How Africa: Earth’s Wild Home Captured Behavior Never Filmed Before

When my wife was in college, one of her classes had students watch a live webcam pointed at a watering hole in Africa and report anything interesting that happened. She watched it for days. Animals came, drank, and left. Mostly nothing happened, and that’s the part of wildlife filmmaking most of us never see.

I had that in mind when I talked with Lillian Todd-Jones, a natural history assistant producer and field director who worked on National Geographic’s new seven-part series, Africa: Earth’s Wild Home. Her credits include the BBC’s Mammals and Netflix’s Night on Earth, and she tends to chase stories that are hard to film. When I asked why, she said each of those stories is real. It’s what an animal actually has to do to survive, and seeing that with her own eyes is a privilege.

Setting Up in a Cave Full of Bats

One of the new things in this series is a dwarf crocodile hunting bats in a cave, in complete darkness. National Geographic says the behavior has never been filmed before. The first step, Todd-Jones told me, was working with Matt Shirley, a scientist who knows these caves and these crocodiles from his own research.

Shirley told the crew what the cave was like, what gear they’d need to mount cameras on the walls, and—most important—that they shouldn’t disturb the bats. So the team went in after sunset, while the bats were out, wearing head lamps. They spent eight hours rigging six cameras on remote hot heads, each with a little umbrella over it to keep bat droppings out. Then they ran cables to a small shack above ground in the jungle and ran everything from there.

After that, they stayed out. If a camera had a problem, they lived with it, because walking back in would mean “the animals’ behavior being set back to day one,” she said. It had taken a few days for the crocodiles to settle into the filming area, and nobody wanted to restart that clock. The lighting was all infrared, so the adapted cameras and the crew could see what was going on while the cave stayed pitch black to the crocodiles.

I’ve been in a few bat caves myself, so I asked what it was like in there. She said every surface glittered with the eyes of insects, mice, and bats once a head lamp hit it. Dripping water sounded strangely loud, but echoes made it hard to hear each other. It was hot and it stank, and she said it was worth it anyway because it felt like going somewhere people don’t normally get to go.

Waiting Around the Clock

The crew knew crocodiles lived in the cave and that the cave was full of bats, so the crocodiles had to be eating something. Proving it on camera took a while. The team worked in shifts so someone was watching the monitors 24 hours a day, ready to hit record.

The patience and dedication necessary to capture these moments are lost on most viewers. So many Nat Geo series include some never-before-filmed moment that it starts to feel routine. It reminds me of the line usually credited to Thomas Jefferson about being a great believer in luck and finding that the harder he works, the more of it he has. A couple of minutes of footage sits on top of months of planning and weeks of watching nothing happen.

Todd-Jones agreed. Part of the job is talking to scientists and learning the place, down to the weather patterns and when the cave floods. Past a certain point, she said, it’s luck, and “your trigger finger has to be ready over that record button.”

What the Cameras Can and Can’t Do Yet

Infrared filming has been around for a while. What’s different now, according to Todd-Jones, is control and image quality. The remote heads let the crew follow the action and pull focus from far away, and higher resolution makes the shots beautiful as well as useful. What she’d still like is slow-motion cameras that work better in low light.

I also asked what happens to footage like this once it captures something science hasn’t documented. Shirley was on location for the shoot, and his research is ongoing. Todd-Jones said film crews often get more time with animals than researchers do, and better cameras than most research budgets cover. So they share footage and what they learned, and that gets folded back into the research.

The Rest of the Series

The crocodiles are one story out of many. According to National Geographic, the series was filmed over almost four years in nearly 30 countries. Other firsts the network points to include golden wolves hunting pelicans roughly three times their size and hyenas in the Congo hunting elephants at night. There’s also a rare wild black panther, chimpanzees using tools to fish for algae, and tortoises that hunt and eat meat. It’s the first piece of a multiyear franchise meant to cover the planet one continent at a time.

Near the end of our conversation, Todd-Jones put the waiting simply. “Luck favors the prepared, but you can’t force these things,” she said.

Where to Watch

Africa: Earth’s Wild Home premieres Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. EDT on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. When you get to the crocodiles in the cave, think about the shack in the jungle and the people taking turns at the monitors so they wouldn’t miss it.