VIDEOS: Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan on capturing the wild side

WILDLIFE cameraman Gordon Buchanan, who was once nearly eaten alive by a white polar bear while filming from a Perspex box in Norway, has learnt from mistakes about how to navigate the ferocious animals he films. 

In 2011, for example, the BBC broadcast a television series, The Bear Family & Me, about the year Buchanan spent living with black bears in Minnesota, North America.

“They’re not the biggest bear in the world, but they’re still big,” he says. “They’ve killed people in the past. To begin with, I was cautious around them, but I got quite blasé, because I thought I knew everything I needed to know to work around them safely, but then, within a couple of weeks, I got a couple of frights where I was too close to them and they didn’t attack, but they made it very clear that they didn’t want me around.