Letaka Safaris with Jeff Corwin

January 2014 – Okavango Delta, Botswana.

In December last year, Brent and Grant spent a couple of days in the bush with Jeff Corwin and his talented film crew searching out all kinds of creepy crawlies for the Ocean Mysteries television series. One of the highlights of the trip for us was the amazing footage which was captured using a quadcopter with a GoPro slung underneath. This remote controlled aircraft enabled us to get some really fresh footage of subjects that have been filmed many thousands of times before and as you will see in the preview video, it makes a big impact.

Although we got really excited about filming beasties from the air, we were out with Jeff Corwin and that meant that reptiles had to come into this show at some point. Jeff and the crew had already spent several days up in the panhandle of the Okavango with well-known crocodile authorities Dr Vince Shacks and Dr Sven Borquin which meant we would have to concentrate on snakes.

We got pretty lucky with the snakes and managed to spend some quality time with a Shield Cobra (formerly known as a Shield-nose Snake), a Puff Adder, an African Rock Python and a Mozambique Spitting Cobra. The spitting cobra caused quite a bit of consternation during the shoot as Jeff got a bit of venom in his eye but luckily it was only a tiny droplet which caused quite a bit of pain but no serious damage.

The show will air on ABC in the US in Spring of this year and hopefully will be taken up by some of the other channels so that we can get to see it here in Africa.