Were you or your crew ever in danger during filming?

People often ask this question and expect us to talk about dangerous encounters with wild animals, but this is rare. The animals we film are quite often dangerous, but our work involves reading animals — not putting oneself in a situation that could be hazardous. People who are killed or injured by animals end up that way because they don’t know what they’re doing. They walk up to a bull bison, for example. They wear inappropriate clothing around venomous animals. Etc., etc. This, of course, is not always the case, but more often that not.

However, having said that, I did have what could have been a very dangerous — and potentially fatal — encounter with a polar bear in Labrador!

During the first night of the shoot in a very remote part of Labrador, a polar bear tried to break into our cabin. At the time, we didn’t know it was a polar bear as no one had sighted one in this region for 20 years but, during the night, it launched itself at the door twice when we were all in the cabin.

The door held firm but it could have been very different if one of our team hadn’t fixed up the bolts on the door of the cabin on arrival. After it gave up with the cabin, it broke into the helicopter we’d arrived in, popped out two of the windows, broke the pilot’s seat, pulled some of the cushions out and leaned heavily against the back prop, breaking the chock holding it in place.

We also had some potentially dangerous encounters filming North America's extreme weather. A team filmed in the middle of hurricane Irene, one of the largest hurricanes to hit the eastern seaboard in a decade.

And we had some interesting — and mildly terrifying! — experiences filming tornadoes in the Midwest. During the filming we lost two windshields to hail and, twice, were caught in such heavy rain that we could barely see the front of our vehicle while we were driving. One super-cell we filmed killed several people and destroyed many buildings.

Another team filming glow worms — the least threatening animals around! — were almost caught up in a massive tornado that pretty much wiped out two small towns on either side of where they were staying.

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