Like many wildlife filmmakers, Gordon Buchanan relishes isolation

When it comes to self-isolation, wildlife filmmakers are real experts.

Scottish filmmaker Gordon Buchanan has survived - and enjoyed - complete solitude for weeks at a time throughout a career filming animals such as bears, wolves and elephants in the wild.

"I'm perfectly happy in my own company so isolation isn't a problem," he says.

"I think the furthest I've been from people on my own was in the Amazon nearly 30 years ago, when I was about 19. My boss had gone back to the city, which was about a week's journey away. It was just me, and I had a bag of rice and some fishing tackle and a canoe and I spent a month up there completely by myself without seeing another human being and I loved it.

"It's funny. It's the type of thing that might drive some people mad but if you have an interest in the natural world and like to observe things it's a complete luxury and joy to be able have that time on your own."

Buchanan, who was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for service to conservation and wildlife filmmaking, has been making nature documentaries for more than 20 years. He particularly enjoys the way that being out in the wild reawakens our own natural instincts.

"If you're by yourself in a wild place you become very vigilant and aware of everything, whether it's the weather or the change of light or an insect crawling over a branch or any noise. You just become a part of the natural world and I think that in itself is very grounding and very fulfilling."

Being part of nature is one thing, but the degree to which wildlife filmmakers should involve themselves with the animals they're filming is always a subject of debate. Buchanan says there are no one-size-fits-all rules.

"It comes down to the individual animals," he says. "You can't say 'with all wolves you have to stay 100 metres away from them', because some wolves you can't get within a mile of and others are happy to stand five metres away from you. I think it's about reading and being sensitive to the animal and having the animal's welfare as the number-one priority. Over time as I've got to know different animals it's quite easy to transfer those experiences from one species to another."

"The urban foxes in Glasgow are really struggling and there's lots of fighting at night time because there's limited food resources."Gordon Buchanan

Buchanan is even in favour of filmmakers directly intervening to save animals in some –circumstances – such as when the crew filming the BBC's Dynasties in Antarctica used shovels to dig a staircase for Emperor penguins that had become trapped in a steep snow gully during a storm.

"They got a huge amount of flak for that because they were altering this natural event. But when those penguins head out to fish, to catch food for their young, the fish stocks are depleted because of us. On one hand we're giving them less of a chance of survival, so on the other if you think 'If we don't step in 100 penguins are going to die here and all we need to do is get a shovel and dig a stairway for them' you can help.

"At the moment all the restaurants and take-away places are closed down so the urban foxes in Glasgow, of which there are many, are really struggling and there's lots of aggression and fighting you hear at night time because there's limited food resources. So I've started putting food out for the foxes every night. I'm involving myself in the natural world and I don't have a problem with that."

Buchanan's latest film, Snow Cats and Me, sees him involving himself in nature in a different way. The two-part documentary follows him and Russian scientist Victor Lukarevsky as they work to rehabilitate captive Eurasian lynx for release into the wild.

It's an emotional journey and Buchanan and Lukarevsky were very much learning as they went. The two older lynx had been born in the wild but had spent years in small cages inside a gloomy garage. The two younger ones were born into the pet trade and knew only a small city apartment.

All of them had different challenges that had to be overcome as Buchanan and Lukarevsky spent months training them to hunt with the aid of some ingenious contraptions. The goal was to release them into a vast wildlife refuge in a remote part of Siberia.

Without giving too much away, there's a happy little ending that has bigger implications.

"Victor's thinking is if you can do it with a lynx you can do it with any cat," Buchanan says. "He's worked with tigers in the far east of Russia and with leopards ... This could be the salvation for those other cats - you're not just waiting for wild populations to bounce back; you can increase genetic diversity by getting cats back into the wild."

Snow Cats and Me is on BBC Earth, Tuesdays at 8.30pm. Reindeer Family & Me airs on Tuesday, June 9, 8.30pm and Polar Bear Family & Me, Tuesdays, 8.30pm, from June 16.