Ahead of his new, biggest ever live tour, Lions and Tigers and Bears with Gordon Buchanan which heads to York on February 27, he shares some of his experiences with those iconic majestic animals.
The show will see him recount tales from his thrilling encounters with some of nature’s most fascinating animals. He’s recently been on screens fronting BBC’s Big Cats 24/7, and has started filming series two in Botswana.
Gordon has spent more than 30 years travelling to some of the world’s wildest environments, to capture the lives of Mother Nature’s greatest beasts on camera.
While the title may conjure memories from The Wizard Of Oz, Gordon promises there’ll be no fiction on his tour as he shares the secrets of these iconic creatures, as well as the mud, sweat and tears involved in documenting their lives.
“It’s so exciting to have the opportunity to tour the country, to talk to thousands of people about these incredible, charismatic animals,” Gordon said.
“I don’t have a bucket list but I’m willing to bet that most people have encounters with these animals on their lists in some way or another. I enjoy touring and being able to give people a sense of what it is like to share that world… Getting up close in the Arctic, how fast you need to run to escape a sloth bear and what it’s like to bottle feed grizzlies.”
Taking inspiration from The Wizard Of Oz, ‘Lions and tigers and bears… Oh my!’ – Gordon’s certain there is more to mankind’s interest in these creatures than meets the eye.
“I know we might laugh at that line from The Wizard Of Oz, but they really are the animal kingdom’s iconic creatures – and are perceived to be these predators who are out to get us,” Gordon explained of his tour title.
“I have always been fascinated by these incredible animals that I’ve spent most of my career getting to know. They’re among the biggest animals we share the planet with and there’s that primal fear of big animals with teeth and claws which dates back to the cave man – when our biggest fears weren’t job security and mortgage repayments, but actually surviving the big animals with teeth and claws.
“Going back into pre-history, humans lived alongside lions and bears – they were here living alongside humans 40,000 years ago. Our great great great great great great great great grandparents would have been living alongside them with their knowledge and fear to keep them safe.
“I think we turn to horror movies today because of our need to be scared of something, to be primalyl fearful of something. Fears in modern life – job, home and money security – aren’t natural in our evolution, fear was and should be about surviving animals eating us. Horror movies retain that kick for us.
“But funnily, these animals are also welcomed into our homes. Go into any family home and there will be a number of bears… We still have a big box of teddies from when the kids were small, and there are lions and tigers among them as well.
“Bears have infiltrated our homes and we have welcomed them in. On TV, they’re still enduring favourites… Paddington, Rupert, Fozzie, even Gentle Ben way back on TV – not that that featured a job as such, but I remember watching and thinking that’s what I want to be, up close with the bear, and it represented wild parts of the world for me.”
Hailed as Scotland’s own David Attenborough, Gordon Buchanan has shaped his career around documenting the lives of majestic bears and big cats.
He’s been seen on screens as part of the teams capturing their lives, including Big Cat Diary, Lost Land Of The…, the Family & Me series, and Our Changing Planet – with his most recent adventures as part of the BBC series Big Cats 24/7 airing this autumn tracking lions, leopards and cheetahs in Botswana over a six-month period.
“In the early days, wildlife documentaries pointed at a lion and what it looked like,” Gordon says of the changes he’s seen during his 30-plus years career. “Now, it’s their behaviour that is interesting; how they behave, interact and live in a modern world, some with humans, some in the fully wild environment.
“I’m very spoilt, seeing them in the wild – lions and tigers and bears are very much animals which have been shaped by the landscape and climate of where they are living.
“For example, polar bears in the Arctic are a real embodiment of that part of the world. They are one of these big key species which are truly part of their environment and shape their environment – and have had the biggest change in their environment with climate change, they are the animal most of us automatically think of when we think of that.
“The single biggest problem facing the planet and all its wild places and species is not actually climate change itself – it’s humans.
“Climate change is a problem caused by population growth.
“More and more land is being taken from the wild for food production, more minerals are being mined for things we want, and that takes away from the wild environments in a practical, physical sense, while also contributing to climate change as a side effect.
“In Africa, lions and cheetah numbers have massively declined. During the past 50 years with population growth, their habitats have been land-grabbed to provide homes, farms and food for humans.
“In North America grizzly bears roamed all over from Alaska to California 1,000 years ago – even 500 years ago – they were part of the USA wherever you were.
“Big animals need big landscapes, and they are disappearing. That is the fear for the future.”
Alongside environment change, Gordon has seen a big shift in how the world of wildlife filmmaking works with huge advances in technology.
“When I first started, we would film all the animals you could with the technology we had; we were shooting on film, only filming during the day. There was no thermal imaging, no drones,” said Gordon.
“The quality of wildlife films has come along hugely even in 15 years – never mind the 30-plus I’ve been doing it. Technology has made the impossible possible now. We can go to the depths of the oceans, the highest mountains; there’s not a living thing we cannot catch on film.”
Gordon’s route to wildlife filmmaking was unconventional, thanks to a chance meeting in a local pub with one of the industry’s greats – acclaimed survival cameraman Nick Gordon.
He’d spent his school years ‘disinterested, and daydreaming about the outdoors’. And while growing up on the island of Mull may have seemed an ideal place for someone keen to pursue a career in the open air – Gordon felt his ‘horizons were limited’, while careers advisors at school gasped when he wanted to do ‘something different to farming, fishing and forestry’.
“When I met Nick, being a wildlife camera person sounded like the best job in the world, exploring, travelling, going to places few people would go to. Amazing!” he said, of signing up aged 17 as an assistant to Nick for an expedition to Sierra Leone.
“I always knew I wanted to break away. Mull is a remote, small community, but I knew there were places much more remote, even the Outer Hebrides – Lewis, Barra, Tyree. We felt like city slickers from Mull in some ways compared to these places.
“I always had a desire to follow a passion – even if I didn’t know what it was yet. But I wasn’t going to settle for the options I had on the island. A lot of young people don’t think it’s an option to do anything outside the ordinary, but I always felt that I would find something to play to my strengths.
“Meeting Nick was when I learnt this job existed and it set my sights quite high. But, if I hadn’t met Nick, if he hadn’t been looking for someone as his assistant and taken the risk on a 17 year old still at school, life could have been very different.”
Another moment when ‘life could have been very different’ was one of Gordon’s most famous on-screen encounters – when he ended up face-to-face with a polar bear, through a Perspex box as it sniffed around the edges picking the scent of a possible kill.
“That was definitely one of those moments when survival mode flicked on,” Gordon recalls. “I was completely awestruck, but terrified at the same time. But there wasn’t much I could do other than let it play out, interpret the experience and film it, while talking about what the sense of being that close to a polar bear felt like. It was something like 40 minutes in all, in that box rabbiting on. Mentally, I turned away from the fear to concentrate on the job.
“If you are holding a camera, it can – sometimes helpfully – make it seem unreal, like you’re almost watching it through a screen yourself like the eventual viewer.
“By contrast, I have seen grizzly bears up close in wild places, on foot with no vehicle around. And that is a really lovely feeling. You’re not terrified, you’re reading the behaviours of the animal. If it starts to show aggressive behaviour, you react, but if there’s nothing between you and the grizzly but 20 metres of grass – you just pay huge attention to their behaviour and accepting what it could do and how it could go wrong… That’s what you’re doing as a filmmaker at the time in that moment.”
While he may have experienced some of the world’s wildest places and wildest animals up close, as well as witnessing huge changes to the natural environment, Gordon’s hopeful for the future.
“In the early 1990s I spent a lot of time in the then-vast wilderness of the Brazilian Amazon – I remember flying over unbroken forest for hour after hour as we flew. This heart of South America was wild. I did the same journey a few years later and that forest was gone.
“In that landscape there were species of plants, mammals, insects, fish which were completely unknown to science – lost before we even knew they had ever existed.
“For 20 years I’ve watched wild spaces in Africa being claimed back by people for farms, villages, roads.
“And it’s hard in today’s world to find places that feel truly wild. But I do a job that takes me to the heart of these places and I am so fortunate and so grateful. When you are in them, you are much more aware that it’s a shrinking wilderness.
“My hope for the natural world, however, is that there are amazing things being done to renature, rewild parts of the world. It would be easy to look and just see the negatives, but I can’t focus on that. We need to celebrate the things being done to support nature.
“The bad news is going to tell itself anyway. I have a platform, and while others may give a less cheery view, the positive can and will inspire young people.”
Lions and Tigers and Bears with Gordon Buchanan, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday February 27, 2025
For more information and to purchase tickets for Lions and Tigers and Bears with Gordon Buchanan go to www.gordon-buchanan.co.uk
