22 BBC Wildlife December 2019SEVEN WORLDS | ONE PLANET
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The team went in late August to
the Dovrefjell-Sunndalsfjella National
Park in Norway. Autumn was in full
swing, and all the leaves were starting
to turn. Every day, the team hiked
up into the mountains, and at first it
looked as if Jonny might have been
right. But on one day when the sun
came out, everything came together.
Kit technician Jack Delf was there.
“Our guide, Sigbjørn Mot Kreft,
came over the horizon shouting
‘Fight, fight, fight!’. We ran as fast as
we could, and then we saw the action
starting. Two big males were circling
one another, digging holes in the
ground and covering their horns in
mud and grass,” says Jack.
“Camera operator James Ewen got
into a really good position and,
at that exact moment,
the camera and
tripod tilted
over and
landedlens-first. We had been waiting
several weeks for this moment, and
I was thinking, ‘That’s it, the lens is
smashed, shoot over,’ but the lens
luckily landed in some soft lichen, and
with some quick thinking by James,
we filmed some of the best behaviour
we had ever seen.”Confounding expectations
In the southeast of the continent, Jo
Haley had an equally intriguing
encounter that was completely
unexpected. She and the crewwent to the Danube Delta where they
were expecting to film a sequence on
co-operative behaviour between pygmy
cormorants and great white pelicans.
But how wrong they were.
“We had come expecting
co-operative behaviour, but the
pelicans let the cormorants do all
the hard work,” says Jo. “We soon
realised that some nasty aggression
was going on. The pelicans would
steal the cormorants’ catch by
lunging at them, sometimes ganging
up in twos and threes. A cormorant1 Great white
pelicans, found on
southeastern Europe’s
freshwater lakes and
marshes, were filmed
mugging cormorants
for their catch.
2 Musk oxen crunch
heads. The species was
reintroduced to Norway
in the last century.
3 Northern Europe is
home to large numbers
of brown bears.2
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