by Thinus Ferreira
Trying to catch over 80 different species on camera in 22 countries, across 6 continents, all trying to have sex, there's much more involved than just animal hanky-panky as the producers behind the new eye-popping, 5-episode nature documentary series The Mating Game on BBC Earth will tell you.
And of course Sir David Attenborough is the narrator, and of course you will see things and learn things that will bedazzled your eyes and bedazzled your mind as the series shares incredible details about the puffing, pluming, prodding and some of the incredible lengths animals go to to find a mate and to have sex.
A crew of 271, who spent 1 194 days on location and filming over 9 000 hours, captured intimate details in habitats from every corner of the
globe, showing 83 different mating strategies in the series.
From great expanses of grassland, to tangled jungles, deep ocean and freshwater each episode shows how an environment shapes animals' mating game, ranging from a violent game played by zebra
in the Serengeti as a stallion defends his mares in a herd of 30 000, to a clash between bullfrogs in South Africa.
TVwithThinus sat down with The Mating Game series producer Jeff Wilson and episode producer Joe Loncraine of Silverback Films.
It's obviously not mating season all year round everywhere around the world. And then there are times where multiple species are mating at the same time. How on earth do you tell and film various animals and have camera crews everywhere you wanted to try and follow animals?
Joe Loncraine: You pick the stories you are really keen to do and then you look and go, "Oh gosh, which of those are in July?" And we cannot film, even if we had 12 camera crews that could be in every different country, that.
Just from a production point of view that wouldn't work. Luckily, there are always good stories because of the nature of the world - you've got Northern Hemisphere, you've got Southern Hemisphere. You've got tropical regions. For some species, there is no mating season.
The chimpanzees you could film any time of year. You pick a few that could be done any time and that enables you to fit your jigsaw puzzle around it. But it is a big part of the initial 6 months before you pick up a camera, before you go anywhere, is working out how on earth we're going to divide our teams around the world.
While you're not filming continuously for 2 years, across the 5 episodes - between February 2019 and May 2021 - we had someone filming somewhere.
You're talking about dividing and picking, so once you've decided what species, I'm wondering - whether it's 8 or a thousand - how are you successful in choosing the specific, individual animal beforehand to follow, which might be the successful one in a mating game that fights off the competitors, woo a mate and get to mate?
Jeff Wilson: It's a very good question because part of the reason that our teams spend up to 8 or 9 weeks in the field is all about film craft - it's all about observation, mapping out which animals are most likely to show us the behaviour we would need, which ones are in the positions that we can film in.
There's an awful lot of failure that happens with wildlife filming.
The best wildlife filmmakers can overcome that failure and learn lessons from each one of those fails and move on and eventually succeed. It does take about 8 or 9 weeks to understand the behaviour of the animal well enough to be in the right place, at the right time.
Whilst we can design it as much as we want on paper, it's really all down to careful observation, biologists, and scientists and filmmakers all working together and actually just trying to figure out something that is completely serendipitous.
If you put yourself in the right place, at the right time, and you're patient and you observe, the natural world can always offer up magic - completely unplanned magic. We got things in The Mating Game that we never thought we were going to get.
Joe Loncraine: Like Jeff said, we're always trying to get the success stories because that gives us an extra element of the story that as you yourself pointed out, there is a lot of failures - a lot of males put the effort in and are not successful.
That's absolutely fine for our storytelling too because that's the reality of it. To show males doing an amazing dance, or risking life and limb in a competition and then not succeeding to mate - that is fine for us to show that as well. That is the reality.
We have many stories that end in failure despite all these efforts.
The argus pheasant in Borneo's rainforests displays and calls to the female and she just runs off in the end and he doesn't get lucky, and that's fine because human males experience that in our lives too - ask any teenage boy. Ha ha.
You captured the humpback whale - we've never seen what they really do. How do you even try to conceptualise the process of trying to film that in pre-production and to capture that in such difficult circumstances underwater?
Jeff Wilson: It's a multi-stage process. We spend around a year and a half in pre-planning and research and that in a large part is devoted to speaking to scientists and strategising on how to be in the right place at the right time.
The second part is that we also need to think of how we're going to film it.
The humpback whales is a classic example. You have up to 20 whales chasing a female at 10, 12 knots through open ocean. How on earth do you film that?
The guys spent a lot of time developing a stabilised underwater camera that allow them to track with the wales as they were in a boat alongside them and that had never been done before.
The result of that is the amazing material they got from the humpback whales and just seeing these real-time battle of 20-ton animals pushing each other out of the way and fighting for the right to gain access to a female.
There's quite a lot of camera research and development. The cameras we use are mainly designed for drama series and designed for filming people.
No-one really builds cameras for wildlife people, so we do a lot of our R&D ourselves; we spend a lot of time building camera units that are specialised to what we need, and then once all of that is developed, you need to give yourself time in the field for mistakes to happen and to then learn from those mistakes.
The humpback whales is a classic example - the underwater camera didn't quite work to begin with, they changed it around, they made some adjustments and what they got, in the end, was magic.
To what degree did you decide to show and include the actual sex act? Because in the mating game that doesn't always necessarily follow immediately after the successful conclusion of a mating ritual. The animals have bonded but haven't made offspring. Is The Mating Game more about the mating rituals, competing and process than the act?
Jeff Wilson: Exactly right, the mating aspect of most animals' behaviour is the least interesting part of the process and often it's the briefest - a couple of seconds.
The Mating Game is really about that quest to attract, to defend, to compete and to impress partners in the build-up, the courtship part of the behaviour, in the build-up to the act of mating itself.
If you take that wide gamut of behaviours and you understand there's this huge amount of behaviour going on in the natural world just to win the mating game.
And to win the mating game you need to keep your partner close to you, you need to attract a partner, you need to keep your competitors away, and therein lies the storytelling. The mating itself is the least important part.
Is there a subtext or a sense built into The Mating Game of how humanity or civilisation has encroached and made it more difficult for certain animals to find a mate, or is the series more about just purely intra-species competition? Or if it isn't in the show, do you have any production stories about how mankind has made it more difficult for animals?
Joe Loncraine: The remit was that we want to show people these amazing courtship strategies that have evolved over millions of years and we wanted people to understand these amazingly bizarre animal behaviours.
It wasn't for many of the episodes - we wanted to wow people with this wonder of the natural world. That said, where there was something specific happening in that environment relevant to that courtship story, then we would include that.
For example, in the freshwater episode, we feature an animal called a hellbender salamander and they fight over den sites which are these particular rocks in a river.
Now, they've always fought over them because there are not that many of them. Now the fights are even more intense because what's happened is a lot of soil erosion, so the den sites are filling up with sediment and they can't find places.
We are now seeing even more intense fights so that's an environmental issue that's been happening because of deforestation and things happening upriver that's clearly affecting the behaviour we're filming, so we mention it - that's why you're seeing these intense fights. We don't shy away from including it.
We filmed fireflies in Malaysia and we were lucky to film in an amazing place where you can see spectacular firefly displays. But also in Malaysia it's very hard to film them because the specific trees are being cut down, or there's light pollution.
If there are lights the fireflies won't display. If a house has a light on on the porch, even if there's the right tree, they won't display. That wasn't part of our story because we had found the right place to film fireflies to include in The Mating Game and it was amazing, but we experienced places where we filmed some behind-the-scenes stuff where they won't display.
Jeff Wilson: One of the most interesting stories really for us, and this is covered in episode 5, is how undoubtedly humans are affecting the mating strategies and abilities of animals in the natural world, the world over simply by the way that we are causing environmental change.
The most interesting story for us is that, through science, we've got the ability to enable animals to win their mating game through captive breeding, through storing genetic material - however, with all the science and all the millions of dollars put into captive breeding programmes across the world, the simple fact is that animals left to their own devices are more successful in their mating game than any science could ever create.
That's illustrated best in the giant panda story. The Chinese scientists and authorities have been involved in this long-term study of giant panda behaviour and captive behaviour and pumped millions of dollars into their programmes.
They've made a huge success of it - it's one of the best success stories of captive breeding in the world.
However, they also found that giant pandas need trees to successfully breed. And what they found when they released giant pandas back into the wild - giant pandas were far more successful breeding on their own than any captive breeding efforts that the Chinese have put together.
Through that 25 year process, they've learnt that actually protecting natural habitat is far more important than actually focusing on the species itself.
That for us was one of the most important stories to tell in The Mating Game. Left to their own devices, animals are very, very good at their own mating game.
Perhaps if we give them the space and the time and the habitat in which to play out their mating game, the world will be a better place. I think that's a lesson for humanity.
The 5-episode series The Mating Game is on Sundays on BBC Earth (DStv 184) at 16:10 and are available on DStv Catch Up.
