Taking a walk on the wild side

Doug Allan: Has a sixth sense when it comes to approaching and filming animals.

The Emmy-award winning wildlife cameraman Doug Allan — described by David Attenborough as “the toughest in the business” — is touring Ireland this week and next. He will talk at Triskel in Cork on Oct 3.

The Scot, 62, has some remarkable tales to tell. He admits he has one of the best jobs in the world and “the immense privilege” to see first-hand the unusual behaviour of animals in the world’s remote, inhospitable corners. It has its drawbacks, however — missing out on chunks of his children’s upbringing; enduring what he calls “discomfort”, like mosquitoes chewing on his flesh or filming in minus 40 degrees.

“I was snorkelling with the camera off the ice edge up in Canada when a walrus came up from the depths and grabbed me,” he says. “My immediate reaction was to look down and punch out with my hands, and luckily the walrus let me go. It would normally kill a seal by drowning it, crushing it between its tusks or sucking its brains out.”

Allan has filmed an extraordinary range of animals, including emperor penguins in 24-hour darkness in Antarctica; a pod of killer whales working together to kill a seal; snow leopards; and polar bears, a personal favourite. He’s particularly interesting on the sixth sense required to get close enough to film these animals.

“If I could draw a human parallel, babies are effectively small humans who can’t communicate by voice. There are some people who could be put in a room with a crying baby and within five minutes that baby will be playing away happily; there are other adults who, when put with the same crying baby, will have the baby crying a lot more five minutes later. There’s no connection between the adult and the baby. It’s all to do with the tone of your voice, how you approach them, how you look at them, and how you handle them. The same applies to animals.”

Allan has known Attenborough for more than 30 years. He mentions that the great broadcaster never got his driving licence.

“Once we wanted to do a sequence of him looking for Arctic foxes while driving a snow machine. I wanted a shot where I would lie down on the floor and he would drive past me very close at speed and swoosh through the snow. It took a lot of takes. I couldn’t get him to drive past close enough. He looked at me at one point and he said: ‘Douglas, can you imagine if I ran over you — the paperwork for the BBC I’d have to fill out?’.”

*www.dougallan.com