Life Lessons

Growing up is tough, especially if you’re a baby animal in the wild. We take a look at the making of one of the BBC’s latest series, which follows the first steps of six species.

- Ben Hoare

That was a bit of a thumping heart moment,” says Sue Gibson, looking up from her viewfinder to face the camera that’s filming her while she films macaques. It was for the viewers back home, too. Ace wildlife film-maker Sue had just bagged a sequence where a pack of salivating feral dogs chase a group of macaques through the leafy grounds of a Sri Lankan temple. Among them is the ridiculously cute, wrinkle-browed newborn Jezir, one of six infant stars in BBC Two series Animal Babies: First Year on Earth. Will he make it up the tree to safety in time?

Jezir is a toque macaque, an endangered species named for the wispy Trumpian toupées worn by the adults. While Jezir and his mother scarper – with him clinging onto her belly for dear life – the voice-over tells us that as mum is an alpha female, she is given precedence by the troop’s subordinate macaques when it comes to escaping up trees from hungry hounds. Amazingly, they wait to let the high-ranking pair go first. Animal Babies, narrated by Nigerian-born British actor Wunmi Mosaku, is full of surprising facts like this.

Did you know that, when just 12 weeks old, spotted hyena cubs have to master the rules of a complex hierarchy in which they must treat every clan member correctly, with either reverence or defiance? That, to begin with, a sea otter can’t dive, because its furry ‘babygrow’ is simply too buoyant? That as soon as Arctic fox cubs see their first patch of snow, they instinctively start practising the balletic vole-pounce? That there are only 50 baby mountain gorillas alive at any time? Or that one of the many hazards facing a naive young African elephant is petulant kicks from grouchy elder siblings whose personal space it has just invaded?

Growing pains