麻豆约拍

By Jo Avery, Director on Seven Worlds, One Planet

Just South of Tuscon Arizona, near the Mexico-USA border is a very special pond. It’s small and unassuming but its year-round water provides a lifeline for countless desert animals. For local creatures it represents their only source of water in the surrounding Sonoran desert. For many migrants it’s a vital rehydration point on their journey north or south.

As a field director on the North American episode of Seven Worlds One Planet I knew we’d need to target these wildlife hot-spots if we were to stand any chance of filming America’s elusive desert animals.

So it was here that cameraman Paul Klaver and I set up to try to film an icon of the American wild west, the roadrunner.

Known to most of the world simply as a cartoon character, roadrunners are a remarkable desert specialist. They can spend an entire lifetime without drinking, obtaining all their water from their food, and can hunt and breed year round in temperatures reaching 50°C.

Our aim was to film them chasing down prey, but given roadrunners can run at over 20mph through dense cactus thickets, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

Roadrunners are also very territorial - not surprising when you realise how difficult it is for them to find their prey in this hostile and extreme environment – so they defend large areas of desert for themselves in order to survive.

In a good summer, the adults can raise more than one brood. Unluckily for us, even though we had arrived at the start of the hot summer, just a few days before we arrived, the well known local adult roadrunner had just finished his first brood of four fledglings and started brooding another clutch.

Sadly, this second nest was over a fence which read in large red letters accompanied by picture of a large shotgun ‘strictly no entrance’. With this adult male now unapproachable, we were left with his new more timid young of the year to film.

A little wary at first, we spent morning after morning approaching the pond before sunrise and keeping a low-profile in their presence for most of the sweltering day. Eventually we gained the bird’s confidence and they even began appearing from amongst the cactus at the sound of our voice.

One roadrunner seemed particularly inquisitive, ‘Bent Beak’ or ‘BB’ as she became known. She and her brother seemed happy in our presence and often searched for food only metres away. Although not the most experienced of hunters, we did eventually capture some fantastic moments.

I miss them and their warm ‘coo-coo’ calling to each other, the confidence they began to place in us was very special.

But I don't miss the early mornings, hot days and running through cactus – even with the snake gaiters the Australian Seven Worlds team kindly lent us - those spines, if you stub your toe on a cactus while following a Roadrunner’s chase, really do hurt!