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View All episodesWHO IS Naudé Heunis
Naudé Heunis is South African adventure filmmaker and conservationist who is devoted to applying his skillset into making a positive impact in our natural world.
In this episode, we take a look into the life of a wildlife filmmaker. Naudé shares his experience about what it’s like to work out in the wild African bush and tells us stories of how he managed to capture some remarkable moments that come once in a lifetime.
Naudé is also the co-founder of BTS Nature, a project that is giving a voice to and documenting people who are doing good things to help protect and restore the natural world.
Listen to the podcast right here!
INSTAGRAM VS REALITY: the story behind the shot
From the podcast: “I was following the wild dogs and these wild dogs started targeting zebra more on a daily basis. We followed them multiple times on multiple hunts with these zebra and eventually they managed to capture a huge zebra, which is super uncommon. Because a zebra’s stamina is better than the wild dogs, they are stronger than the wild dogs, their eyesight is pretty amazing, they are super clever with the way that they navigate any animal trying to hunt them. They are really good at evading it and they also get together and use their numbers against the animal trying to hunt them. This particular one was actually sick and we picked up on it when the hunt started. This one’s stamina started falling away and away and it started falling behind. I was like “oh no, this guy is gonna get taken down!” but the other side of me was like “yes this is happening”…
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“Eventually they managed to get him and he was obviously one of the older zebra and he was definitely sick because even an older zebra would be able to outrun one of these guys.
So they ended up taking him down and I had the drone up and I filmed the whole thing with the drone. But I didn’t get the takedown with the drone. When I put the drone up, I was busy filming them.. and when I put the camera straight down I was like “holy crap look at this”, the zebra’s stripes are making it pop so nice and all the dogs had literally just started eating it so it was still fully intact. Because the wild dogs will rip apart an animal. They consumed that entire zebra within 15 minutes. So like there is not a lot of time to make sure that you’re in the right position to get that initial – before the feast. They just go crazy and they rip this animal apart. It’s quite a hectic thing to see because the animal looks dead in that photo but it’s not, it’s actually still alive and it’s actually just given up because it was definitely sick. It just kind of collapsed and it was just lying there moaning. So it’s a pretty hardcore thing to witness.”