When's a Dog a Croc?
In 2007 and early 2008, I was working as cameraman on a documentary for a wildlife film production company. I travelled to a remote African location four times for several months, to document the story of a pack of five painted (wild) dogs being relocated to a remote island in a lake. The dogs had been individually rescued from poachers’ snares or had been orphaned because their pack had been mauled by lions or killed by traffic. So these five dogs were new to each other.
They were placed on an island where they had no competition from hyenas nor any threat from lions. Only ample food supply in the way of 80-plus waterbuck and over 100 impalas. And the occasional elephant, a pod of hippos, one civet cat, birds and some crocs swimming around. They took to each other well, and bonds soon formed.
The plan was to put these two young females and three males on the island for a year, observe them closely (as part of the documentary; and also scientifically, each dog having a collar which could be tracked with a portable device) and eventually hope they would build a den and have pups in May/June 2008.
The story had been scripted and sold along the lines of: “Wild dogs relocated and conquer a remote island, have a large litter of pups, are transported back to the mainland and the population of their species flourishes once again”. The production company edited a snappy trailer from my first footage, and sold the scripted idea to Animal Planet and various smaller broadcasters in Europe. I was put up as cameraman on the rather risky quest to do justice to the story. I filmed the introduction of characters (animal and human) in April 2007, the relocation in August, an update (in stormy weather) in December; and then we waited for the good news...
Cut to April 2008:
I get an urgent phone call on Wednesday. How soon can I get to the island? The alpha pair of dogs are reported missing. Missing? Off an island two x two kilometres?!?! With over five kilometres separating it from the nearest shore?!?! Even without tracking equipment we had always been able to find them. How could this be?
Friday I got there, on my own, with some hefty HD kit. We searched for a week, on land and from a boat patrolling the island. No sign. No carcass anywhere in the scrub; no collar laying around.
Second last day, we manage a helicopter to track from the air. We pass over the island several times, even to the mainland should the two dogs miraculously have swum over... Nothing. We return – and on the final pass, the tracker shouts and points: a ‘moving’ signal down below from the collar of the alpha-male dog! We hone in, circle lower: it’s a strong signal! And it’s coming from... the water! We follow the swimming dog, except – it’s not a dog...
It turns out to be a rather large crocodile who’s managed a meal in the form of our main character! And the collar is still inside, and thus accounts for the ‘moving signal’…
Scripts for wildlife films are no guarantee, obviously. I don’t know exactly what the plan is now: I haven’t heard from the production company for a while!
More importantly, the three remaining dogs are still on the island, apparently doing well (one female among them, so all is not lost), despite the tragic loss of their former alpha pair of male and female. Perhaps the footage from four trips will be edited together to tell this tragic story of dogs struggling to survive, being eaten by hungry crocs, but rearing a litter nonetheless in 2009...?
I sit eagerly by the phone...
Pieter Huisman
Bio note...
Pieter is a Dutch wildlife documentarian who’s planning to emigrate to New Zealand with his wife and son sometime in 2009. He’s already a member of the Techos Guild.
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