It has a small but important population of chough.
This beautiful calm spell of weather coincided with heavy snowfall in England.
It was odd to be so far north on such sunny days knowing there were chaos and sub-zero temperatures south of the border.
Chough have been on Oronsay for a very long time. There's one carved on a grave slab in the old Priory.
Later on we filmed Colonsay's beekeeper, Andrew Abrahams, who is trying to establish the island as a reserve for native black honeybees.
Moving the camera kit around on Colonsay like this was easier than carrying it.
Staffa's striking geology is a sign of its volcanic past.
Many puffins nest on the nearby Treshnish Isles. It was a delight to film them just as they returned from the sea for the fist time.
Razorbills come ashore at the same time and quickly reclaim their nesting places.
Guillemots crowd tightly onto all the ledges.
Coll, Tiree and Gunnar have beautiful shell sand beaches. There are two basking sharks in this picture too.
When the sand blows inland it fertilise the islands which helps make Tiree great for farming.
And fields full of rich grass are good for hares. Tiree has no foxes either so the hares thrive.
The weather in the Hebrides has been wonderful this spring which has made it possible to film some lovely aerials for the series.
It's also been an exceptional year for whales and dolphins. A pod of perhaps 1000 common dolphins spent several weeks around Skye and the Small Isles.
Mothers and quite old calves often travel together.
The dolphins were focused on feeding in the morning and socialised more later in the day, as well as playing in the wake of the boat.
The Moon jellyfish is another animal we'll be featuring in the series. Early in the year they bud off from tiny polyps anchored to rocks and grow quickly. By mid summer they will be as large as dinner plates.
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Flamingos filter feed for brine shrimps. Some of these birds have flown here from Turkey and Iran.
The joy of using a hide is that the birds soon became very used to it and took no notice that I was there.
If you ever wondered as a child what it would feel like to be invisible, this is it.
There's nothing better when you are filming than to be so close to wild birds without them minding.
Flamingos make such odd and interesting shapes, their bills adapted to feeding upside down.
That these birds are still doing well here, despite the huge new city right alongside them, is a tribute to the hard work of Kevin Hyland, the Dubai Wildlife Protection Officer without whom this filming would have been impossible.
Of course it's crucial when you are being trusted by wild birds not to abuse that trust. That means you don't go into or come out of the hide if something inconvenient happens, like the tide coming in.
By now it was lapping the underside of my seat and the birds had all gone - time to come out.
A lucky find - the skull of a spoonbill. What an extraordinary bill. We gave it to Kevin as a thank you for all his help.
Cities should always have wild places next to them to remind us that all our towers are built on sand.
Arabia's favourite animal, the camel was another subject of the shoot in the UAE.
Camel races are strange events. We filmed some with a Phantom high speed camera and borrowed some space on a tracking vehicle to travel alongside the running camels. Racing round the track-side road with a mad crowd of 4x4s all hooting at their camels was quite an experience.
The falconry sequence was filmed in the dunes at dusk.
The search for the perfect backdrop taught us a few things about how (not) to drive in soft sand.
For an hour or two close to sunrise and sunset the falconers exercise their birds before the desert becomes too hot for the falcons to fly.
I'm not a big fan of captive animals but falcons are such independent-minded birds and they're quite capable of leaving whenever they are flown.
It was clear that these birds had chosen to stay with their trainers.
In the evening we sat around the campfire hearing tales of the origin of falconry and the value it still has in taking people out of their buildings and air-conditioned cars to reconnect them with the desert.
Jordan:
Irrigated fields like this in Jordan are a magnet for migrating birds. Every morning it was fascinating to find it filled with yellow wagtails, chiffchaffs, redstart and many other passerines, as well as steppe buzzards and four species of harriers trying to catch them.
The buzzards and many of the smaller birds rode the irrigation arms around the field and bathed in the spray from the nozzles
The desert was really cold at dawn. Clearly it was even colder higher up because these halos around the sun were made by suspended ice crystals. They were the most complex halos I have ever seen.
Sundogs either side of the sun and three different halos and arcs around and through it.
The morning coffee was hot and very welcome. We were surrounded by reminders that people have been camping here for a very long time.
Two thousand years ago people passed this way carrying valuable Frankincense from Yemen to the Mediterranean. Near the places they camped they carved pictures on the rocks.
Some of them show animals long vanished from Arabia like this lion.
And this ostrich.
Mostly though they are images of camels. I love this guy's enormous hands.
And this I think is an archer hunting big cats judging by the huge looped tail of the one he's shot.
Blasts of sand and air caught us out while we were setting up the crane to film the carvings.
Not the easiest place to balance a crane - the present level of the sand must have fallen.
But passing groups of camels made a graphic connection between the ancient carvings and modern day.
They are still a good way to move around the desert.
At the end of our time in Jordan we had a day's filming in Petra, the extraordinary city carved from solid rock.
40,000 people once lived here but in time Petra was abandoned while the Bedouin's footloose lifestyle is the one which has survived.
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The only way to film the shearwaters from close to their own eye-level was to work from an inflatable boat but when humpback whales, which weigh more than thirty tonnes, came alongside they dwarfed the boat.
Photo courtesy Chadden Hunter.
Here's one reason to be wary of filming humpbacks from a small boat!
Photo courtesy Chadden Hunter.
There is a "making-of" clip about filming the shearwaters and whales for Programme One here.
Emperor penguins go to sea for many days to find food for their chicks. This one, returning after a fishing trip, has a very full belly.
John filmed the penguins leaping from the sea through small holes in the ice at camera speeds of up to 750 frames per second, slowing the action down 30 times.
There's a clip of the flying emperors here and another about the filming here
Photo courtesy Dylan Taylor
The same camera also worked underwater, on the end of a pole, giving some breathtaking views of the penguins in their element.
Photo courtesy Chadden Hunter.
The team camped for three weeks on the frozen sea near Cape Washington. Sleeping on ice a few feet thick had its compensations - sometimes Weddell seals would swim underneath the tents and their beautiful unearthly songs would filter up through the floor.
Emperor penguins are lovely neighbours. They would walk over to the tents in any weather and watch whatever was going on with the greatest interest.
To reach the edge of the sea ice, where the emperors leap out, meant travelling for several kilometres, weaving between these grounded icebergs then on through a maze of pressure-ridges of fractured ice.
It was often essential to walk ahead of the skidoos to mark crevasses with flags because the sea was not far below the surface and it was several hundred metres deep. In a months' time the ice would have broken up almost to where the penguins' chicks live.
Photo courtesy Chadden Hunter
Once they'd made it out of the water the adults still had a long walk ahead of them back to the colony to feed their chicks.
Just as other young birds must learn to fly young adelie penguins have to learn to swim. This one is almost ready, it just has to moult the last of its down. John travelled to the Fish Islands to the west of the Antarctic peninsula to film them taking the plunge.
The colony is close to the face of a glacier where ice tumbles into the sea. Of all penguins Adelies are found the furthest south.
Leopard seals gather where the young penguins will enter the sea.
The young penguins' inexperience makes them very vulnerable to these extraordinary predators.
There's a clip from the autumn episode of Frozen Planet of the young adelies taking the plunge here.
Much of the time the team travelled and lived aboard boats so they took a special interest in icebergs.
The extraordinary French yachtsman, Jérôme Poncet, took them to the Antarctic peninsula and South Georgia in his boat the Golden Fleece.
No-one guessed that it would be barbecue weather so close to the Antarctic circle. Loss of sea ice in a warming climate is a serious threat to the adelie penguins. They eat krill which feed and breed under the ice but around the Antarctic peninsula the annual ice is dwindling very quickly.
Bird Island is at the western tip of the sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia. The British Antarctic Survey have had a research base there for more then fifty years. Fur seals have been coming ashore to breed on the island's main beach for very much longer than that, which makes this a wonderful place to film them, but the males are aggressive and they make no concessions to people so it can be very tricky landing equipment on the pier or if you are in a hurry to reach the toilet by the flag pole.
Photo courtesy Miles Barton
See John's video report about filming the fur seals here.
Wandering albatrosses also breed on Bird Island but at best they manage to raise just one chick every two years. When John was there, in November and December, the year-old chicks were taking their first flights while some adult albatrosses were returning to the island to court or to find their long-established mate. Perfect in the air, with the longest wings of any bird, they none-the-less have great trouble landing. This male had nose dived into the tussock grass and then set off to find a female.
Courtship for wanderers entails showing off the magnificent span of their wings, calling and tapping their bills together. Later the pair will gently preen each others' heads, showing great trust as their bills have very sharp edges and hooked tips.
See John's video report about wandering albatross courtship here.
Svalbard, a group of islands in Arctic Norway, was the main location for filming polar bears and the other animals which share this landscape. Here there were large colonies of nesting eider ducks and Arctic terns which the bears raid for eggs and chicks. The terns put up a good defence but the ducks rely on camouflage. One bear flattened John's filming hide after sticking its head in through the window. Luckily he was elsewhere at the time!
See John's video report about filming the eiders and the bears here and another about what the bears get up to here.
Another boat, the Havsel, was home for seven weeks while the crew travelled right round Spitzbergen, Svalbard's largest island.
In mid-summer the midnight sun shines through waterfalls of meltwater cascading from an icecap. Even though there was no way up this sheer ice cliff and it's more than 100 kilometres long a polar bear was swimming along at the foot of it.
Most of the bears the crew met were, like this one, hunting for seals on the frozen sea.
In the autumn John also filmed polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay which is the furthest south they are found and, in contrast to icy Svalbard, seems a very unlikely home for them.
Enormous numbers of snow geese were passing through the area, leaving their Canadian breeding grounds to spend the winter in the southern part of the USA. Meanwhile the bears were eating wild gooseberries and waiting for the sea to freeze.
There's a clip of the bears play fighting and eating berries here.
See John's video report about the snow geese which pass through Hudson Bay in the autumn here.
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Swallows nest in the Laphroaig and Ardbeg whisky distilleries along the south east coast of Islay where the smell of peat and single malt hangs in the air.
Beside swallows the Ardbeg distillery also has nesting house martins, a thriving colony of house sparrows which enjoy the spilled barley and otters in the bay.
After their many years in the bonded stores the whisky casks lose some of their contents to evaporation. The whisky men call this the Angels' Share.
To their credit the distilleries tolerate swallows' nests and newly fledged swallows inside the distillery buildings - another form of the angels' share
These swallows were nesting near the Kilchoman distillery. Their chicks were on the point of flying but they face an uncertain future with September's equinoctal storms and their first flight to Africa ahead of them.
Basking sharks | August 2011
In calm and warm conditions the sharks' tiny planktonic food becomes concentrated in "lanes" in the sea and the giant fish cruise up and down them, filter feeding.
Sometimes this brings them very close to the shore. This one was only a few metres from the rocks.
Coll is a beautiful island in the Hebrides with wonderful panoramic views of Mull, Ardnamurchan and the Small Isles.
Three Minke whales swam by while John was scanning the area for groups of feeding seabirds.
While filming the sharks the team stayed with Innes and Caroline Henderson in the remarkable castle which they hope to restore. Innes is a creel fisherman with a great interest in basking sharks.
The Outer Hebrides in high summer | June 2011
On north Uist in mid June the sun barely sets. The white sand beaches and dunes of the RSPB's Balranald reserve are never more gorgeous and you need only turn around to enjoy the glory of the flowering machair.
Jesse Wilkinson, an extremely good naturalist, has been assisting with the filming of the series.
Photo courtesy Jesse Wilkinson
Sule Skerry | July 2011
It's a rare treat to visit Sule Skerry. Once every two or three years a group of birders camps on the island to ring the seabirds, especially the puffins which breed in their tens of thousands. In recent years gannets have started to nest there as well. Their choice of the sides of a low geo for their colony makes them easy to film.
Spring storm on the Isle of Mull | May 2011
The anemometer's maximum speed needle (at the bottom of the dial) was blown so far off the end of the scale that it probably would have read 110 knots if the numbers went that far. A rare strength even for a winter storm, and this one was in May!
John was filming at Ardalanish, a beautiful organic farm on the Isle of Mull when the storm blew in.
This picture doesn't do justice to the wind which made it hard to keep the camera on its tripod. After the storm the beach was covered two feet deep in broken kelp. Aeneas MacKay who farms Ardalanish collected it by tractor to fertilise his fields.
White tailed eagles on the Isle of Mull | Winter 2011
This male white tailed eagle was scanning the tideline for anything edible. The gulls were making a great deal of noise and followed him around until he returned to his perch in a tree.
The Isle of Mull is a real hotspot for eagles.
Photo courtesy Jesse Wilkinson.
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Boobies associate boats with fish so they often joined the team when they were setting out to film.
Film crews' boats must be a bit of a disappointment.
Filming in the tropics isn't always everything it's cut out to be - but at least the rain is warm.
These days many cameras are essentially computers with a lens on the front.
The Phantom extreme slow motion camera needs a laptop to control it as well so you can end up in the odd position of filming a view like this via a computer screen.]]>
Snow piles up on everything.
Mountain hares live up here too but are harder to spot than the ptarmigan whose calls and flight displays give them away.]]>
Photo courtesy Stewart Mayer]]>
Ewan McGregor Narrating 'Hebrides - Islands on the Edge'
"It's one of the most beautiful films I have seen".
John produced the second programme of the series and directed Ewan's narration for this programme. It was a real pleasure to see how much skill and intelligence Ewan brought to all the films.
Wild Arabia
Sixty Years in the Wild
John filmed with Sir David Attenborough and Lloyd and Rose Bucks' imprinted greylag geese on Loch Lomond for David's next BBC series, Sixty Years in the Wild. The series was shown in November 2012.
There is a clip here.
Frozen Planet Wins at Wildscreen
At the Wildscreen festival in Bristol on October 18th 2012 Frozen Planet was honoured with Panda awards for sound, best series and cinematography.
Nigel Wilkes of Panasonic UK presented the Cinematography Panda to John, Mark Smith, Doug Anderson and Hugh Miller, on behalf of the many cameramen in the team.
Frozen Planet Wins Emmy for Cinematography
In Los Angeles in September 2012 Frozen Planet 'Ends of the Earth' won the Primetime Creative Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for a Non-fiction Programme and the Emmys for Non-Fiction Picture Editing and Sound editing. The series also won the Outstanding Non-Fiction Series Emmy. Well done everyone!
Frozen Planet Wins BAFTAs for Cinematography, Editing & Sound
On 13th May 2012 Frozen Planet won Craft BAFTAs for cinematography, editing and sound. John and underwater cameraman Doug Anderson collected the Cinematography BAFTA.
Read more here.
The Winter episode has also won the Royal Television Society award for Cinematography and the series won Best Cinematography at the International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula as well as several other awards there.
Other News
John has recently been filming in Jordan and the UAE for the new BBC series Wild Arabia.
John's third radio series about filming wildlife, A View Through A Lens, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 every day between 26th -30th September 2011.
For more information see the entry in the main section of this website.
John and Mary-Lou have recently run a wildlife film-making training course for rangers from the National Trust for Scotland at their Threave Estate in Dumfries and Galloway. The Trust has some outstanding properties with world-class wildlife, like St Kilda and Mar Lodge. Other courses are planned.
On the evening of 8th April 2011 John gave an after-dinner speech to more than 600 people at the RSPB Members' Weekend at York University and in November he spoke at the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust's 50th Anniversary Celebration Event at Portsmouth Grammar School.
Read more here.]]>