402 EURAMERICA While the early books center on Durrell’s exuberant participation in physically capturing or bargaining for animals from local people, actual animal capture becomes less prominent in his television and film work, which instead focuses on his captivebreeding activities and conservation message. G. Durrell (2016) was not filmed in the field with a director until 1962, on an expedition to Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia, recounted in his book, Two in the Bush for the BBC series of the same name. He recounts only the challenges of capturing on film because no animals were physically taken on this trip. When film dictates the action, animals continue to provide impromptu delights, but they are not merely observed; they are managed as Buck’s were. The director Chris Parsons and cameraman Jim Saunders know the shots they want and determine the action, telling Durrell what to do to perform his role as animal friend. In New Zealand, upon seeing a large lake covered by nonnative black swans, they arrange for a boat to accost the swans so that hundreds rise up, making an impressive show of how vast the numbers of these invasive birds are, while Durrell comments on how they, imported by European settlers, have replaced the native ducks. No harm was done to the swans, but it was a staged shot to illustrate Durrell’s conservationist message in a graphic way. Durrell (2016) tells of the discomfort the team suffers going to see another rare bird, the tahake, in the wild. Only after several days hiking, do they manage to glimpse (and film) one before it flees, and only then does their guide tell them that he has raised two tahake chicks that are very tame, “almost domestic.” The cameraman who has been lugging heavy equipment over water-logged ground asks why they didn’t just go there in the first place. “‘It wouldn’t have been authentic,’ explains his director. ‘We wanted to show the bird’s real environment . . . get the feel of the place’” (76). This scenario raises some of the main issues of the filmed capture narrative. One is to show the animal interacting with its pristine (without sign of human influence) native habitat to prove its authenticity, even though signs of human presence are often edited
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODg3MDU=