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“This is a world where nothing is quite as it seems – full of strange connections, often hidden from us. Only now are we beginning to see life in the forest from a new perspective.”
Sir David Attenborough
Episode synopsis
David Attenborough journeys into the hidden world of forests, where lives are entwined in the most unexpected of ways. From the temperate rainforests of Canada, where rarely seen spirit bears fish for salmon, to the teak forests of India, where whistling wild dogs work together to bring down prey three times their size, the forests of planet Earth are full of unseen connections. .
To stand out in the misty mountainous forests of China male tragopan have developed a comical dance routine, in the dense tropical rainforest ninja treehoppers form surprising alliances to fight off assassin bugs, and in Borneo oriental pied hornbills go to incredible lengths to protect their young.
We are only now beginning to understand how deeply interconnected life in the forest is, but we do know that these connections are threatened by deforestation. Each individual tree is an intricate ecosystem in its own right, yet humans cut down 15 billion of them every year.* In the Amazon, they are being replaced by plantations of eucalyptus, a single species of tree which turns rich and complex worlds into little more than green deserts. In the small patches of remaining forest animals like chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are forced to carve out an existence in the human world.
Filming locations and species
- Spirit/Kermode bear: Hartley Bay, Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada
- Tragopan: Central China
- Treehoppers: Yasuni National Park, Ecuador
- Eucalyptus: Brazil
- Oriental pied hornbill: Gomantong and Sukau, Borneo
- Chimpanzee: Bulindi, Uganda
- Dhole: Kabini National Park, India
- Kapok tree: Tambopata region, Peru
In numbers…
Number of shoots: 19
Number of remote shoots: 15
Number of days filming: 267
Rare species documented…
- Spirit bear: the rarest animal filmed was the spirit bear, though not classified as endangered there are only around 150 in existence.*
- Eastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii): endangered
- Asiatic dhole (Cuon alpinus): endangered
Fun fact: It took six shoots across three years to get the hornbill nesting sequence.
Fun fact: To film the tree fall sequence the team took nearly 60 cases of filming equipment, containing components of a ‘triffid’ motion controlled slider, two hand-held gimbal systems, a complex cable dolly system and rope access equipment, three cameras with a wide selection of lenses, three drones and lights to help illuminate the tree from the ground. For the tree fall the team used three drones in the air and six cameras positioned on the ground!
Q&A with Producer and Director Sarah Whalley
What is your favourite moment in this episode?
I think it’s got to be getting our first glimpse of oriental pied hornbill eggs. Putting a camera inside a nest to film their amazing nesting behaviour hadn’t been done before. It was a massive crew endeavour both from the UK and the local team in Borneo. We had to get the timings right, pick the right trees- we rigged quite a few often at heights of around 30m and all this in a way that wouldn’t disturb the birds. In the end it took six shoots to get the sequence, but it was so precious to see this intimate view. It really resonated with me as I became a mother (nearly twice over!) on this series and after living through all the covid lockdowns, I really related to the female trapped inside.
What was the most challenging moment when filming?
Forests aren’t easy places to film so the episode was a particularly ambitious undertaking, with completely new, never before filmed stories in hunting dhole, nesting hornbills, chimps crossing roads and ninja treehoppers but one story stands out for me. The filming of the kapok tree falling took over three years of planning. We knew we would only get one chance at getting all the shots we needed so the organisation on the ground and equipment needed was immense. The shoot was a culmination of all that hard work, delivering some of the most powerful shots of a rainforest giant falling to the ground that was extremely hard to watch.
What new technology was used to capture some of the footage in this episode?
For the kapok tree sequence we wanted to get an immersive view of this 60m rainforest giant, so we used a piece of equipment developed for the series Green Planet called the ‘Triffid’. The Triffid is a field robotics system for filming in real time and timelapse which allowed the camera to travel along the ground and up a buttress root. The results are amazing – you really feel like you are entering the tree’s world. To get into the canopy we used a cable dolly system created by our rope specialist Ollie Laker he named the Monarch. This enabled us to transport the camera all the way up the kapok’s huge trunk and into the canopy in one seamless shot. To complete the sequence capturing the tree fall, we also had three drones in the air with six additional cameras positioned on the ground. We had to predict the direction of the fall creating a safe zone around it so the cameras could stay intact. They all made it but of course it was a bittersweet moment.
To capture the intimate images of the hornbills nesting behaviour we set up camera boxes next to the nest trees. Small holes in the tree were used to insert a special probe lens with tiny adjustable lights which we gradually turned up to give just enough light to film the female inside without disturbing her. Often all of this was all done dangling from ropes at 30m! The camera was connected to a controller by an incredibly long cable so the cameraman could work at a distance from the tree in a hide but still have full control over the shots. It was a massive team effort but incredible to get those first images back.
What do you hope the impact of this episode will be?
The Forests episode isn’t a doom and gloom show but hopefully thought provoking. It is saying these places are special but fragile. Forests are full of unseen connections and humans are destroying them before we even fully know what they hold. I hope we have sowed a seed that makes people look at forests differently and feel connected to them and therefore empowered to do something. I think people often overlook forests but I hope this film gives a new perspective of how connected they are, and generating a new appreciation for them.
Key stories explained
Treehoppers
Yasuni National Park, Ecuador
NB: New behaviour
In Forests, we captured the astonishing world of treehoppers, by exploring the symbiotic relationship between treehoppers and bees, the incredible maternal care of aetalion reticulatum with their nymphs and a mother treehoppers using her legs to signal and kick away potential predators.
Assistant Producer Alex Walters: “It’s just astounding how many stories there are to tell about these wonderful little insects, I got quite sucked into their world. I first started looking into treehoppers five years ago whilst first developing the series. I was intrigued because they look so bizarre, but the more I researched them, the more I realised there is a whole world of incredible behaviours hidden in plain sight. Treehoppers don’t only live in the Amazon rainforest where we filmed them, there are over 3,000 species, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica, so I encourage anyone to go and discover them in their back gardens. They are easy to miss though; some are the size of a pin head! You’d need a magnifying glass to find them, which was why we had to use a camera with a special macro probe lens and a super high-speed camera to reveal their surprising stories.”
So much remains unknown about these amazing insects. The scientist the crew worked with, Rex Cocroft, internationally known for his research on communication in treehoppers mentioned how the footage could support the idea that there is maternal care of nymphs in the species filmed as currently there is no agreement in the literature.
Eucalyptus
Brazil
NB: New behaviour
This was the first time a monoculture of eucalyptus on this scale has been filmed for a Blue Chip series in an area that was once Atlantic Forest. A local drone pilot worked closely with the Planet Earth III Forest team to reveal the vast scale of the plantation, revealing the hard line between native primary forest and the green desert of eucalyptus trees that span to the horizon, as well as the eerily mesmerising aerials of the swaying eucalypts. The team wanted to also show the shocking difference between the two from within the plantation and native forest, so the drone pilot managed to film inside the eucalyptus plantation, which revealed shockingly bare soil and uniform trunks, a stark contract with the tangled lush green tropical rainforest.
Chimpanzee
Bulindi, Uganda
NB: Filming feat
The chimps of Bulindi village are remarkable in that they live so close to humans. Every day they must walk across agricultural lands and near houses to find food. Only a handful of fruiting trees exist in their small forest patch, so most of their diet comes from human planted food.
The team filmed the chimpanzee group for 35 days, and witnessed hair-raising moments when the chimps would cross a main highway.
Director Abigail Lees said: “Some of the younger males are the worst at crossing the road. There is one in-particular called Gerald. I think we filmed at least three near collisions with Gerald and a truck or car. He was terrible. The females are very different. They have dependents to look after, so they will cross with utmost caution – listening for a lull in the traffic. In the last year, speed bumps have been put in place to help the chimps cross. Now the females will only cross beyond the speed bumps where the cars are slower. They figured this out for themselves very quickly.”
Kapok tree fall
Tambopata region, Peru
NB: Filming firsts
To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time a Kapok tree being felled was filmed on this scale with so many cameras – three drones and six ground cameras. It was the first time filming a Kapok using the BBC motion-controlled triffid slider and cable dolly set-up to get an immersive view of this rainforest giant.
Oriental pied hornbill
Gomantong & Sukau, Borneo
NB: Rare behaviour
The crew filmed a female oriental pied hornbill inside a nest in a hole in an old growth tree in the wild and were able to capture rare footage of hornbills catching bats during courtship.
Sir David Attenborough said, “Bird courtship is just one of the most dramatic sequences you can get because it’s designed to impress a female, and it impresses you! And the lengths to which a male will go in order to attract the attention of a female… The key is that in tropical circumstances there is a super abundance of food. The male doesn’t have to spend all that time gathering food, he’s got time to spare, and therefore what he does with it is to say, ‘oh, now can I show you something honey that you’ve never seen before’”.
Assistant Producer Alex Walters said, “Filming inside the nest was extremely tricky, the local film crew had to get the timing just right and also hope they had chosen a tree hole where the hornbills would actually nest that season, it was a bit of luck of the draw! But they had luck on their side with local experts guiding them who had studied the birds for years, so knew which old-growth trees had historically been used by the birds. A month before nesting season the crew had to make a tiny hole in the tree, just big enough for a small probe lens to fit snugly in, with the hope that the hornbills chose that particular nest.”
Meet the team
Sarah Whalley, Producer and Director
As a wildlife filmmaker for over 15 years, Sarah has documented everything from pumas in Patagonia to fireflies in Tennessee. She has produced and directed documentaries for Animal Planet, Terra Mater, National Geographic and more recently working at the BBC on the award winning Seven Worlds One Planet. Her greatest passion lies in storytelling and finding new, innovative ways to do this. Before making films, she travelled the world in search of animals and attained a degree in Zoology along with a Masters in Conservation. On Planet Earth III, she is the producer/director on the ‘Forests’ episode. Highlights include capturing inside a hornbill nest for the first time, filming dholes hunting together, treehoppers maternal behaviour and telling a powerful chimp conservation story in Uganda.
Abigail Lees, Director
Abigail Lees is a Producer/Director at the world-renowned BBC Natural History Unit. She co-Directed the ‘Forests’ episode of ‘Planet Earth 3’ and field directed for the ‘Human’ episode. She was responsible for directing several sequences across the series including: the village chimpanzees of Uganda, Eucalyptus monoculture in Brazil, Ecuadorian treehoppers, North American Spirit Bear, Mexican monarch butterflies, the Amazon fires, and Australian city tawny frogmouths.
Lees’ work has taken her to some of the most remote places on all seven continents including Antarctica for David Attenborough’s ‘Seven Worlds, One Planet’ series. She is currently producing an episode on the Himalayas for the BBC’s next big blue-chip documentary series.
Alex Walters, Assistant Producer
Alex Walters is an Assistant Producer at the BBC who has worked in television for over 10 years. She has a Masters in Cinematography & Lighting and qualifications in Ecology and Climate Change. Alex has worked across multiple award-winning series at the BBC and at independent production companies. She developed Planet Earth III alongside the creative Director Mike Gunton and since then has set-up and directed many complex and remote sequences for the series; including wolves in the high Arctic of Canada, elephants facing drought in Kenya, the Forest episode opening scene and the felling of an emergent tree in the Amazon. She oversaw the 9th episode of the series for BBC America, which is a compilation of the behind the scenes footage to show the lengths the crew went to film the series.