BBC Earth has uploaded a heartwarming clip showing a curious chimpanzee adopting one of its animatronic spy cameras in the shape of a tortoise.
Captured in a forest in Senegal, a family of chimpanzees shows great interest in the spy tortoise. One five-year-old chimp in particular becomes possessive of the robot and drags it off into his bed.
“He’s torn between using it as a pillow and giving it a cuddle,” says narrator David Tennant. “It’s somewhere between a toy and a pet.”
The five-year-old has to fight off other members of his family for ownership of the toy which is unusual since chimpanzees are not known to possess items.
The clip is from a 2017 PBS episode of Spy in the Wild which is billed as “one of the most innovative natural history series ever presented” but was recently uploaded to YouTube.
In the second series, the robot tortoise camera went a step further and actually gave birth to “camera eggs” that captured what it is like to be attacked by vultures looking for a quick meal.
The clip above features three “spy” creatures in all: a drone disguised as a vulture captures the incredible turtle swarm from above, the spy turtle shows the process from up close, and then the clutch of camera eggs captures what it’s like for the baby turtles that never get the chance to hatch.
The Spy in the Wild series eventually evolved into Spy in the Ocean which saw a spy camera disguised as a mudskipper attempt to seduce a female mudskipper in a courtship battle.
Spy in The Wild producer Rob Pilley told Televisual that it is an “industrial process” to build the animatronic animals that film the show, encompassing robotics, programming, and aesthetics.
Inside the spy creatures are remote-controlled miniature cameras, shooting in 4K, and often hidden in the eye sockets of the animatronics.
Spy in The Wild producer Matthew Gordon said the cameras come from a wide range of manufacturers but have been stripped down and modified to fit inside the spy creatures.
The producers say that deploying such expensive camera equipment in the wild can be an extremely stressful process, with producers fearful that it will be destroyed in an instant by suspicious animals.
The robotic animals are not the only devices filming each scene. Up to 10 cameras at a time — from boulder-cams to dung-cams — were also placed in situ during the filming of Spy in The Wild to record footage. There is also a long-lens camera recording footage.
“We can cut between them to get lots of different angles, which you can’t do in natural history very often,” executive producer John Downer tells Televisual.
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