing hyenas, their seemingly infinite numbers slowly but inevitably bringing a buffalo to its knees. Heat-seeking cameras highlighted the sheer vulnerability of the impalas, burning bright and lonely in the black void full of animals that would like to eat them. And sometimes, we watched the dusk caress Saharan sand dunes, animals becoming silhouettes as the stars wheeled overhead. It was television to stir even the most silted of souls.
The action moved underground, to an Etruscan shrew taking her babies on their first walk. They held each other’s tails, in a kind of nose-to-bum conga. By this point I thought my heart couldn’t melt any more. But then I saw the the Fennec fox, which appeared to be an AI mash-up of a dog, a hare and a kitten, with the cute dial turned up to 11.
The relish with which Attenborough described his subjects was palpable, from his delighted emphasis on the “hairy” armadillo to the exotic lilt he afforded the word “gerbil”. The stories may have been epic, but the success of their telling was all in the details: bats that use their claws, “for back scratching and ear picking”, we learned.
The “making of” feature at the end is always revealing in these films, anchoring all this spectacle in our world. In this episode we met series producer and director Stuart Armstrong, who said, a little wearily, of filming Fennec foxes: “Something will disappear so quickly behind a dune. And then you add the challenge of doing it in the dark…”
All was going unexpectedly well for the film crew, until the foxes vanished. Then they found other humans who had been camping close by, leaving cigarette butts, litter – and two Fennec fox corpses. Yes, we humans might be the “most successful” mammals. But at what cost?
But if this programme was both a warning and a lament over our impact on the animal kingdom, it never tipped into despair. Which is why my abiding memory is not of the pointless death, rather the sight of one and a half million bats emerging from beneath Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas. Against a backdrop of metal and steel, each animal was impossibly small against the blunt force of our civilisation.
Yet year after year, the bats take to the sky. Every flight is a warm-blooded speck of pure hope.
