The BBC's Blue Planet returns to our screens for a second season on October 29. The new season took five years to complete, with a fresh cast of marine life from every corner of the globe. In August 2016, BBC producer and photographer Jonathan Smith went to the Arctic with the task of tracking down walrus.
His group of four sailed from Svalbard and headed north. And kept going. At this time of year, when the sea ice is low, walruses congregate in large colonies on land. A lack of ice meant the team were able to sail further north than expected. "I thought that it would be hard to find walrus but actually even finding ice was difficult to begin with" Smith says.
As producer of the opening episode of Blue Planet II, Smith knew what he wanted the shoot to provide. "Originally, the goal of the trip was to film mother walrus with their pups and show the challenges of the frozen arctic," he says. "But what you can never be prepared for is the behaviour that you will get."
The team was filming a colony of walruses from afar one afternoon when a polar bear appeared in the distance. "As it got closer we were able to view it through the telescopic lens of their Cineflex camera system," Smith says. "We assumed that it was looking for one of the many pups in the colony."
As the bear closed in, the walruses got spooked. As one ran, a chain reaction began and the entire colony rushed into the sea. "This is the moment that was captured in this still image" says Smith, who was only a few hundred metres from the action. The walruses were able to safely remain in the sea, out of reach of the polar bear.
The team returned over several days to work more closely with the walrus colony. "I ventured into this shoot thinking that a walrus was a big brute of an animal, because this is how they have so often been portrayed," Smith says. "My eyes were very much opened to a very different animal when I actually began to spend time with them".
"A walrus mum, it appears, is actually one of the most beautifully caring and attentive mothers in the entire natural world."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
