INTERVIEW: Bertie Gregory reveals the ‘Secrets of the Penguins’
Photo: A tiny chick barely peeks out of its parent’s protective pouch. Photo courtesy of National Geographic / Alex Ponniah / Provided by press site with permission.
Bertie Gregory has built an international career of documenting the many different stories of the animal kingdom. He has headed to the Pacific Northwest to chase sea wolves along the coast, and he’s found polar bears up north in the cold environs of Hudson Bay, Canada. Now he’s back in a frigid environment to search for penguins, and his travels are documented on the new Nat Geo series Secrets of the Penguins, premiering Sunday, April 20, on the TV channel, with streaming available on Hulu and Disney+.
“There are a lot of choices in the animal kingdom,” Gregory said in a recent Zoom interview. “To be honest, I was pretty daunted when I was first asked to be involved because I film penguins a lot. I know how to film them. They’ve been filmed a lot before — March of the Penguins, lots of iconic documentaries. I think people are quite familiar with them, and I know firsthand that they are very hard to film. They live in very challenging places, and when you call a series Secrets of the Penguins, you’re setting expectations high.”
Gregory ended up spending two years of his life searching for those secrets. He went to several environments and countries to find various species of penguins. In the series, he’s up in the Galápagos Islands, and he’s also down in Antarctica — and everywhere in between. His efforts paid off with stunning footage that was edited into three episodes.
“I thought I knew penguins; I was so wrong,” he said. “I had my mind blown continuously on the two years of filming. Just when I thought they’d hit their limit with a particular situation, they would do something that I never expected, so we really did reveal a whole bunch of secrets. It was magic. In terms of why penguins: They live in amazing places. They’re indicators of the health of ecosystems, and they do crazy things. One of the other key things about them is they are very emotional compared to a more traditional wildlife documentary, and that is not because we’ve Disney-ified or whatever. It’s real. The reason that it’s so much more intimate and emotional is because normally when we’re filming wildlife, we need to be far away, hidden in a bush and with a long zoom lens. When you’re filming a human documentary, trying to get the emotion of the personality, you never hide in the bush and film them far away. You want to be close, and because of the biology of penguins, they in most places have basically no terrestrial, land-based predators. They’re not scared of people, so we can be pretty close without disturbing their natural behavior. So we can use completely different camera techniques, and that is why it feels so real and raw.”
Gregory, a BAFTA and Emmy Award winner, is not simply documenting the fun and fleeting nature of penguins — and let’s be honest, they are the comedians of the animal kingdom. The documentarian was also searching for the more serious aspect of their current status, which is that they are greatly impacted by the negative alterations of the planet due to climate change.
“Everywhere I go at the moment the effects of humanity, whether or not that be climate change or other issues, are very clear,” Gregory said. “I think what’s particularly powerful with the struggle of the emperor penguins is that they are quite unique in the animal kingdom in that their only threat is climate change. Most animals climate change is affecting them, but there’s also another very immediate issue, whether that be deforestation or poaching or overfishing. Because they are so remote, it’s just climate change. Most emperor penguins will never meet a human, so most of these emperors will never meet the cause of their greatest threat. And I think that’s a pretty profound thing. They might live far away from most people, but our story and their story are intertwined. We want to live in a world that has penguins because they’re really cute and funny and cool, but also they are indicators of ocean health. And we need a healthy ocean for everything we do, so, yeah, we better take notice.”
Episode one focuses on those emperor penguins, and the finale of their story is quite remarkable. Gregory said he believes the team captured a behavior that has never been documented by TV cameras before. Their goal was to film young chicks fledging for the first time — essentially heading out from the protection of the adults in the colony and experiencing the world for the first time. The penguins typically head to the edge of the sea ice and jump 1-2 feet into the icy water below.
Not this time.
“We weren’t actually able to film that behavior because we started to, that was our plan, but the sea ice that they were jumping off of started to break apart,” Gregory said. “And it was too dangerous for us to be there, so I was thinking, well, we don’t have an ending for the opening episode. We’re in big trouble. I was literally flying the drone around because I had nothing else to do, and I flew around this corner along the ice shelf and was presented with that scene: several hundred chicks walking to the edge of that huge 50-foot ice cliff. It’s never been filmed for television, and so we had no idea if they could survive a fall from that height. Just to put that into context: Those birds have never been in the ocean. They have never even seen the ocean. Their entire world up until this point has been this flat, beachless, 2D, icy landscape, and they took a wrong turn, arrived in that spot.”
Gregory was watching them, and then they started to jump off that 50-foot cliff.
“We had lived alongside the colony for the previous two months,” he said. “We got to know those penguins. You gain an emotional attachment to them. I was really worried for them, but incredibly they survived, not only survived but popped up and were like, ‘Oh yeah, the ocean. I know how to do this,’ and then headed out for the horizon to become fully fledged adult emperor penguins, an extraordinary thing to witness.”
Yet another secret revealed.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Secrets of the Penguins, from filmmaker Bertie Gregory, premieres Sunday, April 20, on National Geographic, with streaming available on Hulu and Disney+. Click here for more information.
