To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show television audiences that the natural world was stranger, livelier and more intricate than they had thought. Salisbury, who died on May 13th aged 84, spent more than four decades turning that patience into television. His route into that work was suitably unpolished, according to an obituary in The Guardian. He did not go to university. He worked as a mechanic with Voluntary Service Overseas in Africa, where he developed his interest in photography. Back in Britain, he pressed the BBC for a chance until Horizon gave him a brief research opening. He worked first on Parkinson, then on science documentaries, before moving to Bristol and the BBC’s Natural History Unit. There he found the place where persistence, practicality, and curiosity could become a career. His breakthrough came with Life on Earth, David Attenborough’s 1979 account of evolution. Salisbury helped produce some of its most memorable sequences, including a lion hunt that had defeated him once before. He went back and got it. That became part of his reputation: not bluster, but refusal to be beaten by weather, animals, equipment or logistics. In 1985 he made Kingdom of the Ice Bear, filmed in Arctic conditions that tested both people and kit.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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