This wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I am sitting in the dirt on a freezing, barren Wyoming plain, talking to a man with a camouflage tarp over his head. The man is Wolfgang Bayer, acclaimed TV nature-show producer, who is at work on a program about the Grand Tetons for the PBS series Nature. The tarp is supposed to fool a den of coyote pups into thinking that Bayer is a pile of leaves and not a wildlife filmmaker.
I don't know about them, but I'm beginning to believe it. We've been out here 40 minutes, and Bayer hasn't shot an inch of film. I was sent here to uncover the secrets of wildlife filmmaking — two days of action-packed outdoor adventure with the king of nature television. So far, other than the moose over the fireplace in my hotel lobby, I've yet to see a single animal. No tussling pups, no fighting stags, no courting prairie fowl.
But wait, a sound — a short, guttural snuffle. A tussling pup? An angry coyote? No, a snoring cameraman. I give Bayer a nudge. He tells me that over the years he's developed the ability to sleep while remaining attuned to his surroundings. Nature Filmmaking Secret Number One.
I ask Bayer how much longer we have to wait. He lifts a corner of the tarp and aims a steel-blue squint at his impatient guest. ''This is nothing,'' says the Austrian-born filmmaker, who is 56 and lives in nearby Jackson Hole with his wife and two children. ''Once when I was filming a National Geographic special, I waited three weeks for coyote pups to come out of the den.'' He adds that there's a good chance this den we've staked out is empty. During the night, coyotes often shuttle their pups to a different den, to frustrate predators and media professionals. ''They're like MX missiles,'' Bayer says. ''You think you know which den they're in and then you spot them 50 yards away.''
My photographer is worried. Our editor is expecting the Terrific Animal Shot — ruggedly handsome silver-haired filmmaker, wild baby animals clambering over his $60,000 Arriflex camera. ''Do you think anyone would notice the difference,'' he says, ''if we just brought some German shepherd puppies out here?'' I cringe. Bayer doesn't even blink. He starts telling us about the time he filmed a show on the endangered black-footed ferret. Nearly extinct species pose a problem to the filmmaker in that they're nearly impossible to find. ''Fortunately,'' he says jokingly, ''the only difference between a black- footed ferret and a regular pet-shop ferret is the black on the feet and collar. Spray paint works wonders.''
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