By Belle Adler

Filmmakers like to joke that the only people who want to make documentaries are the people who’ve never made one. Documentaries are a complicated business—financially risky, physically and emotionally demanding. None of us who make them have any fingernails left.

On the other hand, the life of a documentary filmmaker can be exhilarating and rewarding, ushering you into incredible adventures as you explore and expose serious societal and political problems.

For instance, two years ago I made a documentary on a war raging in East Africa. A little-publicized struggle, in which victims die by the thousands as only a handful of nations come to their aid. One that’s being fought in the savannas, the game parks, and the national reserves.

It’s the war poachers are waging against elephants, rhinoceros, and other once plentiful animals, which leaves them fighting for survival. Thirty years ago, 1.3 million elephants lived on the African continent. Today, conservationists estimate there are between 250,000 and 500,000. Thirty years ago, 20,000 rhino roamed the plains of Kenya. Now fewer than 500 remain. There are only 145 cheetah left in Kenya.

Who’s behind the destruction? Conservationists point the finger at well-organized ivory- and pelt-hungry poachers, many of them former soldiers from war-ravaged Somalia. These men have no qualms about slaughtering gentle giants or sleek cats for the few thousand dollars each kill earns in this poverty-stricken part of the world.

In February 2002, my production team and I traveled to East Africa to produce a documentary titled Operation Animal Shield. The hour-long piece, which aired nationally on the cable channel Animal Planet and around the world on Discovery International, documented the efforts of two elite American pilots to train young Kenya Wildlife Service rangers in aerial antipoaching techniques.

Dale Snodgrass, a much-decorated Gulf War veteran, and Patty Wagstaff, a winner of three U.S. national aerobatic competitions, had volunteered to go to the African bush to teach the rangers advanced flying maneuvers—the same spins, rolls, high-speed dives, and other aerial evasion techniques used in modern warfare. Poachers are notorious killers who don’t hesitate to fire their semiautomatic rifles at the small planes rangers fly, often at very low altitudes. Controlling an aircraft well enough to avoid a poacher’s bullets can mean the difference between a ranger’s life or death. In addition, the mere presence of skilled pilots in the skies above the game parks is often enough to deter poachers, who fear being captured or killed.

It sounded fairly straightforward. We’d follow Snodgrass and Wagstaff on their journey from America to Kenya, document the training sessions, videotape the animals, interview the pilots and the rangers, hope to get some video of poachers or poached animals, interview a conservationist or an animal-rights advocate—and that would do it. With lightweight, portable digital equipment, an experienced crew, and a visually interesting, environmentally important topic, we thought this would be a relatively simple story to produce.

We could not have been more wrong.

From the very beginning, a series of unanticipated and unavoidable problems plagued our journey. For starters, Animal Planet executives delayed signing our contract until our flight to Nairobi was literally just two weeks away. Consequently, much of our preparation could be done only at the very last minute, never an auspicious beginning for working in a developing country.

My coproducer and I scrambled to get the proper visas, working papers, and permits for videotaping in Kenya. Unfortunately, when we arrived in the middle of the night at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, those papers were worthless. Since customs officials had gone home for the evening, no one could authorize us to bring our cameras and sound equipment into the country. Everything was confiscated and locked up in an airport closet.

Meanwhile, we scurried around Kenya’s capital for as many official stamps as we could obtain. Our hotel reservations had been mysteriously canceled, so we spent our first night at a seedy downtown hotel, one apparently so prone to robberies that security guards patrolled the corridors with nightsticks.

After we got our gear back and began shooting, we experienced audio problems, which caused us to lose parts of a crucial scene we’d shot involving endangered black rhinos. Then I developed a serious reaction to the antimalaria medication I’d been given in the United States, which left me unable to work for several days and quite ill for weeks afterward.

The difficulties continued. We struggled to get access to game reserves, despite repeated reassurances that admittance would be guaranteed. Driving with $120,000 worth of camera equipment presented a few security problems. Airplanes broke down. It was unbearably hot. There were mosquitoes, budget overrides, disagreements with network executives over content. One of the rangers crashed his plane.

But we enjoyed successes, too, such as getting an interview with noted anthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey. He talked about establishing the first worldwide ban on ivory and conducting a global education campaign on the horrors of poaching, thereby cutting off demand and stopping poachers in their tracks. He also explained why poaching, after a decade-long pause, had recently returned with a vengeance—poachers were illegally stockpiling ivory, in anticipation of a new relaxation of the ban—threatening to wipe out surviving animal reserves.

Local journalists and environmentalists adding their perspective on the poaching resurgence revealed a new wrinkle—bushmeat poaching—which is further decimating endangered animal populations. Amateur and professional poachers use snares to catch dik-dik, gazelle, and other small mammals for their meat, a trapping practice that negatively affects the entire food chain, including such larger mammals as the zebra, the cheetah, and the bongo.

Once we’d determined snares were an important part of our story, we needed a visual illustration. We were fortunate. After many hours of observation, we found a mature female elephant whose trunk had been caught in and punctured by a snare meant for a smaller animal. The damage to her trunk was obvious; capturing it on videotape allowed us to explain in visual terms what snaring does and make a compelling case for ending the practice. It’s what filmmakers call “the money shot”—the shot that makes a scene worthwhile, that says it all.

As for adventure, I would never have been able to experience Africa’s wildlife up close in quite the same way, if not for this documentary.

My crew and I spent weeks on safari, videotaping the interplay of animals and environment with the help of an experienced and knowledgeable field biologist. We flew with members of the Kenya Wildlife Service in small aircraft just feet above the treetops, looking down over vast African plains, Mt. Kilimanjaro towering in the distance. From Samburu National Reserve, in northern Kenya, to a nearby private reserve called the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, we witnessed the animal kingdom’s rich diversity through the eyes of those deeply concerned with the future of wildlife in Africa.

And we brought back an appreciation of the fragility of an irreplaceable ecosystem, which may disappear unless the world community takes steps to protect it.

Was making the documentary worth it? You bet it was.

Belle Adler is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism.