Penguin Bloopers from Penguins: Spy in the Huddle and Its Spycams

This minute-and-a-half of penguin bloopers comes from Penguins: Spy in the Huddle, the John Downer Productions series that filmed penguins up close using 50 hidden cameras disguised as penguins, eggs and rocks.

Penguins: Spy in the Huddle

The three-part series was made by John Downer Productions for BBC One and later shown in the US as a Nature special on PBS, which premiered it in September 2014. David Tennant narrates. The crews filmed for nearly a year and recorded about 1,000 hours of behaviour, cut down to three hours of television.

The series follows three species through a breeding season:

• Emperor penguins in Antarctica, filmed by 17 spycams during a shoot that ran for more than 330 consecutive days. The over-wintering crew was cut off for eight months and filmed on all but ten days.
• Rockhopper penguins on the Falkland Islands, with 18 cameras.
• Humboldt penguins in Peru’s Atacama Desert, with 16 cameras over 165 days.

The spycams behind the bloopers

Downer’s team is known for “spy” cameras that let wild animals carry on as normal at close range. For this series they built animatronic penguincams that could walk, stand still or film underwater, plus eggcams, chickcams, rockcams, snowcams and even a rolling snowballcam. Each was designed to blend into a colony so the birds would accept it.

The blooper reel gathers the lighter moments those cameras caught along the way, cut together by the production company and released on its own YouTube channel.