Lost In The Urban Wilderness

On the face of it, this should have been a fairly straightforward film to make.
The commissioning process had gone smoothly; a 3 minute home-edited pitch film and a 2 page document outlining the story had been enough for the BBC’s Natural World office to sell the idea to Discovery, and regular contact with the scientist in the field, allowed us to fine tune the shooting schedule to the storylines we wanted to cover and the time we had available.

But this was no ordinary wildlife film, it was to be made entirely in the streets, backyards, greenbelts and shopping malls of Anchorage, Alaska.

 

Alaska is vast – as big as England, France, Italy and Spain put together, much of it is pristine wilderness and home to some of North America’s most charismatic wildlife. But perversely, one of the best places to regularly see many of the state’s wild inhabitants is in Anchorage, the biggest city in the state.

The statistics on Anchorage’s urban wildlife are truly remarkable: over 1,000 moose, 200 black bear, 60 brown bear, over 1,000 ravens, 5 wolf packs, several beaver families, lynx, porcupines, 5 species of salmon and a whole host of other furred and feathered creatures spend some or all of their year inside the city limits. No other city in the world can boast wildlife on this scale.

Several factors have contributed to Anchorage’s extraordinary and unique wildlife situation; its location (a sheltered bowl surrounded by mountains), the rich mosaic of habitats that urban development has created, and the tonnes of garbage produced every day as a bi-product of the Progress and the American Dream in full swing.

 

But perhaps the single most important factor in maintaining the rich biodiversity in Anchorage is one man, Rick Sinnott; area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. It is his brave and groundbreaking approach to conservation over the last 15 years that has created the current remarkable situation.

 

Rick passionately believes that humans and wild animals can live side by side, and that conservation in a modern, rapidly urbanising, world is not just about preserving areas of untouched wilderness like large scale museum exhibits, but about maintaining and appreciating the essence of wildness wherever we live. In Anchorage that appreciation and acceptance of wildness has meant some very large, and potentially dangerous, animals living cheek by jowl with some quarter of a million people.

This approach to conservation is not some ill-considered new age idea that Rick has just come up with, far from it. It is an idea that has been with Rick since he was at collage; a line from Henry David Theroux “In wildness is the preservation of the world” has stuck with him and guided his approach to managing the wildlife in the city. Nor is Rick just an ideas man, he has an exceptional blend of qualities that has allowed him to put his philosophy into action: an outstanding level of understanding of wildlife and a real passion for his work, coupled with the toughness and resourcefulness developed from a childhood spent in the great outdoors and several tours of duty in Vietnam as a marine sergeant.

The aim was to make a film that covers the story of Anchorage; how and why the wildlife has come to live there, how Rick and his working partner Jessy Coltrane manage the issues that the presence of the wildlife creates, and what can we learn from Rick’s approach to conservation.

And it all should have been so much easier than it was.

 

True, when you are filming in a city you can stay in a hotel, eat in a different restaurant every night, pop into Starbucks if you fancy a latte, do a bit of shopping if the light is lousy and drive to within a few yards of your filming location, but in so many ways making a wildlife film in an urban setting was a horrendous experience; a universe away from the simple tranquillity of many wildlife locations.

In order to save money and increase days in the field Matt Drake (my fantastic and long suffering camera assistant & sound recordist) and I stayed in one of the foulest hotels I’ve ever encountered. Once a brothel and now moved up a few ‘stars’ to the ‘doss-house / crystal-meth lab’ category, the hotel was cheap and central. But the noise, evil smells, and raids by the Anchorage Police Department wore very thin towards the end of the year of filming.

Perhaps the worst thing about filming in Anchorage was the knowledge that, at any one time, somewhere in the city, some fantastic sequence would be playing out. But the chances of us being in the right place at the right time to witness and film the events were minimal. Not that this is unusual, in any rainforest, rock pool or swamp the same is true. But if you miss events in the wild you are usually none the wiser. Miss some great story in Anchorage and the chances are that somebody will have snapped a few photo’s of it and the first we would know about it would be the ‘Black Bear Family on trampoline – Exclusive Photo’s’ newspaper headline we’d see the next morning, or the helpful ‘you should have been here last week …’ comments from pretty much anyone we talked to about the film. The usual field skills developed over years of study and wildlife film-making became more or less redundant when working in a city. I found this very unsettling, like I was working blind much of the time.

Rick and Jessy would call me whenever they got an interesting call from a member of the public and the Anchorage Police Department would also call me if they received any wildlife calls but it could easily take us 90 minutes to cross town and typically by the time we reached the scene of some fantastic wildlife event all that would remain would be a few overturned garbage bins and, if we where lucky, a still warm pile of bear poo.

The first few trips were very slow, but as the months of filming went on we started getting more ‘hits’ than ‘misses’. A couple of front page stories about the film in the local papers raised our profile and gradually it seemed that most people knew that we were making a film about their city’s wildlife. We had cards and flyers printed up and eventually we had a fantastic network of people around the city who would call us if anything was happening.

We slowly won the trust of Rick and Jessy, and more and more often they would phone us if they were going out on a call. These calls could be any time of the day or night and we never quite knew what to expect.

Rick and Jessy’s job has the potential to be very unpredictable and dangerous. Brown and black bears, and especially moose, can be volatile and lethal. Add to the mix the fact that we would be working in situations where there would be wild animals, firearms, dart guns (the tranquiliser that is takes to knock out a single adult moose would kill more than 50 grown men), traffic, and the general public - and life could get pretty hairy. It is a testament to Rick & Jessy’s exceptional skills and professionalism that no-one has been hurt while they have been dealing with a situation.

We were always ready to go out and film sync with Rick & Jessy and over the course of the year’s filming we got 4 or 5 good sequences of them at work - along with dozens of near misses where we either arrived too late, or the situation resolved its-self. We were also constantly working to film a whole host of other wildlife stories around the city. These involved filming the salmon runs that fill the streams and creeks that run through the city, a beaver family that had taken up residence in a housing development, the hundreds of ravens that stream into town each day during the winter, various moose behaviours – rutting, calving etc along with a full range of atmospheric and seasonal sequences that paint a portrait of the city through the year.

 

In our trusty hire van we would typically contain a giant Jimmy Jib, an 16mm Aaton kit, an Ikegami lowlight camera for night-time filming, the Z1 kit for sync work, stills timelapse kits, a polecam and a selection of foul smelling waders, cold weather gear and half eaten burritos. It was not unusual to use pretty much every piece of kit on any given day.

On of the worst aspects of the filming was knowing when to stop each day. Street lighting meant that we could film right through the night with the Ikegami if we had wanted to, and during the summer you could have 20+ hours of beautiful daylight to work with. Most of the best animal behaviour would happen during the middle of the night when the streets were quiet, but most of Rick and Jessy’s call outs would be during the day when the chances of human – animal encounters where highest.

It was like being part of some horrendous sleep deprivation experiment – the presence of drive-through coffee stalls on most street corners only helped push us further into the weird state of strung-out delirium in which we would spend most shoots.

One sequence I really wanted to get was of black bears foraging through urban neighbourhoods at night. Up to 200 black bears live around town, many are fully urbanised spending nearly their entire summers in suburbia. Certain areas of town were real hot-spots for bear activity but these tended to be the poorer areas – the trailer parks and apartment complexes where people tended to leave trash lying around. Anchorage, like any big American city, has its fair share of drug problems and gang violence – Rick still has the bullet in his leg from a drive-by shooting before Christmas, and it is precisely these poor neighbourhoods where the social problems are at their worst.

We would find ourselves endlessly cruising the streets of the roughest parts of town in the middle of the night; our van with its dodgy looking tinted windows crawling along at walking pace looking for signs of bear activity. These neighbourhoods seemed to be no-go areas for police and we would be regularly tailed for prolonged periods by gang bangers in their low-rider pickup trucks as we searched for bears.

The bears themselves could be very difficult to track. Overturned garbage bins and split refuse sacks were the best sign that a bear was around, but the neighbourhoods were a labyrinth of yards and passageways, and even if we could see the signs we could still spend an entire night driving the mean streets of Anchorage with no bear sightings. On the rare occasions we found a bear it was then a case of me following it on foot with the Ikegami as it foraged, while Matt tried to keep with the us in the van via radio contact. It was a pretty un-nerving experience creeping though people’s yards in the pitch black trying to keep up with the bear that you knew was out there somewhere but couldn’t always see, all in the ‘wrong’ bit of town.

The black bears were not really a physical threat if you gave them space, the urbanised individuals were comfortable around people and no-one has been hurt by one in Anchorage. The city’s really incredible wild residents are the brown bears. Rick had always known that a few brown, or grizzly, bears came into town each summer to feed on moose calves and salmon, but until two years ago he had no idea what their movements were. Then he got the data from a study of 8 radio & GPS collared brown bears and the results were extraordinary. It showed that several individuals were spending weeks on end living and hunting right in the city. These are full grown grizzly bears, killing moose and stuffing themselves with salmon, within a stone’s throw of houses and schools. Yet nobody reported seeing one. A brown bear defending a kill, with young cubs, or simply caught unawares is a notoriously dangerous animal, yet here they were, living right in the heart of the biggest city in Alaska.

We desperately wanted to be able to tell this story as it is probably the most remarkable aspect of Anchorage’s wildlife. We had filmed Rick and Jessy dealing with the grizzly aftermath of a yearling moose that had been killed by a brown bear in someone’s yard, but we really wanted a shot of a brown bear that would allow us to talk about them in the context of Anchorage, and how close they live to people. Going off and looking for them was not an option – it would simply be too dangerous to go poking around in the thick vegetation of the greenbelts where they seemed to be spending their days. So we decided to set up a motion triggered camera on the bank of a small creek in a park on the edge of town. We had lots of experience setting up remote cameras – we had spent months trying to get shots of the wolves that haunt the city’s dump – so we knew that chances of success where slim as there are so many variables and so much to go wrong with the equipment, but you have to try.

We set the camera up at a spot that felt right and left it for a couple of days, fully expecting to return to find that it had not been triggered, or that it had been nicked by local kids. When we got back to the location all the sensors and cables where still in place, and the display showed that the camera had been triggered twice. We knew from bitter experience that this usually meant nothing other than it had been a windy night and moving vegetation had tripped the system. We re-wound the tape and hit the play button. The first shot was four teenage kids and a dog walking past camera – they apparently hadn’t seen the equipment at all, paid it no attention, and walked out of frame. The next shot started with an empty frame and as we watched the camera’s tiny screen out waddled a huge brown bear, coming from precisely the direction the kids had just headed, the bear walked right up to the camera until its wet nose touched the front element of the lens and then it calmly exited stage right. There could be no better way to illustrate quite how closely these notorious and iconic animals of America’s wilderness are living with people.

We got a few more shots of brown bears on the remote camera that trip, along with the wolves at the city dump. Other memorable sequences include moose getting tangled up in Christmas lights and mating with a mailbox and Rick & Jessy wrestling with orphaned moose calves and running troublesome black bears out of town.

In the end we had more than enough material to make a really good film – many of my personal favourite sequences have not even made it into the final cut. The film has become more about Rick, and his philosophy on conservation, than I had imagined when we set out. But it is precisely this personal quality to the story, and the genuine relevance of his ideas to the modern world, that make the film so strong. It was a very challenging, complex and pressurised film to make, but extremely rewarding in terms of the final story and the message it puts across.

MOOSE ON THE LOOSE will be broadcast in early 2007 on BBC2

Directed and filmed by John Brown
Sound & camera assistant Matt Drake
Produced by Ian Gray
Edited by Dave Pearce
Natural World series editor Tim Martin