Hayes Baxley has spent weeks on boats in Antarctica waiting for whales to surface. He once waited 27 days in the jungles of Brazil before a jaguar finally made her move, lunging onto a caiman to feed her cubs.
"That's the beauty of working with wildlife," he says. "You get these long periods of time where you get to watch and study animals. It's like a mystery. You're trying to figure out what they're going to do."
Baxley is an Emmy Award-winning wildlife cinematographer whose work has taken him from the Arctic to the Amazon. His specialty is the underwater world, diving with orcas and humpbacks. His work has aired on the BBC, National Geographic and Disney. This summer his assignment is in his hometown of Asheville, where black bears roam the same streets he does.
Baxley is on assignment for the BBC's Natural History Unit filming a wildlife story he pitched. He seeks to document mothers and cubs navigating the yards and neighborhoods of a city that has learned, mostly, to live alongside them.
"I see black bears all the time," he said. "But this project allowed me to start thinking about, wow, what if we could really spend a serious amount of time — like weeks and months — following one of these mother bears with her cubs? What are they really up to? How are they surviving alongside us?"
The BBC did not need much convincing. The project is part of a new wildlife series focused on the United States, although details remain under a nondisclosure agreement, producer Mary Melville said the bears of Asheville were hard to resist.
"He was like, there are so many bears here, you've got to see this," Melville said, "And showed us clips of mums playing on playgrounds and on trampolines with their cubs. And we thought we've got to try and capture this."
To film the bears, Baxley relies on a 1,000 millimeter zoom lens which lets him stay far enough away that the bears never know he is there. He also plans to place motion-triggered remote cameras along the trails where bears are known to travel. The approach is the same one he uses anywhere in the world: Learn the animal, find the patterns, wait.
"Spending a lot of time watching them," he said. "The moms will have what we call day beds where she'll bring the cubs. The cubs might go up in a tree and she can nurse them. She can sleep, the cubs can sleep safely. So looking for those day beds, looking for different trails. They use yards. They use streets just like we do.”
Filming bears in a region where human interactions are an ongoing concern comes with responsibilities. This spring several bears were euthanized in the region after breaking into homes. Ashley Hobbs, coordinator of BearWise, a N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission program that promotes safe and peaceful coexistence between people and bears, said her office became an important resource as the BBC project came together.
"We reviewed all of their gear that they're using and their methods," Hobbs said. "It's going to be a great kind of representation of urban bears."
"This is not a big operation," Baxley said. "It's just going to be me showing up with a camera and silently, quietly watching and observing bears."
He is already capturing moments that stay with him. During a recent downpour he watched a mother bear climb high into a tree and stand over her sleeping cubs on an outer branch, keeping them dry in the rain.
"You can imagine this giant branch out of a tree 100 feet up in the air and the cubs are sleeping there and she goes out there and stands over them to keep them dry and comfortable in this downpour," he said. "You see those kind of moments, and it just makes you think."
Baxley plans to be in Asheville neighborhoods all summer, camera in hand. And when the film airs, he hopes it changes the way people think about the animals they share their city with.
"You don't have to go two weeks to Antarctica to see amazing wildlife," Baxley said. "We get to see it right here in Asheville. The goal of this film is so that you think about the bears all the times when you don't see them. Which hopefully will make us better stewards of the bears."
If you spot a mother bear and her cubs in the north or east Asheville area, Baxley wants to hear from you. You can send a message on the project's Instagram account: @Asheville_Bears
