“Wildlife documentary-makers are going to increasingly cunning means to sneak into the secret world of their subjects but don’t think for a second that the animals are fooled, as these images prove. Award-winning director John Downer had disguised one of his remote-controlled spy cameras as a large snowball to capture the journey of a polar bear mother and her cub crossing the sea ice in Svalbard, Norway, in search of seals. But – in a documentary Dowler says captures the bears’ ‘astonishing intelligence’ – this adult male wasn’t having the wool pulled over his eyes. Instead, he marched straight up to the ‘snowball’ camera and, after briefly exploring it with a massive paw, gave the director and his producer a close-up while he smashed it to pieces.” w/ photos
