Passion for wildlife that started on an island

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy talks to award- winning Gordon Buchanan,  who is coming to Galway

For a man who never made a conscious decision to work in television, Scottish-born Gordon Buchanan has made his mark on the world of wildlife programmes.

His lauded 2012 BBC series The Bear Family and Me and Me won him a Royal Television award and was followed by the popular but controversial The Polar Bear Family and Me. He has also worked on the BBC’s Winterwatch, Springwatch and The Lost Land. And he has contributed to wildlife series and documentaries for Discovery and National Geographic. His travels have taken him to places as diverse as South America, Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea, Russia and Alaska, capturing extraordinary wildlife and helping to discover new species.

But he followed no well-charted career path, in fact it all came about by accident, he says on the phone from the Highlands of Scotland where he is on a talking tour, which will see him visit Galway next week.

“I loved watching wildlife programmes and being out in the wild when I was young, but I never thought of the people making these films.”

Gordon’s lucky break came when he got a part-time job in a restaurant at the age of 15. The owner’s husband was a wildlife cameraman and took Gordon under his wing, explaining what was involved in filming nature, and giving him his career start.

Gordon worked his way up, becoming a cameraman on various wildlife programmes, until eventually, his passion for the job and his good looks marked him out as an ideal presenter.

His success grew, courtesy of films he made of foxes in Glasgow, where he lives, for BBC’s Springwatch and Autumnwatch.

In 2009 he presented the Lost Land of the Volcano, and during its filming, a range of new species was discovered including the Bosavi woolly rat.

Gordon’s career has not been without controversy however. In the 2013 series, The Polar Bear Family and Me, for which he followed a polar bear and her cubs over the course of a year, he was accused of disrupting the bears’ lives.

That happened after Gordon enclosed himself in a Perspex cube and filmed the hungry polar bear as she did her utmost to join him inside. The long sequence made for fascinating viewing, but some wildlife groups insisted it offered no insight into the lives of bears and focused more on the presenter than on the animals. In addition, the programme’s producer was threatened with a fine by the Norwegian government for disturbing wildlife. The uproar died down and, stresses Gordon, the makers never intended to cause offence.

The whole idea, from the moment the crew landed in the Arctic, was to have minimal impact on the animals, he says. But the reality with polar bears “is that you cannot enter their world without causing a disturbance”.

“If you want to tell their stories and highlight their plight, you are changing their behaviour because they are deeply interested in what we are doing. Bears are inquisitive”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.