“Weaving Your Way into your Lady’s Heart”

Many of you will have been glued to your TV sets in recent weeks, following the latest David Attenborough series, “One Life”, produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Each year we marvel at the quality of the camera work produced by the team and the intimate way in which they open up the natural world for us all to appreciate in a way in which has never been done before. The standard produced by the team as a whole sets the bench mark for wildlife film making the world over and, as a result of their work, people the world over have come to explore Africa, fallen in love with our landscape and grown to appreciate deeply our flora and fauna; all without leaving the comfort of their armchairs. The BBC team are frequent visitors to the Hoedspruit area, and have even been known to do location work on the Blue Canyon Conservancy. Indeed, last year I was treated to an “inside view” of how they produce these nature epics, when the BBC came to town looking for a likely location for the filming of the “weaver nest building sequence” that was featured in Episode 2 of the series. After having failed to locate a suitable nesting site during the previous week, I received a call to discuss a possible location that the film crew might use as they were down to their last week of scheduled filming. A location on the edge of the Blue Canyon Conservancy seemed the logical choice as I was able to show the team some nesting Southern Masked Weavers hard at work on the construction phase of their nests. The rest is history, and the extreme slow motion film footage, have you not seen it as yet, is unmissable!!