You never know where filmmaker Christian Muñoz-Donoso will turn up — or what kind of creatures will turn up for his camera.
In Patagonia, where the Emmy-winning Montague wildlife specialist was working until this past fall, his Red Epic Dragon 6K camera was focused on pumas and their prey, llama-related guanaco, for a three-part BBC series, “Patagonia: Earth’s Secret Paradise.” The series began airing last month in England and will eventually air here on Animal Planet.
More recently — and for the next two years — the 49-year-old filmmaker has been filming a variety of Andean wildlife in Chile and Argentina for a National Geographic-German television series. The focus will be on the nearly extinct spectacle bear, jaguars, condors and torrent ducks on the South American high plains, temperate and tropical rain forests and coastal areas.
The shoots may be edited into a coherent whole for the series, but they were filmed over two Southern Hemisphere winters as Muñoz-Donoso also filmed armadillos, Andean condors, killer whales and, even penguins.
He worked on two episodes of “Planet Earth 2,” a six-episode follow-up to the award-winning BBC wildlife series narrated by David Attenborough, which began airing in November in Great Britain. For the series, he filmed flamingoes in the high plains of Bolivia and Chile and hummingbirds, along with parakeets and chinchilla-like bizcachas, in the Peruvian desert.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Muñoz-Donoso interspersed his South American work with filming one of three installments in BBC’s “Earth Greatest Spectacles” series, about the seasonal transformations in New England. The footage includes beaver, moose and other aspects of the region’s wildlife, some of it shot in the woods behind his Montague home.
For all of his work in South America, it was New England that Muñoz-Donoso focused on for a series produced by his own Equilibrio Films, “Wild View,” winning him four of seven Emmy Award nominations in 2011 — Outstanding Director, Outstanding Photography, Outstanding Audio and Outstanding Musical Composition.
Working with his two sons, ages 27 and 29, the Chilean-born director of photography oversaw a crew of 60 and spent four months filming pumas in winter to get footage of them stalking their guanaco prey across the high plains of Chile and Argentina.
“This is the only place in the world where can see pumas in the wild like this,” he said. “You can go to Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons, but you can’t see pumas like this,” as he described females that are about 100 pounds and males that reach 240 pounds. “These are the biggest pumas in world.”
Muñoz-Donoso, who moved to this country and Montague in 2002, has a special relationship with pumas, especially after being attacked by one of the largest ones he’d ever seen during a shoot when he was 27 years old.
While working on a Chilean mountain lion research project in an Andean location “in the middle of nowhere,” Muñoz-Donoso stayed behind with his camera while most of the researchers had been lifted out by helicopter, and encountered the largest mountain lions he’d ever seen at a watering hole.
“I really like big cats,” said Muñoz-Donoso, who recalls the animal jumping on him , biting his flesh and ripping his scalp, so he was left screaming for a friend to come running with a large shovel he used to beat the puma. He was left in a nearby cabin, with the animal trying to claw its way in, until he could be evacuated by a military helicopter.
After all that. The filmmaker said, “Everyone said why are you filming pumas again? They almost killed you! But I really love them. That situation was an accident. If you’re in puma territory, you need to know what you are exposing yourself to. Now I know the animals, and know which animals I need to be a little far away from.”
The puma he was tracking most recently “was very confident with me,” he said.
It was a female he had found several winters back as a 6-month-old, along with her sister, who’d disappeared after two years, said Muñoz-Donoso.
“We habituated this puma to the cameras and human presence. So, I can be around her very easily. It takes patience. It takes time. I know more or less where she likes to be, so I’d check all these places — in the rock, the hills, the valley. Normally, I found her every day and was following her and her mother hunting guanacos.
Like many persevering predators, the puma would try unsuccessfully for several days to capture a guanaco, which has very good eyesight and can outrun her, said Muñoz-Donoso.
Cameramen can’t legally move closer than 50 meters to the wildlife, but they’re free to film them at closer range if approached by the animals, hich fortunately happens at times.
Pumas are tame with people around, but keep their distance, said Muñoz-Donoso, who has been filming them every winter for the past four years — “the only one who’s been filming pumas in the wild that long” — and by being quiet and steady has been able to capture behaviors unseen before by wildlife biologists.
The filmmaker — who originally trained at Universidad Catolica as a biologist, but also took courses in filmmaking and scriptwriting, ultimately devoting his career to filming wildlife — has been asked by scientists if they could review his footage.
The problem that researchers have, he said, is a lack of enough funding to spend many hours in the field to witness over time behavior that Munoz has seen time and time again.
“I am a person who needs to be working directly with animals. To me, it was more important to capture this behavior and share with people, to show what we have in the natural world,” he said.
“The only thing (they) can do is put cameras on traps and collars, but you can’t see a lot of behavior that’s happening. I’m basically working with the pumas all the time, and to film them, I need to see them, witnessing behavior that with a radio camera they will never get.”
For example, he captured on film a mother with her three cubs, including a male that came upon a female’s kill from the night before and was taking advantage of the free meal.
“The female came back to eat, and there was a big male, which might try killing unrelated cubs,” said Muñoz-Donoso. “He moves around and the female goes to eat the kill, and sends the little cats to the kill. All these things appear at the same moment.”
He said there was also another female puma in the area at the time.
“The little ones know (the male) can kill them, and the (unrelated) female notices there’s a little puma, so she continues trying to hunt it. It would go back to its mother, with the male still hiding there.”
A scientist would need to be there all the time, for days and months, to witness what Muñoz-Donoso sees and is able to capture on film for the world to see.
Part of what he has witnessed, in places like Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia and in Antarctica, are the effects of climate disruption.
The snow that was typically seen in Torres del Paine every winter in the 1980s, for example, hardly showed up last year, except for a single snowstorm that left snow on the ground for just four to five days.
“It’s getting warmer there,” he said. “You can see a change in the behavior of animals, new animals arriving in those places, like migratory bees that don’t live that far south, migratory ospreys. Also the marine life is changing.”
Muñoz-Donoso, got his professional start as a 17-year-old location scout, pointing the way to an eagle’s nest near his grandmother’s house for a crew filming Goodyear commercials.
But after all, it’s pumas that the Muñoz-Donoso, whose role was essentially cinematographer, loves working with best.
“I really like big cats,” he says, ignoring the fact that his Chestnut Hill home in Montague is dominated by Briards, the breed of giant dogs bred by his wife, Elise McMahon. “They are so mysterious, such solitary animals,” says Muñoz-Donoso. “Pumas are so hard to find in that place. There is a lot of myth around them. I like the unknown.”
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