Getting a peek into the life of primates

The show on Sony BBC Earth ‘Primates’ throws the spotlight on the focuses on the natural history storytelling and focuses on a group of animals that fascinate and captivate human beings more than any other. The show portrays the emotional, thoughtful and caring and fearsome side of primates.

Gavin Boyland, who is an an award-winning producer making shows for both the BBC Natural History Unit and the independent sector, says spending time filming these primates taught him a great deal about how similar human beings are to primates. He explored the lesser known regions across Congo and many other places to get an insight into the life of primates. Gavin takes time off to chat with Metrolife about the show and more.

What made you feature Primates in the show?

At the BBC Natural History unit, we’ve made two other series looking at entire family group of animals. So previously, we did shows on the big cats. And prior to that sharks, and towards the end of making big cats, we were thinking, what could be the next animal family that we would look at. And the prime out, primates just really stood out. They’re a really charismatic group of animals. There’s such variety within the family, but they also have such interesting behavior. And the fact that primates also include humans in that family means that there’s lots of comparisons, we can make fun of our lives today as well. So, we thought they’re a really interesting group of animals in a rich subject matter for a series like this.

Why do you feel that they too are social animals?

So that’s one of the key characteristics that really defines the primate families, their sociability, the fact that they live in large groups. And that’s really interesting for us as filmmakers. Well, because within our primate troop, there was always something going on, there is always some sort of interaction that’s really interesting to film. And also, when we were doing the filming for the series, you get to know, specific individuals within groups, which made it really interesting for us to be able to tell those individual stories, as well as the kind of group dynamic that happens.

What was it like to spend time with these animals?

I studied primates at university, I did a master’s course at Cambridge University looking at primate behavior. So, they’ve always been a group of animals that I’ve spent a lot of time with, and really enjoyed being around them. But making a series like this enabled us to go and film primates across the world. And I was lucky enough to do a couple of the filming trips myself.

Any interesting experiences that you can recount?

One of the most amazing experiences I had during the making of this series, was to go to the Ranga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there we filmed mountain gorillas. And we spent two weeks every day trekking up to find the same gorilla family. And we’d spend an hour out two hours in amongst the group kind of building their behavior, we were focusing on the Civil War.

And it’s just an incredible experience to be in that environment and surrounded by a gorilla family and just getting to kind of understand the different individuals in the family and how they interact with each other. And they had some babies there that were just so cute to watch, play and stuff like that. So, it’s an incredibly privileged experience to be amongst such an amazing animal like a mountain gorilla.

What are some of the fascinating human-like similarities that you found?

Talking about that gorilla sequence, the behavior that we wanted to film is there was a scientific study that showed that gorilla Silverbacks who play more with their offspring tend to have more offspring in general. And that was the behavior that we wanted to see to see how this kind of the big silverback who’s got a reputation for being the kind of a quite an aggressive animal is actually really caring and tender and playful. So, this silverback, who we were filming had these two offspring’s. One was one year old one and the other was about two-year-old, and these two babies would literally follow this silverback around like he was the doting father and they couldn’t let him out of their sight. And whenever he’d stopped, they’d be clambering over him and it was just really beautiful. See how playful and how tender he was with these babies, which is very different to the kind of flawed idea.