A TV STAR has revealed he's made a killer doc on crocodiles after one tried to eat his cameraman alive.
Naturalist Steve Backshall was filming a TV show for the BBC when he and his cameraman were attacked by a crocodile over a decade ago.
You’d think he’d have had his fill of the killer reptiles, but you'd be wrong.
This week, he’s back with a brilliant two-part series doing a deep-dive on the cold-blooded creatures.
“We were diving with crocodiles in Botswana in 2011 and on the penultimate day, we had a huge male, about 4.5m long, and he just came straight for us,” remembers Steve about his brush with death.
“He went to the surface, took a breath, then came right between me and my cameraman and this big cloud of sand went up. I knew the croc was in there and my cameraman Johnny, who is a very dear friend of mine.
"It was a gut-wrenching moment where I 100 per cent thought my friend had just been eaten in front of me. The croc came out of the sand cloud and luckily Johnny was okay, but it’s one of the only times in my career that I've really been frightened.”
During the six weeks of filming Killer Crocs, Steve once again got up close and personal with crocodiles in South Africa, helping to catch and move the beasts to sanctuaries.
But the show also watches crocodiles - which have roamed Earth for 220 million years - displaying their natural behaviours with long lenses and drones.
“I’ve been working with crocodiles for 30 years, but it was a privilege to see them from a distance doing things I’d never seen before,” reveals Steve, 50.
“The things we think about crocodiles are true - there is no doubt they are one of the only animals on the planet that will stalk, hunt, kill and eat a human being deliberately, so a certain amount of their reputation is justified. But there are huge amounts of a crocodile’s life - its maternal instincts, social life, communication, enjoyment of physical contact with other crocs - that make the animal more relatable.
“They are one of nature’s survivors. They’ve been around since before the first dinosaurs. Any animal like that is doing something right, there’s something about its biology that really, really works. For the crocodile, it’s the ability to spend a long time without food - sometimes years, the ability to live in and out of the water, their armoured, scaly skin and their ability to regulate their heat using the environment that make them the perfect reptilian predator.”
New Nature airs Monday and Tuesday at 9pm on Channel 5.
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