Wildlife wonderman

HE'S come face-to-face with a gigantic sloth bear in a Sri Lankan cavemouth and survived a 45-minute polar bear attack on his perspex hide on the ice, but I have to ask cameraman and presenter Gordon Buchanan about the impact on him of filming Barnacle geese chicks leaping 400ft to almost certain death from the cliffs at Svalbard in the Arctic.

"A lot of people ask me if there isn't some better way that these birds can raise their young. If there was, they'd be doing it," says Buchanan, who will be presenting his Lost Adventures show at Durham Gala Theatre on Monday.

"With wildlife it's all just a struggle to survive and for these birds the benefits of flying to the Arctic, where there aren't many predators, is the best place to go. There are foxes, wolves and polar bears, but some of the chicks are going to survive," says the man who captures award-winning footage for the BBC. Fortunately, the Barnacle geese in Sir David Attenborough's Life Story series did a little better than when Buchanan visited.

He recalls one pair of adult chicks who nested in the wrong place and filmed nine chicks leaping to their deaths. "If you look at it as an evolutionary end product you can be fairly dispassionate, but on this occasion the cliff was too high and there was a raging tide and over 30 seconds every single one of these chicks leapt to their doom. Your heart does go out to the birds, but you hope next year they will think more carefully," he says.

Buchanan recently won an award for TV's The Bear Family And Me and gained 2.3m viewers for his The Snow Wolf Family And Me shown on BBC2 last December. Travelling the world, the married father-of-two says that being chased by bears and elephants is probably when he's been most scared.

"I think a lot of people think my job is inherently dangerous, but you build up a knowledge of the animals. Big cats are quite often scaredy cats themselves and they will run away. The trouble is, doing my job you're sneaking around in forests, trying to keep quiet, and you can't always tell what is behind the next tree.

"I walked up to a cave in search of a sloth bear and thought there couldn't be one and then walked in to find a huge bear barging out. Fortunately, it got such a fright that it ran off to the side. In fact some of the funniest occasions have been after being chased by a big scary animal because we do have fears like not being able to pay the mortgage, but the primal fear is of being eaten or injured by a big animal. When you come up to a big animal that fear is replaced by relief... and then hilarity," he says.

On the perspex hide incident Buchanan explains that polar bears are one of just a few animals who regard us as their "chicken in the basket".

"The whole idea of the hide was getting close to observe polar bears for the BBC and we used it and none of them had been really interested at all. There was just this one bear, who are all individuals like people, and it decided there was something inside it thought it could eat. And it was testing all the weak spots of the hide," says the cameraman, who admits he was seized by controlled terror. Without a gun between the BBC film team his fate lay with a colleague starting up a skidoo or snowmobile to startle the attacker away with the engine noise.

"That was going to be the plan. Start up the engine and drive towards it," Buchanan says.

His title of Lost Adventures came from the recent series of BBC Lost Land of... where camera teams went in search of rare or unknown species.

"Having done this job for 25 years the project that most interested me was about Borneo, the jaguar, tiger and volcano. A lot of the time you go to film one particular aspect of behaviour. With lost land we knew the destination, but not what you were going to find," says Buchanan, who was in the team who discovered that tigers were surviving in the Himalayas at 4,000m above sea level.

"This was the first time that camera traps were used en masse to target one species and we were blown away by the results. We decided not to include the yeti in the film because we thought they would be too much of a distraction," he jokes.

Buchanan particularly enjoys the question and answer side of his presentations and is delighted to see quite a few young faces in the audience.

"At the end of each half there's a 20-minute q&a and it's nice to talk to people rather than talk at them. It's great to meet the TV fans of the programmes I make. It's really rewarding to see so many younger people turn up because I did think it would be mostly older ones, in their 50s and above," Buchanan says.

He's just returned from India after spending a month to capture a four-minute section for a new BBC series which is due to be seen in 2016. "It could well be the most expensive wildlife series ever made. What the BBC always wants to do is show people things they've never seen before. It's certainly the most ambitious programme that's been made to date. We did pretty well to get four minutes, the worst case scenario was one or two shots."

I can't let Buchanan go without asking him what's the story about coming from Tobermory. "I haven't been asked that one before," he laughs. "I was living in Mull when Balamory started filming and friends' kids were involved. I asked why the BBC was making a kids' show all the way out here. It was a huge success and subsequently the island was besieged by families all looking slightly bored because there is nothing more than the brightly-coloured houses, some nice pubs and lovely hills. There's no Balamory world."

• Monday, Durham Gala Theatre. Box Office: 0300-026-6600 or galadurham.co.uk