Scots wildlife filmmaker Gordon Buchanan has admitted he’s best known for “maybe the most stupid thing I’ve ever done” – sitting in a tiny box while a polar bear tried to get inside to eat him.
Buchanan famously came face to face with an 80 stone female polar bear that tried to make a snack of him as he filmed the animals in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.
He was filming from inside a metal cube for a BBC series called The Polar Bear Family And Me, when the enormous animal attacked.
He escaped unhurt despite there being only a thin layer of perspex between them.
Buchanan, 53, told an audience in Edinburgh how the animal had been nicknamed Fat Freda because of its huge size.
And he revealed he had encountered the animal earlier — when it came to the film crew seeking biscuits.
He said: “It was a very big close call and it was terrifying. You’re a quarter inch of perspex away from an animal that actually wants to eat you.
“Well, the thing is, we’d seen this polar bear around for a few days. She’d stuck her head in the port hole of our ship one day when the cook was making some biscuits.
“I said to her ‘what did you do?’ and she said ‘I gave it a biscuit’ – highly illegal.
“But this polar bear, we’d christened her Fat Freda, because she was the biggest that we’d seen.
“I think because she was in such great physical condition, I think she thought, ‘ok I’m going to expend a bit of energy trying to get this thing that I’ve never eaten before’. I mean, I have become best known for maybe the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”
Buchanan has previously told how the bear was not expected to show much interest in him, and insisted he would not put himself in the same position now.
Adding: “I wouldn’t do that again… Inwardly I was terrified because it wasn’t safe, there were certain things that could have gone wrong that we hadn’t anticipated until I was in that situation.”
Buchanan was discussing his book In The Hide: How the Natural World Saved My Life with A Kick Up the Arts podcaster Nicola Meighan.
He has spent his life exploring the natural world and hunting for footage of elusive creatures. But when he first sought advice from a school careers officer on the island of Mull, he said he was advised he should be a nanny.
He said: “I was 17 at school and didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. Based on quite an extensive questionnaire, he said I should be a nanny – like Nanny McPhee or possibly Cat in the Hat.
“The second time I saw him, when I was just about to leave school, I told him I was interested in wildlife filmmaking – that I’d met a wildlife filmmaker and I thought this was the perfect job. He looked at my credentials and his big rolodex of jobs in the world and he got to the very end, at the Z.
“He said ‘you could be a zookeeper and you don’t need any grades for that’.
“I was like ‘but I want to be out in the wild seeing these things. As luck would have it I was offered a job by the wildlife cameraman. That was the golden ticket I’d been handed to pack in school and go off to spend a year and a half in Sierra Leone.”
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