Fergus Beeley | |
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Born | 1962 |
Occupation | Television producer |
Fergus Michael Edmund Beeley (born 1962) [1] is an English wildlife conservationist and filmmaker. He is best known for his work producing films for BBC Natural World , including "White Falcon, White Wolf"; "The Eagle Has Landed"; "Return of the Eagle Owl"; and "Spectacled Bears: Shadows of the Forest". He joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1990 and has produced series including Planet Earth: The Future and The Life of Birds in collaboration with David Attenborough.
Beeley was born in Tonbridge, Kent. [2] In 1985, he graduated from the University of Durham (Hatfield College) with a degree in anthropology, earning a 2:2. [3] He completed his thesis with the Pitjantjatjara tribe of Aboriginals in central Australia. [4]
Beeley joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1990 and has produced natural history programmes for television. These include the documentary series Planet Earth: The Future , The Life of Birds and PBS Nature : "Jungle Eagle".
A month before Beeley was due to depart to Ellesmere Island for filming of the documentary "White Falcon, White Wolf", he fell whilst filming high up in the Andes and was flown back to the UK by air ambulance for surgery on a broken ankle. This meant he could not be on location with the crew for filming and had to assist via GPS and edit from his hospital bed. [5] [6]
In 2009 Beeley spent a year in the rural Scottish Highlands on Beinn Eighe and neighbouring Loch Maree, filming the documentary "A Highland Haven". [7] [8] [9]
Beeley is the creator of a community conservation project called the BLUE Campaign, which encourages anyone with access to a green space to give a piece back to nature to promote biodiversity. [10]
In July 2017, Beeley was involved in a road rage incident in which he informed a family that he was placing them under a citizen's arrest. Beeley was filmed telling the family to "get ready to die" and that he "wanted them dead". Two claims of assault were made but neither party pursued the matter further. [11] [12]
Loch Maree is a loch in Wester Ross in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. At 21.7 km (13.46 mi) long and with a maximum width of four kilometres, it is the fourth-largest freshwater loch in Scotland; it is the largest north of Loch Ness. Its surface area is 28.7 km2 (11.08 sq mi).
The BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of BBC Studios that produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and has a long association with David Attenborough's authored documentaries, starting with 1979's Life on Earth.
Wester Ross is an area of the Northwest Highlands of Scotland in the council area of Highland. The area is loosely defined, and has never been used as a formal administrative region in its own right, but is generally regarded as lying to the west of the main watershed of Ross, thus forming the western half of the county of Ross and Cromarty. The southwesternmost part of Ross and Cromarty, Lochalsh, is not considered part of Wester Ross by the local tourist organisation, Visit Wester Ross, but is included within the definition used for the Wester Ross Biosphere Reserve.
Natural World is a strand of British wildlife documentary programmes broadcast on BBC Two and BBC Two HD and regarded by the BBC as its flagship natural history series. It is the longest-running documentary in its genre on British television, with nearly 500 episodes broadcast since its inception in 1983. Natural World programmes are typically one-off films that take an in-depth look at particular natural history events, stories or subjects from around the globe.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
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