GavinThurston

NO!

I once sat for 12 hours a day for 17 days to try and film Lace Monitor females returning to dig their newly hatched young from a termite mound in S.E. Australia!

I was once filming antelope fawns in southern Russia (then USSR) I was dropped off to get in the hide before first light and picked up after dusk - 15 hours or so. Bursting for a piss I couldn't leave the hide for fear of scaring off the antelope/fawn so I dug a hole in the sand and peed into it thinking it would soak away. Two hours later I was still stood with cramped legs astride of a crater full of piss that refused to drain away!

Generally we do not intervene in natural events. This is often harrowing to experience animal suffering. However the ethos is that if there wasn't a human there then the event would still happen. I have intervened on two occassions though: I was filming green turtle hatchlings on the north west coast of Australia, each nest produces around 80 hatchlings. However only a handful make it even to the sea before being eaten by gulls etc. After 6 days of filming, myself and the producer both got up and ran down the beach scooping up the hatchings in our T-shirts and took them down to the sea. Still the gulls managed to get a few but at least that clutch got a head start in life. There will be people out there who will condemn us for for even doing that.

The most amazing thing I witnessed looking through the camera viewfinder but didn't manage to capture was a Gorilla female feeding, she stopped to catch a butterfly in her hand and held it up briefly to her eye to see what it was. She then almost seemed to raise her eyebrows in recognition before releasing it and watching it fly away. As a cameraman there are many things I witness but fail to capture on video. If you impressed by what you see on TV there is way more out there to see and witness!