This is a black sicklebill bird of paradise at dawn in the forests of New Guinea.
It’s one of 39 birds of paradise, a family of birds known for the males’ extraordinary
courtship dances and ornate feathers.
They’ve been called the holy grail for wildlife filmmakers, in part because for decades, they
were really hard to film.
GUNTON: One of the one of the really challenging things about animals is that they do a lot
of stuff at dawn and at dusk, just when the lights are going.
The black sicklebill only performs its courtship ritual at the first light of day.
When the BBC aired this footage in 1996, it was the first ever captured of this behavior.
Two decades later, the black sicklebill is still dancing at dawn in New Guinea, but this
time the humans have sharpened their tools.
Light-sensitive digital cameras can now pull back the curtain of darkness around sunset
and sunrise.
But what about behaviors that happen at night?
Like the animals that they pursue, nocturnal filmmakers have had to find ways of seeing
in the dark.
Film cameras struggled in low light because film stocks with higher light sensitivity
produced a grainier image.
The film emulsion literally had coarser grains of silver salts.
So for decades, when they did try to do nighttime stories, BBC producers resorted to
using artificial lights.
That’s not ideal for the animal, but it’s not great for the filmmaker either, since
they’re trying to capture natural behaviors.
GUNTON: Animals that are out at night, they’re out a night for a reason, which is they don’t
want to be out in the light so as soon as you start flashing lights around they don't
like it, they don't behave properly or they disappear.
It took several months to habituate these bulldog bats to artificial light so that the
producers could show in slow motion how they fish.
So for the past couple of decades, the BBC has often turned to infrared cameras.
That requires setting up lights too, but they’re lights that emit wavelengths outside the range
that humans and many animals can see.
That infrared light bounces off the scene and into the lens to form a monochrome image,
but as far as the animal is concerned, they’re just going about their business in the dark.
ATTENBOROUGH: Mantises defend themselves in two ways, either by camouflage or with an
aggressive display like this.
By 2002, the quality of infrared cameras was high enough that the BBC could use it extensively
for the Life of Mammals series.
It allowed them to film the rare water opossum in the wild for the first time.
And it was the technology the BBC used to capture the iconic scene in Planet Earth of
lions hunting an elephant in the dead of night.
They installed infrared lights on a truck and powered them with car batteries.
For Planet Earth 2, the producers used infrared lights in the Deserts episode to capture a
showdown between a long-eared bat and a scorpion.
But this time, it’s infrared with high resolution and slow motion, combined.
CHARLES: So the cameras we were shooting on were Red Dragons and they’ve taken out the
part of the filter, which means that it’s now sensitive to infrared light.
So you've got this incredibly crisp 5K image -- you can use your zoom lenses and shoot
at your higher frame rates all in infrared, which is fantastic.
When it’s not possible to set up infrared lights near the animal, there’s another
option: Thermal cameras.
NIGHTINGALE: Originally there sort of multicolored cameras, the reds and oranges and so on were
rather artificial.
Whereas now, there's a camera, which gives you a really nice and very fine detailed view
of animal of heat gradients.
Thermal cameras detect infrared radiation too, but longer wavelengths, or what we experience
as heat.
Instead of collecting infrared light that’s reflecting off of the subject, it senses the
heat that’s being emitted by the subject itself.
This technology was developed for military use and it’s become so advanced that in
Planet Earth 2, we can see every whisker of the leopards that stalk the streets of Mumbai.
NIGHTINGALE: There's a scene where these leopards are hunting the pigs.
Pitch blackness.
And what was strange is in the sequence, you also see people walking through the park at night.
Of course, they can't see a thing.
They can't see the leopards.
The leopards can see them, the leopards aren't interested in them, the leopards are interested
in the pigs.
So you get this incredible observed view on a pitch black night, you need no ambient light,
not even starlight.
The thermal camera is really the only way they could have filmed this hunt.
But it can’t capture color, which is essential for some stories, like this bioluminescent
railroad worm, filmed for the first time for the Jungles episode of Planet Earth 2.
GUNTON: On it’s side it’s got these bright yellow dots and those are warnings to other
creatures that don’t eat me because I’m poisonous.
And it also has on its head little red lights.
They’re little search lights.
When it gets close to its prey and switches to hunting mode, it turns the yellow lights
off so the prey cant see them, but the red lights, which the prey can’t see because
it's infrared, it keeps them on so it spots them.
This was filmed at night with a Sony A7s, a small, relatively affordable camera that
came out in 2014 and blew people away with it’s abilities in low-light.
You can see how it compares with some of the other cameras we have here at Vox, with the
same settings.
Digital camera sensors are bigger than ever.
The Sony A7s has a full frame 35mm sensor, but it actually has fewer megapixels than
most comparable cameras.
That means each pixel is bigger and can take in more light.
They’ve also engineered two steps of noise reduction to keep the image cleaner.
Sensor technology is changing so fast that the Sony a7s didn’t exist when the BBC first
started working on Planet Earth 2.
Now, it’s opening up new opportunities for filmmakers.
NAPPER: We can now put it on drones.
We can take it underwater.
Suddenly there’s a lot of animal behavior which we’ll be able to reveal using that camera.
It’s hard to imagine what wildlife films will look like 10 or 20 years from now, especially
as so many species face existential threats, but as long as engineers keep innovating,
filmmakers will keep finding new ways of revealing the beauty and diversity of Planet Earth.
Thank you for watching!
You can find Planet Earth 2 on BBC America.
It will be airing Saturdays through March 25th.
You can also find tons of clips from their archive on BBC Earth’s mobile app.
It’s called Story of Life and it’s actually where I found a lot of the clips that I used
in this video.
And it’s free!
So check it out.