What it's like to film wild lions in the dark
Videographers gathered new insights about how the natural world is responding to human activity.
It was pitch black on the African savanna when Bill Markham figured out a lion was staring at the Jeep he was sitting in.
Markham, a longtime producer of nature documentaries, was in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park with a small team of photographers and biologists for the filming of Night On Earth. It’s a six-part Netflix series that showcases elephants, polar bears, elegant birds and jungle insects during the night, a time when few human observers have been able to study wildlife. New camera technology has since made it possible for naturalists to sift through the darkness to observe a range of new behaviors never seen in the wild.
That night vision also made it possible for Markham to look into a monitor sitting in the back of a truck to see that a lion was not far away.
“You can see it staring at you with this intensity that you never see in the day,” he says now.
“The hair gets up on the back of your neck a bit. It’s a visceral, primal excitement and fear. You need to then say ‘I’m a professional person and I can’t have fear now,’ but it’s quite a thing.”
Videographers captured orangutans eating at night, and confirmed that cheetahs hunt zebras and compete with lions for resources. At times, the filming process required wading through crocodile-infested waters, spending the night in a tree and fending off street monkeys in Mumbai.
“We had a team of crew in a cave where there were vampire bats looking for blood,” Markham said. “One cameraman felt something in his lap and it felt like a bat, and it was only a rat, and that counted as a relief.”
Night On Earth crews traveled through the world to capture scenes that have proven valuable to field biologists at a time when a range of species are adapting to living in the dark to avoid human disturbance. Birds, antelope and beavers, for instance, are among the dozens of creatures shifting to become more nocturnal, according to a 2018 University of Berkeley study. (Mammals only switched to daytime activity after the dinosaurs died out, according to a growing body of research, suggesting people are now the world’s “ubiquitous terrifying force.”)
Human interference in the natural world has created a “general sadness” among the tight-knit class of specialists who have dedicated their lives to creating nature documentaries, Markham says.
Areas of the world that were thriving with wildlife only recently have become progressively worse-off. Efforts to slow the widespread, ongoing sixth extinction — like Philadelphia’s decision to dim the lights to avoid disrupting migratory bird routes — are admirable, but too limited.
“If you look at South Africa on Google Maps, the nature preserves have straight lines. It’s not natural,” Markham says. “It’s utterly depressing to start looking at those kinds of things. We go to amazing places where you do feel lots of things and there’s an urge to fight back.
“The most we can do is try to keep people up to speed and informed about these things,” he added. “There’s things that happen all the time that we just don’t know about.”
How Karen O wrote ‘Maps’
Imagine dating someone as cool as Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and then blowing her off for a job.
Some time in the early ‘00s, Angus Andrew, founder of the band Liars, bailed on Karen for reasons that are lost to time. The result, though, was “Maps,” one of the greatest songs of the era and still an absolute-must at any karaoke party.
Whatever happened, rumor has it that “Maps” stands for “My Angus Please Stay,” which explains lyrics like “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.”
She verified the story during a 2007 interview with NME, saying that her tears in the music video were authentic.
“My boyfriend at the time was supposed to come to the shoot,” she said. “He was three hours late and I was just about to leave for tour…I didn’t think he was even going to come and this was the song that was written for him.”
Lyrics for the song came after Karen O heard guitarist Nick Zinner noodling on the intro riff, the words coming together in minutes as part of a kind of artistic daydream.
“I’m endlessly curious about that song because it’s just strange to me,” she said in 2019.
“It’s a long song, and there’s just not a lot of bands that have one of their biggest songs as a love song. So I’m pretty stoked about that, too.”
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