No matter how good your intentions are and how carefully you plan something, there’s always a chance that it’ll suddenly go sideways.
This is especially true when you’re trying to do a live recording of something and even truer than that when your co-stars are nature itself.
After all, no matter how much of a Herculean task it is to stop people from goofing off in the background of your shot, it’s outright impossible to stop wild animals from following their instincts.
As you’ll see in the full video, the crew of BBC’s Blue Planet Live just received a hard reminder of this reality.
One episode saw host Liz Bonnin join conservationist Liz Ferguson on Australia’s Heron Island.
There, Bonnin makes an impassioned speech about our personal responsibility to our planet “through our actions and by making our voices heard.”
And the context of those words was intended to give them additional weight, but ended up making them sound unfortunately ironic.
What was supposed to happen was for Bonnin to say all of this while cameras captured the first hours of some baby turtles’ lives.
Five of the new hatchlings were just released and were making their way towards the sea.
As The Daily Mail reported , Bonnin said, “We’ve watched them come up to the sands of Heron to nest and we’ve also had the great privilege of watching precious new lives, little hatchlings emerging from nests and making it in the big blue” as this was going on.
But what they didn’t know was that they weren’t the only ones watching the baby turtles.
In fact, it would soon become clear that a hungry seagull lurking just off-camera was watching them a lot closer than either of the hosts.
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Before the baby turtles could reach the sea, the seagull swept in and swooped at least one of them up in its mouth.
It can be seen making its approach in the background of Bonnin’s speech and a second camera catches a better view of it making its attack.
As Bonnin continued with what she had to say, the seagull could be seen re-entering the shot.
Her segment was just about to wrap up, but the seagull had enough time to quickly walk across the scene with the baby turtle apparently still in its mouth.
The clip of the attack would end up on Twitter, where those who saw the segment and those who had just been made aware of it reacted.
Although some could only shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s nature,” others were were clearly upset about the fate of the baby turtle.
Part of the problem was likely the dissonance of watching Bonnin talk about how precious the turtles are while one of them gets eaten behind her.
Although the cameras don’t entirely fixate on the seagull’s feast, that dissonance still comes across in the full video.
