Living on Volcanoes

Raising a three-year-old kid in a traditional nuclear family, making a living out of a profession you are passionate about and having a couple of cute animals visiting your yard occasionally seems ideal to most of us. But if we were going to give this ideal way of life two prepositional phrases, say, “on active volcanoes” and “for two years,” and not to mention that the animals are one of the most exotic and least studied species on earth – the land iguanas, what would it be like?

This is exactly the life an Australian couple David and Liz Parer and their little daughter Zoe led on the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador from 1995 to 1996. The couple’s shared love of and passion in the nature have compelled them to produce some of the world’s finest documentary films of wild animals and bagged numerous major awards.

But trying to get close to wild animals may not be glamorous at all. On Fernandina, one of the most active volcano islands that could erupt at any moment, the Parer family once slept only 50 meters away from huge streams of lava that burst out of a volcano, running down the flank. Instead of running away, the Parer couple got as close as possible to catch the destructive moment with their cameras – they needed to understand why the land iguanas, the relatively untouched island animal, chose to live in such a deadly environment.

The inquiry all began with David’s uncle, Damien Parer, a very famous photographer and cameraman during the World War II, David recalled in an interview with the Australian television network ABC.

“He felt that war wasn't the explosion,” said David. “It wasn't the destruction. It was the human within that experience of conflict and how the individual responded.”

It was this idea that always struck David and Liz to capture the moment of battle, the moment of fear and the moment of courage – not with a human being, but with an animal in every moment of truth.

The iguanas living on volcano islands are just like human beings in a war: Some got exploded right at the moment when a volcano erupted; those survived had to carry on seeking their ideal location for incubation. But unfortunately, the most ideal location was also the most deadly – the center bottom of the Fernandina, where the heat and temperature was best for iguanas’ eggs to grow. This also meant the Parer couple and their crew had to go down there as well, to a place synonymous for “center of death.”

Using a long pole to carry his camera so that it could be operated only a few inches above the ground, which was the same height as the iguanas, David was able to transmit the feeling of “migration” to his audiences in front of their television sets. When the creatures dug holes, David got his camera ready at the entrance of the holes so that his audiences would be able follow the iguanas’ effort without distance. Of course, the price was pounds of dust in his hair, nose and camera.

The involvement of Zoe, the couple’s three-year-old daughter, in their journey to explore the Galapagos was also something that surprised many people. For two years, the little girl had no playmates – human playmates – but she got to play with iguanas, dolphins and turtles. Her growth on the volcano islands was perhaps also a testimony of human beings’ growth of knowledge about the world in which they live.

From birds stealing, breaking and sucking other animals’ eggs, to 200-year-old turtles still mating to have the next generation and to a sea lion giving birth to her baby who was accidentally stuck by the tissue that had been wrapped around him when he was in his mother’s womb, the couples’ philosophy behind their filmmaking – to capture the moments of truth in animals’ world – is perhaps also a mirror that reflects the moments of truth in human beings’ life.