Cabinteely man Colin Stafford Johnson has swum with sharks and spent months tracking tigers. Now he's tracking wildlife nearer to home, for the new RTÉ TV series, Living the Wildlife
SOME PEOPLE are just wired differently to the rest of us. Say you're swimming off the coast of west Cork and you see an enormous fin approaching. Feeling very much alarmed, you put your head under water and suddenly, out of the murky gloom, you see an enormous white mouth bearing in on you. You've seen Jaws. You've watched Open Water. You'd be terrified, wouldn't you?
Well, not if you're Colin Stafford Johnson. The Emmy-award winning cinematographer and wildlife documentary-maker swam with 20-foot basking sharks for his new RTÉ documentary series Living the Wildlifeand describes the experience as fun. Fun? "It's a good feeling," he deadpans. "Very exciting." Basking sharks, he says, are relatively harmless. And besides, the Cabinteely man has had scarier experiences in a 20-year career which has seen him travel the world with the BBC's natural history unit, tracking and filming everything from big cats in Africa and India to anacondas in Guyana.
He has a habit of downplaying the potential dangers of his work, but admits to having been rattled by a charging tiger in India. "I was going for a walk in a river bed, not really minding what I was doing and I came around a corner and there were tiger cubs there. The mother charged me and stopped around 15 or 20ft away and let out a roar. I knew she wasn't going to kill me because it was the same charge they use to frighten away other tigers, but at the same time there was that primordial terror there. I was quite literally rooted to the spot. It took my body about two hours to recover. I've been chased by bears and other things before but that was the most terrified I've been."
His first assignment for the BBC, after studying Biological Imaging in the UK, was to spend a year in India tracking tigers, and he has returned there repeatedly throughout his career to film big cats. He is, by his own admission, besotted with tigers, and in particular a tigress called Machhali which he has tracked since she was a cub. "If I am totally honest, it's a very one-sided relationship. I'm mad about her and I'd like to think she likes me, but really she just tolerates me. She doesn't see me as a threat. I have filmed her lying out on her back in the sun with her paws in the air, and you would love to go over and lie beside her like you would with a dog in front of the fireplace. But you can't, because she would kill you. I filmed tigers fighting, which was amazing because of the noise and just how rare it is to get to see it. I also filmed them mating on Christmas Day - that was my Christmas present that year."
Stafford Johnson points to the extraordinary investment of time, effort and money that goes into producing wildlife documentaries - where months or even years of work gets condensed into an hour of television. He followed an individual tiger for 600 days in India, and in another instance spent four months in Guyana trying (unsuccessfully) to film jaguars for Sir David Attenborough's Planet Earth- not a single reel of footage made it to screen.
"It is common to spend up to 200 days in the field to get a one-hour documentary and you are working 15 hour days, seven days a week. After about 60 days I usually try to come home to re-charge because I am just burned out. You have run out of energy and enthusiasm."
The wildlife cameraman's lot, he says, is to spend 15 hours sitting in a hide waiting for something interesting to happen. "You can be sitting up in a tree in a rainforest and that can be pretty solitary. But, on the other hand, you are seeing a view of the forest that no one else has ever seen before. You see extraordinary things. I climb out of a hammock in the morning in a rainforest and I can't believe that someone is actually paying me to do this."
Living the Wildlifesees him focus his lens on Irish wildlife and move in front of the camera as presenter for the first time. There's an element of the wanderer returning home to get some much-needed time with his family, but he is also deeply passionate about Irish wildlife and believes that the exotic is all around us, if we know where to look. "This series is about Irish wildlife for Irish people, things that we can all go out and see for ourselves. We have this tendency to think of wildlife as being something we just see on TV, but we have lots of fascinating animals to see right here in Ireland."
A case in point, he says, is the sea lamprey, which he filmed in Annacotty in Limerick. "They are a sort of leech or vampire, they live off other fish. When they are building a nest, they use their suckers to move literally hundreds of stones around. I was filming this extraordinary underwater sight and you just utterly lose yourself in it. You forget where you are. When I stood up out of the water and took off my mask, there was a bridge over my head and people were commuting to work completely oblivious to this wildlife event happening underneath them."
For another episode, he went diving off the coast of Cork and swam with tens of thousands of mackerel, dolphins and the aforementioned basking sharks. "That day was as good a day's filming in the water as I have had anywhere in the world, and this is something that anyone can do. The next time you are thinking of heading off to Bratislava on a cheap Ryanair flight for a weekend, why not go swimming with sharks in Cork instead?" Why not indeed.
Living the Wildlife starts on Tuesday on RTÉ1 at 7pm