In his upcoming special, Wolves Up Close with Bertie Gregory, the wildlife filmmaker returns to the remote shores of Hudson Bay to reconnect with a wolf pack he has followed for seven years. Gregory discusses the remarkable social lives of wolves, the unexpected lessons in leadership he learned from a pack leader named Kuna, and what it feels like to come face-to-face with a polar bear.

Wolves Up Close with Bertie Gregory premiers tomorrow on National Geographic then the following day on Disney+ and Hulu.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: This is a return to Hudson Bay for you. You’ve been there before. Can you describe it for people who’ve never been there, beyond what you see in the pictures? And has it changed much since you were there last?

BERTIE GREGORY: It’s a very remote and wild place. It’s very flat. Hudson Bay is a huge inland sea, and the area we were on, western Hudson Bay, is super wild. There aren’t a lot of humans there, and near the coast, you have these amazing beach ridges. They’re sandy ridges with trees on them, and then you’ll get a swampy lake, and then another beach ridge, and then a swampy lake, and then another beach ridge, and then the coast.

In summertime, it can get pretty warm sometimes, but in wintertime, it gets very, very cold. Hudson Bay freezes solid. We regularly had minus 40-degree conditions, which makes filming very challenging.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: And besides wolves and polar bears, which we’ll get to in a minute, what other animals do you find there?

BERTIE GREGORY: You get a lot of moose. There’s an amazing density of moose. They’re there eating all the willows that thrive at the coast. There’s good birdlife. In the autumn, in the fall, thousands and thousands of geese pass through. There are lots of owls. We get lots of red foxes. It’s a little too far south for Arctic foxes, so mostly red foxes.

It’s this amazing ecosystem where, when you get there, it feels very bleak and barren and empty. But actually, once you get your eye in, there are loads of big animals around.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: Before you headed out there, when you were planning, what did you set out to achieve with this particular episode?

BERTIE GREGORY: I think, previously, with Animals Up Close, we made lots of different episodes about lots of different animals. And one of the episodes that resonated most with people was when I went to film a puma in Patagonia. She was called Pataka, and I’ve known her since she was a cub. That seemed to really resonate with people, when I had a longstanding connection with an animal.

So we were thinking about the other places I could go where I’d spent a lot of time with individual animals, and this wolf pack was a bit of a no-brainer, given that I’d spent seven years following them. I think what we really set out to achieve was, firstly, to show how amazing wolves are, but also to try and help reframe our society’s understanding or perspective on what a wolf is. Because I think the media, our childhood stories, and Hollywood would have you believe they’re these ravenous human killers, which is just totally not true. We tried to correct that myth.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: Well, they are gorgeous-looking, aren’t they? Can you tell me about this particular pack of wolves, the one you’ve had a longstanding relationship with? What kind of wolves are they? And what makes them special, objectively, and what makes them special to you?

BERTIE GREGORY: Sure. They’re gray wolves, so they’re the species you find across North America. They’re not Arctic wolves, even though these wolves are in the subarctic. They’re kind of at the northernmost extent of their range.

This particular pack is special because they’re one of, if not the only one in the world, known to regularly go after polar bears. That was what originally grabbed my attention and made me want to go film them. And then they mean a lot to me because I know them as individuals, right? Just like humans, they have different personalities, individual personalities, and I’ve gotten to know those.

Wolf lifespans are very short. In the wild, on average, they’re usually only two or three years old. If a wolf gets to five or six, they’re doing really well. So that means all the individuals I first met in this pack six or seven years ago have now passed. I’m now following the descendants, the grandkids and the great-grandkids of those wolves. That’s a really special thing. It’s kind of nostalgic to be following the kids and grandkids of animals you used to know.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: So Kuna was pretty young when you first met?

BERTIE GREGORY: No, when I first met the pack, Kuna wasn’t around. He wasn’t around yet. So I’ve basically followed him his entire time in this pack.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: This is probably my favorite episode that I’ve seen from you because, whether it’s by design or not, there seemed to be something inherently primal about this episode, to me at least, and it really resonated with me.

There are three parts, and I don’t think these are spoilers because people actually have to watch it to really get what’s going on and how amazing the footage is. Three parts stuck out. Can you just describe them to me, what was going on, and what you were thinking?

The first one that struck me as really primal was Kuna and his family chasing the dark wolf away. And the dark wolf, that’s so sort of literary, isn’t it? But I mean, protecting their territory, and I guess protecting his pack, right? Because you said he could have been wanting to replace him.

BERTIE GREGORY: Yeah, totally. That was an amazing situation in that we’d met that black wolf as an individual, by himself. And we’d obviously followed the main pack for a long time. So then to be in a situation where the two of them came together, and actually to be in the right position to film that, was incredibly fortunate. You couldn’t have scripted it.

I think what most struck me about that was the interaction the pack had with each other just after they chased him off. They kind of came together to celebrate defending their home. You could see they were celebrating, but also reassuring each other after this really on-edge time. And to see the way they licked, tail-wagged, and howled, they’re just so similar to how a domestic dog would greet its owner after being away for a long day. It just felt so familiar, but then also so wild.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: Right. I mean, there was something about the stalking and the hunting and then the chase. It was really amazing. The chase was amazing. I mean, that dark wolf really can run, right?

The second one was the hunt. And again, it’s the stalking, and then the hunting, and then the chase. Number one, you see the efficiency of the wolves, which is amazing. They’re like this well-oiled machine when they’re hunting the moose. And then, when it got to Kuna, when he latches onto the moose and, for I don’t know how long, is just there, it’s so primal. What was that like?

BERTIE GREGORY: Yeah, I mean, as you say, I love the way that the wolves are running in snow that is as deep as they are tall. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to run in snow, but after about 50 feet, I’m cooked. I’m done. So they did miles and miles through that deep snow.

I love the way that the front wolf was breaking trail, and then they’d get tired and hop out of the way. It was like an Olympic sprinting team passing over the baton. So that was really, really cool.

I think what was so crazy about the whole thing was that, in this time of immense danger for the family, of course it was Kuna who stepped forward and jumped on the moose. It was like he was saying, “I’m gonna show you how to do this.”

I think I learned a lot from Kuna about leadership. When the situation was benign, he would always lead from the back. He’d let the younger members of the pack think they were in charge and give them autonomy. But whenever it got serious and his family was in danger, whether that was chasing the black wolf off or jumping on the moose, he would step forward and take the lead. On a human level, he showed amazing leadership.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: The last instance is the obvious one. It’s the polar bear and you, right? And again, it’s so primal. The staredown, the almost-hunt, the almost-chase. Well, there was almost a chase.

In that scene, you could feel the electricity. You know, there’s that thing when you’re going to get into a fight or something’s going to happen. You feel it, and you can almost literally feel the hair raising as well. And it struck me that, in a weird way, that’s an interaction that humans have been having for millennia. You know what I mean? That sort of staredown with an animal. How did that feel? What was that like?

BERTIE GREGORY: Yeah, well, I guess there are two parts. The first part would be that it’s pretty humbling to be on the food chain. The media would have you believe that every wild animal is out to eat you, like the wolves, but that’s not true. They’re not. Whereas polar bears are one of the only animals that actively hunt humans.

That said, we’ve added some dramatic music, but the reality is, if that was actually a dangerous situation to be in, we wouldn’t put ourselves in it. Because that would be unfair for us and for the polar bear. The reason it’s not dangerous is because of the knowledge of our amazing guides, Mike and Butch. They’ve spent decades living alongside polar bears and know how to walk with them safely.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: But you still did have to move it along.

BERTIE GREGORY: Oh, yeah. No, it’s time to go!

And to be honest, that’s more in the interest of keeping the bear safe. As a bear gets more and more interested, we have all these levels of deterrent. We didn’t really go into this in the show. We have everything from using our voice to banging sticks. We have flares, we have the shotgun. Now, a shotgun is for making a very loud noise. It’s not for shooting the bear.

But you don’t want to have to get to the louder things, because why not just leave? Most of the bears, nine out of ten, you can just deter with your voice.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: Again, even knowing that deterrence is the product of millennia of interactions, you know how to interact with them, you know how to move them on. It was so amazing to me. I thought it was really great.

And I couldn’t stop thinking of those Coke cans during Christmas time, when they have the big polar bears. I’m like, they’re not the same, are they?

When you’re filming, do interactions ever really turn? Not often, necessarily, but do they turn once in a while in that way that animals can flip from maybe walking away to suddenly thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m under threat,” or “Maybe that’s my dinner”?

BERTIE GREGORY: The first thing I’d say is there are three things that are potentially dangerous in our job. And I will list them in the order of actual danger: humans, the physical landscape, and animals. Wild animals.

So humans are always the dangerous thing. If you work with great humans, they’re not dangerous. The landscape is the second most difficult. Particularly in this case, it’s really cold, and if you’re not smart, you can cause yourself a lot of harm.

And then, thirdly, these animals are large. The polar bears, the moose, they’re potentially very dangerous, but not if you interact with them correctly. And as I say, the wolves, we’re part of the landscape to them. They’re bold, they’re curious, they’re not aggressive.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: What would you like the audience to take away from this wonderful episode?

BERTIE GREGORY: I hope they can see just how magical wolves are and the amazing connection they have within the pack. And I hope that it rejigs their impression of wolves, and that maybe childhood stories and Hollywood might not have had it right.

The reason I hope people realize that is because it’s very easy to do harm and persecute something that everyone hates or fears. So if we don’t hate or fear this animal, maybe we’ll think twice before taking them off the endangered species list or shooting and trapping them. Maybe we’ll treat them a bit nicer.

Wolves are key parts of wild places, and we humans need wild places to be healthy.

SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER: Wonderful. Thank you. That was a really great episode. I really liked it a lot, in case you couldn’t tell! But yeah, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

BERTIE GREGORY: Thanks, Marc.

IMAGE CREDIT: National Geographic/Bertie Gregory