What was your very favorite day of shooting the North America series?

My favorite day would have to be one where everything worked out as planned — or, even better, when things exceeded expectations! Naturally, there’s a lot of waiting around in this game — lots of patience needed — and plenty of occasions when things don’t go as planned. Animals, sadly, rarely read scripts.

Filming in Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica, our aim was to film the arribada, the mass synchronous nesting of olive ridley sea turtles. This duly happened but on the second day of the shoot — before the adults came on shore — we had a mass hatching of baby turtles from an arribada two months previously.

We had expected an emergence but the scale of the hatching was just amazing. Over three days we estimated over a million hatchling turtles emerged. Most of the hatchlings emerge at night, when they’re safer from predators, but a good hour after sunrise there were still tens of thousands of hatchlings making their way across the sand to the sea.

On the first morning, low tide happened at sunrise so they had further to go. Everywhere you looked there were little turtles moving in waves across the flat sands. This was a memorable sight on its own, but what made it even more of a spectacle were the predators that suddenly appeared to make the most of them.

There were frigate birds swooping down and snatching them both off the sand and in the water, iguanas taking them, vultures, crabs — we even filmed a large (3 meter) American crocodile snatching hatchlings as they tried to swim out to sea (this could have been a first in terms of filming — at least I haven’t seen any footage of this before).

It was like a scene from Saving Private Ryan. It was also a poignant scene (you can’t help wanting the hatchlings to make it to the sea safely) — but definitely nature at its most powerful and impressive.

BUY THE BOOK: North America: The World In One Continent