Parenthood is a journey that we humans share with countless other living beings on Earth. Yet when it comes to rearing young, the paths that all parents follow are as varied, complex and inspiring as the animals themselves.
Over the years, many series have been made about animal babies. These have often given an outsize role to their young protagonists, yet it’s the parents that are the real heroes in the story of growing up. It is the parents that have the agenda, who determine the direction of another life story. Their choices mean the difference between success and failure in a game where the stakes are nothing less than the future of life itself. What could be more dramatic?
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Parenthood was four years in the making, filmed in 23 countries across six continents, in habitats varying from deep jungle to open grassland. No matter where in the world our characters are, or how they choose to rear their young, each story is unique and fascinating – exactly the criteria that lends itself to a groundbreaking new wildlife series. It’s an adventure, and our cameras capture every gripping moment.
There are the orangutans in Borneo that display extraordinary feats of devotion and teaching lasting up to 10 years, including showing their young how to make their beds; and the ingenious female crabs in Indonesia who clone living weapons from coral to defend their offspring. There are the male poison dart frogs in French Guiana taking on the Herculean task of finding exactly the right nursery deep in their rainforest home, and the social weaver birds in South Africa facing an uncertain reproductive future as their society collapses in the face of an unpredictable climate. In fact, the subject matter was so rich, with so many colourful stories new to science, that perhaps the biggest surprise was that we had never attempted a deep dive into this realm before.
Making Parenthood
Parenthood was the natural next step after our team made The Mating Game for BBC One in 2022. That was a series packed with real drama and revelatory insights into the natural world. But there was a deeper motivation, too. For parents – and I include myself in that club – the world has become an uncertain place, with a changing climate and an overwhelming number of choices to make. But you don’t have to look far into the natural world for inspiration on how to cope.
The series focuses on the key pillars of parenthood: building a home; finding plentiful, quality food; protection; teaching; and raising resilient offspring to independence. The first episode, The Greatest Adventure, shares the most extraordinary and poignant examples of these responsibilities from across the planet, from burrowing owls creating underground nests to shelter their chicks, to the lions that share childcare duties in the grasslands of Africa’s Kalahari Desert.
Through our research, we discovered that parents’ home habitat plays a crucial role in the choices they make, so the rest of the series transports us to oceans, grasslands, fresh waters and jungles across the globe, revealing the myriad ways animals rear their young. And for the first time, we decided to give the science teams working alongside our crews the attention they deserve in our behind-the-scenes stories.
There was little debate as to how the series should start – it must, and does, begin at birth, and we open with the precious first moments between a female western lowland gorilla and her newborn. For me, the purity of this moment, filmed deep in the primary forests of Gabon, needs little narration – though Sir David Attenborough, our trusted voice throughout the series, handles it with the expertise you’d expect. The scene brings into stark clarity the excitement, trepidation and overwhelming responsibility that all parents feel at this seminal moment. In my 25-year wildlife film-making career, this is undoubtedly the opening sequence I’m most proud of. It’s the perfect way to launch the series.
From this point on, it’s an emotional rollercoaster that passes through every station from Adorable Town to Independence Avenue, via Bonkers Street, Snackville and Teenage Tantrum Green. The drama doesn’t stop until the final minutes of the final episode.
Parenting isn’t an easy subject matter to cover. As film-makers, we are dealing with the most sensitive time in an animal family’s life, a time when our subjects are incredibly vulnerable to disturbance. A commitment to spending many hours in the field, using the appropriate technology and, most importantly, adhering to high standards of fieldcraft and wildlife knowledge were key to ensuring that we didn’t overstep the mark. Naturally, there were multiple failures but we were all too happy to accommodate these misfires if it meant we didn’t impinge on the lives of our subjects.
Standout stories
Given the personal and emotional investment our teams had in each of the stories (some crews were around their animals for the entire parenthood journey), there is great debate around the most standout sequence. For sheer parental commitment – and the fact it has never been filmed before – my personal pick is the story of the African social spider, filmed over several weeks in Namibia.
A female lives with her 50 or so sisters, who hunt together in packs across their football-sized nest (this alone is a sight worth filming). Every year, the spiders each lay up to 50 eggs within a few weeks of one another. Then comes the grisly bit. As the eggs hatch, the mothers’ bodies begin to disintegrate from the inside, creating a milky, protein-rich soup that they feed to the spiderlings via their mandibles. With such plentiful nourishment, the spiderlings grow rapidly and are soon hunting for their own prey – again, collectively – only now there are thousands of them.
The spiders’ hunting strategy is nothing short of extraordinary. To pinpoint the direction of their prey within the nest, they use their feet to detect the vibrations of an entangled insect – but with so many spiders in the nest, the signal can get lost. So, they have evolved to stop simultaneously, listen, then move a few centimetres in the right direction before stopping again, en masse. It is an incredible game of Grandma’s Footsteps that has never been filmed before.
And the story doesn’t end there. As the spiderlings grow, their mother makes an unprecedented sacrifice. She mimics the distressed vibrations of a prey item, inviting her young to feed at her dinner table, one last time.
This previously unseen behaviour took weeks of careful observation and filming by our brilliant cinematographer Pete Cayless, working alongside lifelong spider scientist Tharina Bird, and the resulting sequence is jaw-dropping. I have watched many test audience members react with both horror and fascination as the story plays out, but they all remain astounded by the commitment of these mother spiders.
A theme such as parenthood also offers plenty of sweet and tender moments. We capture the palpable exasperation of a pair of wild dogs in Zambia as they teach their family of boisterous teenagers the dangerous art of hunting buffalo, along with the trials and tribulations of a low-ranking Hanuman langur in proving herself a worthy babysitter for the alpha female. It’s the year before her own parenting journey will start, and she’s learning just how difficult it is to look after dependent baby monkeys.
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It’s also hard not to be enamoured by the hard-working San Joaquin kit fox mother, who relentlessly hunts down kangaroo rats for her growing family. In doing so, she is caught between the roles of provider and protector as coyotes circle her den.
Behind the camera
As you can imagine, creating the right camera systems for many of the sequences in Parenthood required years of research and development. To capture the passing of generational wisdom from matriarch orcas to their daughters and grandchildren as they teach them how to hunt blue whales – the largest (and loudest) animal that has ever lived – was a hugely ambitious and exciting sequence that required specialised equipment, developed especially for the series. We created a ‘tow cam’ that allowed the team to float a camera at high speed into the path of the hunting orcas, giving an unprecedented view.
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We also turned to military grade infra-red cameras in specially fitted gimbal housings, which enabled us to follow a mother hippo and her calf as they embark on a nightly gauntlet in search of fresh grass, leaving the safety of their home pool and venturing into a dark and terrifying world teeming with predators. The resulting sequence not only gives a fresh perspective on this after-dark adventure, but also a highly cinematic take on the African bush. It looks superb, and the sound-mix of the animals in the African night places you right in the footsteps of the hippo mother. It is certainly a drama.
Our crews at Silverback Films are packed with specialists from both scientific and filming backgrounds but, as with all wildlife productions, the real expertise comes from knowing how to deal with the unpredictability of working in wild and often remote environments with ‘actors’ who don’t read scripts.
How, for instance, do you mitigate running into an elephant in dense forest while tracking lowland gorillas in Gabon? The answer is, of course, that you can’t – but you can certainly run fast in the other direction to get out of the way. How do you react to a wounded and distressed chulengo (a young guanaco, a member of the camel family) in the Patagonian grassland, separated from its mother and snared on a barbed-wire fence? You intervene of course, as our teams working alongside Argentinean scientists did, and in the behind-the-scenes story, you highlight the ubiquity of these abandoned fences and their effect on wildlife, blocking migratory paths.
Witnessing parents battling against the encroachment of humanity and the changing climate was a regular occurrence for our teams, highlighting the plight of parents across the globe. But there is one species that provides hope. During the filming of Parenthood, one of our most beautiful and enigmatic subjects, the Iberian lynx, was downgraded from Critically Endangered to Endangered – a much-needed good-news story for what was once the world’s rarest cat. We were able to tell the story of the species’ recovery through a remarkable mother and grandmother raising their kittens in the same abandoned barn in central Spain, just a few hours south of Madrid.
The best bit of this story is that the females didn’t do it alone – farmers in the region have realised that, simply by changing their practices, they can help wildlife recover. It is an example of one set of parents helping another across the species divide, and a strong message that if we all help one another, a brighter future is possible.
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Top image: a western lowland gorilla mother carrying her young child through the Gabonese forest. Credit: BBC/Silverback Films/Peter Lytle