In June 2017, I travelled to the high Arctic in Northern Canada on a shoot for the Netflix series Our Planet with director Sophie Lanfear, says documentary cinematographer Jamie McPherson.
The further north you go, the smaller the planes get. You hop from community to community, until snow and ice cover everything as far as the eye can see. Having travelled from Heathrow to Iqaluit, and then to Pond Inlet, our final stop was Arctic Bay in Nunavut, where we met our helicopter pilot Jean-Michel Dumont.
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We had come all this way to film narwhals. As the sea-ice breaks up at the start of summer, these cetaceans queue along the ice edge, waiting for cracks to open. They then swim down the cracks so they can hunt fish in areas they have not been able to reach all winter.
We loaded our kit into the helicopter and flew out to the sea-ice to meet the rest of the crew - underwater cameraman Doug Anderson and assistant producer Hugh Wilson.
We were camping on the sea-ice, which is an amazing, if slightly terrifying, experience. Our camp was in the middle of the bay, our tents perched on one metre of ice with the open ocean below. It’s quite surreal to bang nails into ice rather than using traditional pegs!
We were very aware that we were on borrowed time. The sea-ice was getting thinner by the day, and we could wake up one morning to find ourselves floating out to sea. The presence of such large numbers of narwhals also attracted the attention of polar bears, so we constantly kept an eye out around camp, and instigated a ‘polar bear watch’ at night.
To film the narwhals, we used the helicopter to search along the floe edge. When we located them, we’d call in the underwater team. At that time of year, with the water warming, the area was often shrouded in thick fog. While the underwater teams could travel by snowmobile, fog and helicopters do not mix, and we were often grounded. We got caught out a few times, forced to land and wait for the fog to lift.
As the days passed, we got some truly mesmerising images of the narwhals, both underwater and from the air. They are one of the most bizarre yet magical creatures I have ever seen.
With most of the intended sequence in the bag, the only elements we were now missing were ground-level shots of the narwhals coming to the surface to breathe. So, we found a suitable breathing pool and planned to rig the camera to a small boat the underwater team had been using, which we had located near a suitable pool the previous day.
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With just a few days left on the shoot, we took the chopper to the pool. The sun was shining and from the air we could see that the narwhals were already en route. The pool was a temporary gap in the ice that opened and closed with the tide, so we only had a small window to land, load and rig the kit in the boat, and position ourselves on the water.
From the air, we also happened to spot a large male polar bear, fast asleep by the pool. Perfect, we thought. We could capture the narwhals and the bear in the same shot! Filming from the boat, we would be safe. Worst-case scenario, we could fire bangers to scare him away.
As we prepped the boat, which at this point was still on the ice beside the pool, Jean-Michel decided it was a good time to top up with fuel from a nearby cache. We all agreed that would be fine. The light was stunning and the narwhals seemed very comfortable in our presence.
But as the helicopter flew off, the polar bear woke up – and immediately made a beeline for us. Still on the ‘shore', we were pretty easy prey. Peter got his shotgun out to fire a warning shot to move the bear away from us, only to discover that the gun didn’t work.
We had no time to lose. We scrambled to get the boat into the water as fast as we could. The situation quickly became very tense, as the bear disappeared behind some ice, hiding itself from view – a polar bear’s favourite way to hunt.
We quickly rigged up the small outboard engine, which would allow us to keep our distance should the bear enter the water, only to discover that the motor didn’t work, either. There we were, being ambushed by a probably very hungry polar bear, in a boat with no engine and no means of protecting ourselves.
We paddled into the middle of the pool and kept watch for the polar bear breaking cover. Filming narwhals was now off the table, so I laid out my toolkit to improvise a defence. Our best options were now throwing spanners or a flask of tepid tea.
We called Jean-Michel on the satphone as, to compound matters, a thick bank of fog was now rolling in fast. Not only that, but the wind was also rapidly closing the pool. As the conditions got worse for us, they became increasingly favourable for a hunting polar bear.
Jean-Michel had been grounded before he could reach the fuel cache, but hearing of our predicament, he took off anyway. With amazing skill, he navigated his way back by following cracks in the ice that he recognised from earlier. Hearing the chopper approaching overhead was one of the best sounds I’ve ever heard. Jean-Michel flew over us, scaring the bear away, and managed to land.
We ended up getting the shots we wanted, and I will always be grateful to Jean-Michel for preventing me having to fight off a polar bear with a set of adjustable spanners and a flask of tea.
More near-death experiences from Jamie, which will give you nightmares...
- "We were in a small boat in the deadly, croc-infested Zambezi River, just metres from the edge of Victoria Falls. Then the engine spluttered and cut out...”
- "There was a loud ‘CRACK.‘ The filming vehicle was falling rapidly through the sea ice, and we had seconds to escape.” What you don't see on Netflix's Our Planet
- "A flying block of ice the size of a truck nearly knocked our helicopter out of the air” – A stark reminder of the colossal power of nature
