Ammonite Goes To Hollywood

It's finally ready and winging its way over the pond to star in a Hollywood feature film alongside a raft of Oscar winners...

For weeks we've been preparing a custom starlight rig for a super-sensitive, Mega-A-list film, an undercover operation so ultra-secret that if we reveal any names, large black-suited men will take us away and feed us to their pet piranhas.

Last Night Filming In Botswana

A quick search of the sandy tracks in the morning showed us that our family of lions had now moved to a spot where it would be impossible to film them, water channels and thick bush meant we had to go elsewhere and find some other animals to film.

We needed shots of impala herds, more elephants and anything else at large in the area

As we came round a bend, a couple of sitting giraffes got up and wandered away from the track and stared in their usual way. This was very interesting as giraffes at night seem to be very hard to find. It could well be because they spend time quietly sitting and ruminating rather than wandering around making themselves a target for predators.

We have seen the same pattern with many animals, springbok, topi, buffalo, oryx, wildebeest, gazelles, spending many of the hours of darkness sitting almost silently, ruminating. The darker the night, the more likely these animals are to be sitting, sleeping even, usually in a tight bunch. And it’s very clear that lions have great difficulty in locating these herds. It would explain why giraffes were so hard to see
at night, these two soon stopped staring and sat down again (an awkward process for giraffes). With the starlight camera, despite bright moonlight, the giraffes were almost impossible to spot, even if you knew where they were, their tall necks looking more like tree trunks. With the thermal camera, we could see them clearly, as well as herd of elephants moving in the background. And we could also see that there weren’t any lions anywhere near us.

That was a fascinating night, free of the pressure of having to find or keep up with lions, we could at last have a good look around, get some much needed shots of other animals featuring in the film, especially impala.

Tomorrow we start the pack...

Leaving Deception Valley

It’s not called Deception Valley for nothing.

Camping in the bush is by far the best way to see African wildlife. Being able to examine lion footprints from the night before right outside your tent is exciting enough, but being able to meet some of the smaller creatures; desert mice which nest under the tents (and nibble cables), African wildcats which come to catch the mice, curious hornbills and the African stink ant, one of the largest ants in the world, all contribute to the experience and understanding of how the ecosystem works. But camping is usually best in warmer climates.

Two days ago, another Antarctic front arrived, not that it wasn’t already very cold at night. Now the temperatures dropped to below zero on the valley floor - and when the vehicle moved, the windchill dropped the temperature to as low as -15. This was itself is a major problem for us. The clothing we needed to stay warm was very restricting and batteries of all kinds ceased to function properly. But it was the lions which were our biggest problem now. We noticed with the thermal camera that the tops of the dunes on the valley* edges were a couple of degrees warmer than the valley floor. On very still nights (most nights), a clear thermocline (A clear boundary between gas or liquid of two different temperatures) was visible. Cats don’t like the cold, and it looks as if our lions had disappeared into the dunes - where we can neither film nor follow them - until either the weather warms up, or a breeze breaks up the thermocline and warms the valley floor again. For three days we found no signs of lions that we could film, heard no roaring (one of our main means of finding them), and saw no tracks or kills. It was time to leave the Kalahari...

*Using the term 'valley’ loosely here. The ‘valleys’ around here are usually about a kilometre wide and completely flat on the floor where short grass grows. On either side are fossil sand dunes covered in scrub, which rise as much as 20 metres, but are generally about 10 metres high



these images are made using our image-intensified camera, the 'starlight camera' can film clear images at night using only the light of the stars.