Dave SalmoniRenowned zoologist behaviour expert and global heartthrob Dave Salmoni is coming back to screens next week with new show Deadly Islands, where he explores some of the world's most remote locations to investigate just how the native inhabitants have been so successful at surviving despite some of the harshest conditions on the planet.
We got the chance to chat to Dave about his time filming the series, how he found himself taking this path in his life and what his scariest and most satisfying moments are in his career to-date.
How did you find yourself going down this career path - has it always been a passion of yours?
The passion part of it you hit on - absolutely. I feel like I've never been one to sort of sit down and say 'what am I gonna do with my life?'
I do remember a point I told my father 'I'm gonna go take Zoology as a university course' and my father kinda looked at me and he was like 'what kinda job do you get from that?' and I was like 'I don't care about my job, Dad, I'm just interested in this stuff' and so, career was never my thought.
I went from a Zoology degree to an animal trainer and that was just because I wanted to be hands-on with animals and hang out with them, and then I left that and wanted to get into conservation and I loved that, then TV came and found me - I loved that - but even four or fives years into my television career I never thought of it as a 'career', it was just like these guys are paying me to do all these fun things - you know?
'I wanna go live with lions.' 'OK, we'll pay you.' 'I wanna go play with tigers.' 'OK', well who doesn't wanna go play with tigers?
So my career only came, once I bought a house I was like 'Oo, I guess I have a mortgage now, I better assume this as my career!'
Obviously TV becomes a lot scarier when you're depending on it because it's fairly fleeting with most people. Who knows how you're meant to choose that as a career path?
Tell us a little bit about what you'll be getting up to in the new series Deadly Islands.
Deadly Islands is an attempt to show the world animals that they're not used to seeing doing things that they're not used to seeing them do, and to do that we always had to go to places that we haven't been before. So, there was no point us going to the African Savanna for this series, we went off to the farthest corners of the planet and found these islands that people just haven't been to.
It's too difficult to get there and once you're there it's too difficult to be there. So we were there with cameras and in each episode you're gonna see what I consider to be the best of the best blue chip wildlife footage. We hired the makers of Planet Earth to make sure that happened.
Then my job was to tell a story. Each one of these islands had had some kind of animal mystery and I try to take you along this mystery as we try to figure out what's going on with these animals at these places. I'm the entertainment value hopefully!
So viewers can expect to find out things that haven't been discovered before in this series?
Well yeah, a great example - we had one of our cameramen - I think he's got two PhDs in something - so he's one of these guys which are just uber focused, and he was in the bush in a hive for 12 weeks looking for a bird, and while he was in there he heard this weird noise and he went and found it and it happened to be Capuchins using tools - using an anvil to open almonds - and previously science didn't think that Capuchins in that area did any kind of tool use, so we were the first people to find it, let alone record it and show it to our audience. So that happened pretty regularly.
You're also in some dangerous situations in the show - do you ever have a moment where you think you're pushing things too far?
Well, I mean any time that you've gotten yourself into a life or death situation you've kind of gone too far, you know what I mean?
I feel like we mitigate our risk at all times and we knew that there would be risk involved because you can't deal with bears or sharks or whatever and not have risk, but controlled risk, and when that controlled risk exceeds our level of control, certainly you've made a small degree of error, and that's the only level of error we allow for. In every case our safety protocols and our abilities as outdoorsmen who have been on these types of adventures before, we got ourselves out of. No-one died in the making of this, but certainly I had sharks tryna bite the top of my head.
We got stuck on the top of a volcano with limited food and water where things could've turned pretty ugly pretty quickly if the weather didn't turn on us. So, certainly there's no shortage of situations where we had to make sure we stayed alive.
What would you note as the scariest moment of your career so far?
I would say that life threatening is life threatening. One life threatening moment is never any scarier than another. When you're in a situation when you realise 'oh my God this could be - my decisions now and my actions right now are gonna determine whether I live through this' - those moments are always the exact equal sense of scary.
I've been attacked by a lion and that was scary, but I've been surrounded by man-killing elephants and that was scary!
I dove 60 metres, let me tell you diving out of a jet is something I'm not comfortable with - I felt closer to death in that moment than ever with a shark or when a vampire bat was biting off the back of my leg.
Similarly, what would you say are some of the most satisfying moments of your career?
Satisfying moments, I would say I am an impulse guy at the best so I feel like anytime I've gone to answer a question I feel like I do that, that's satisfying.
Great example, when I first started television I said I want to go and introduce myself and be accepted by a pride of lions and the world was saying it's impossible and I thought I could do it, and that's my ego talking so I went off and I did it.
I remember there was a point where I was sitting on a termite mound with three other female lionesses in this pride and they were just lying there sleeping. Very undramatic from a television point of view but from a personal point of view I was like 'I did it.'
So there's moments like that all the time. I said at one point I wanted to train two tigers to fend and kill for themselves and once again science had been trying to do it for 40 years and it's impossible, and 'Dave you can't do that' and once I did it, it was that satisfying moment.
At the end of Deadly Islands is another good example. We did a year and a half in production. Everybody in this production gave everything they had. I was telling a guy the other day we had producers that literally - their wives gave birth and these guys were the very next day in the office trying to make sure that we were supported and not without water or food on one of these islands and so everybody gave an ounce of their own flesh for this show.
So, the satisfying moment when you first see that first cut when the show's turning around you're like 'oh, this is gonna be quite good!' Sometimes when you watch a show you're like 'this is a great description of what we did' and there's other times when you're like 'oh wow, this is good entertainment, this is something that I think people are gonna love.' and I think this year my most satisfying moment was when I watched that first cut I felt 'oh this is riveting'.
We went out in search of what I keep calling 'wow moments', and I feel like this show better than any show I've ever done is just a series of moments that you're gonna go 'Wow. Wow!' I would doubt that anybody would watch this show and have three minutes where they don't go 'oh, wow.' and I think that's the whole point. That's what we wanna do, we wanna impress upon you that this is cool, these places are cool and the animals are cool.
So it's a very gruelling but rewarding experience in that sense?
Yeah gruelling is definitely a good example. We are physically exhausted, we were mentally exhausted and we were beat up pretty bad on this show.
What's at the top of your list for future projects?
Being an impulse guy I sort of feel like I really enjoy the part of Deadly Islands where you're going to a place that you don't know exactly what to expect. You don't know which animals you're gonna see, you don't know what they're gonna be doing and you don't know if anyone's even been to this space before and I think that will definitely be top of my list right now, to do something like that again.
Deadly Islands airs Thursdays at 9pm from May 1st on Discovery Channel.