Jaguar: Eater Of Souls

THE FILM Wildlife photographer Nick Gordon can’t imagine any experience surpassing his first encounter with a wild jaguar - arguably the most beautiful and evocative of the world’s big cats and certainly the most seductive, secretive and elusive. He was hiding in a pit, filming expansa terrapins in northern Brazil, when one of the magnificent creatures ambled out of the forest. "It felt like an electrical charge had gone through my body - but typically I’d used up my last foot of film on the terrapins," Nick recalls. Because it is so rare, so shy and so difficult to find, the jaguar is one of the most difficult animals on the planet to film and getting the sequences he needed to complete this definitive study of South America’s most evocative species took Nick seven years. "We went to the far corners of Amazonia chasing wild jaguars and had some spectacular experiences," he recalls. "Very few people on this planet are privileged enough to see a wild jaguar. I only had eight or nine sightings in seven years – which shows how incredibly difficult they are to tackle as a film subject." Making this programme about the animals was the final and crowning achievement of his ten-year mission to film the amazing creatures of the Amazon rainforest. Nick’s last Amazonian quest took him to one of the forest’s remotest regions, 500 kilometres (800 miles) from the nearest point of civilisation, to a place which - because of its heat, humidity and primitive conditions - he reckoned was ‘hell on earth’. There he made contact with ‘The Jaguar People’ - Amerindians who believe that this big cat consumes the souls of their dead - and had amazing encounters with both the tribespeople and the animal itself. He also found himself the surrogate parent to two baby jaguars which were taken to the Brazilian city of Manaus after their mother was killed - probably by poachers. These ‘orphans of the forest’ grew up with Nick and were raised by him for three years before Nick had to part company with them. "I was sad to say goodbye to the days when I could cuddle one of them in my hammock at night or swim in the creek with them clinging to me – but their claws were getting too big and dangerous." Nick recalls. "We could never seriously consider re-introducing them to the wild, however, because they lost their fear of humans. "But, fortunately, I found a home for them in huge jaguar enclosures with a lake at a government-funded zoo park and they have since successfully bred. Of course it would have been better had they never been taken from the wild in the first place. But, sadly, that is not the reality in Amazonia." The Matis people - who wear facial ornaments as marks of admiration for the jaguar’s hunting prowess, which they hope to emulate by taking on its identity - have shared a dark past with the great cat itself. Both were almost wiped out when outsiders arrived to slaughter jaguars for their glorious skins from the 1920s to the 1960s. For the hunters carried with them diseases such as influenza - against which the Matis had no natural defences. The irony is that the surviving Indians were saved from extinction by the modern medicines of the intruders. The dark days of the skin trade, too, have mostly faded into history but the forest of Amazonia is the last refuge for both the jaguar and the ‘Jaguar People’. The life of the Matis involves many rituals and ceremonies which, to us, seem truly bizarre. In one of them filmed by cameraman Nick Gordon, a giant nocturnal monkey frog - which the ‘Jaguar People’ know has special powers - is caught. For a highly-toxic liquid secreted by its skin is an important element in their preparations for hunting. The Mati collect some of this mucous from the frog - which is then released unharmed - and then have it dabbed into wounds caused to their biceps by stabbing with burning sticks. The toxin rapidly enters the hunters’ bloodstream, causing them to vomit violently in less than a minute and then go into an hallucinogenic stupor. Although the effect - a sort of body-cleansing - is stupefying, the Mati believe that this ritual sharpens their senses while hunting in a potentially dangerous forest. After leaving the Matis and Amazonia, Nick moved on to Madagascar to work on a new film on lemurs and Nile crocodiles. "I tend to get itchy feet and I’d love to go off to the Arctic," he says. "Despite all my time in the Amazon, I’m actually a cold climate person and I hate the heat!"     THE FILM-MAKER London-born Nick Gordon is one of the great adventurers among natural history film-makers. After an education in Lancashire and later North Wales, he worked initially as a chartered surveyor and auctioneer - but joining a sub-aqua club in Blackpool and making a first dive off the Isle of Man triggered a new career plan. "I can never forget the moment I first put my head under the water and entered this totally new and beautiful world with its fabulous sea life," he recalls. "Although I'd never had a camera of any description, I knew from that first moment that I wanted to film it - not just photograph it but to capture the moving images. "My whole life from that point was consumed with getting where I am today." But it was some time before Nick got his break in television - and it had nothing to do with natural history. A BBC director saw some of his work and offered him a job as a news cameraman in Manchester. Nick still had ambitions to film wildlife but knew that working as a newsman provided some of the best training he could get. "It doesn't matter if it's a one-minute news film or a one-hour SURVIVAL documentary, the principles of telling a story in the available time are the same," he says. Spare-time was spent diving and filming wildlife and opportunities began to open up for him in the mid-1980s, starting with films for the RSPB and an animal rights group and followed by a contract to film dolphins in China for an American network. Then came his first association with SURVIVAL - shooting sequences for a film on snakes - which took him to South America and sparked an abiding love affair with that continent. Nick’s first big SURVIVAL commission was a one-hour Special about the giant otter, filmed in Guyana. It had all the ingredients that Nick loves best - South America, rainforest, underwater filming, remarkable animals and a cracking story line. While filming the otters in an Amazonian river, Nick felt something bump against his legs. Looking down, he was somewhat concerned to see the head of an anaconda emerging! Rainforest and otters were also important elements of Nick's next big project. But this time the location was Sierra Leone in West Africa from which he and his team eventually had to flee for their lives after the paradise island of Tiwai became a war zone. Back in South America, the forests of Venezuela yielded the tale of the world's largest spider and a tribe of Amerindians who both worship and eat the Goliath tarantula . True to form, Nick made sure he got the whole story - by joining in the Indians' weird ceremonials, which included a feast of barbecued giant tarantulas. Over the border in Brazil, he discovered another opportunity to film an indigenous people who enjoy a unique relationship with their environment. This resulted in two more SURVIVAL Specials - one about golden white tassel ear marmosets (GREMLINS: FACES IN THE FOREST) and the other on spider monkeys (WEB OF THE SPIDER MONKEY). Both were shown in December 1998. Back