Searching the Sahara for Desert Wildlife - DJI Osmo Pocket 4

Literally right in front of me is a fennec fox. These foxes are specialized for life in the desert and in the summer they almost never drink water. Join me for a week in the Sahara Desert where I've brought the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 to help share what I see with you. The Sahara Desert is the largest hot desert on earth. Temperatures can exceed over 45 Celsius in the day. Some dunes can reach over 160 meters high. Wind is constantly reshaping dunes meaning the landscape is always changing. Despite harsh conditions the desert supports life, adapted to the extremes. Welcome to the Sahara. Over the years I've been sharing my adventures online. I've been sharing all the amazing wildlife I see and hopefully bringing you a little bit closer to the natural world. I really like to make my videos cinematic but this comes at a cost. Weight, having to need a tripod, an extra camera, a microphone and the truth is I wouldn't be a wildlife photographer if it wasn't for you watching these videos. So it's really important that I do share these stories and share the wildlife I get to see. But the truth is I've missed plenty of wildlife shots just trying to set up an extra camera and try and get the behind the scenes. But now I have a solution. This is the DJI Osmo Pocket 4. It has a gimbal, it's very compact, this is the microphone which is tiny and this is all I need. This is it and this means I can focus on the wildlife photography. So let's take it into the Sahara and see how it does. In the afternoon we set off for our first session in the Sahara. When we were arriving here this morning I was so excited seeing the dunes from a distance. I've wanted to come here ever since I discovered my squirrel recordings were going to be in the movie Dune. And yes, later in this video I find the famous desert mouse. And shortly we found our first fennec. She's hiding behind the rock. Fennec foxes are nocturnal so spend most of the day resting. After a bit of patience Miss Fennec was up. It's showtime. With those big ears, fennec foxes have exceptional hearing. They rely on acute precise hearing to detect prey beneath the sand. These amazing ears also help dissipate heat and help cool the fennecs in the Sahara heat. They actually have many adaptations for surviving the Sahara. They have thick fur between their paw pads to protect their feet from the hot sand. They also have specialized kidneys. In the summer they almost never drink water so all their water intake is taken from their diet. Like all foxes, fennecs raise cubs in a den. Fennecs dig two to three meters into the sand. These dens not only offer a safe place for the cubs but also somewhere to escape the Sahara heat. So it is our first evening in the Sahara desert and we saw our first fennec fox. He's around a year old and it was amazing because well I mean it's the first fennec we've seen. We first found him sleeping and he was just behind some grass and he got up and he started walking around and it was amazing seeing him do that very typical fox behavior where they cock the head left to right and they are listening into the ground for prey. We are now next to another den. We're about maybe 50 meters away and there's lots of fresh tracks and fresh digging. Hopefully we will see a fennec. It is still quite bright even though the sun has set so I think we'll give it a bit longer. We called it an evening and headed back to our accommodation just in time for the stars to fill the sky. There's something about the Sahara that feels almost unreal. A place shaped by wind and time where the landscape is constantly shifting yet somehow feels timeless. It's harsh, vast and often silent. There's a certain magic here. We're only just beginning our time here searching for wildlife. There's still so much to see but let me show you how some of these shots have been possible. For this video I'm of course going to be filming with my usual camera and lens but for the vlogs and for the behind the scenes of me walking around and filming from the ATV I'm going to be filming on the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 which I'm currently filming with and I thought I'd share a few of the features that are important for me. So it shoots in 4k and high frame rates. This is really great for detailed and sharp shots. It also shoots in 10-bit D-log. This is really good for post-processing so when you're editing you can get more colours and more information in the shadows and highlights and you're just more flexible for getting a certain colour look. It also has really good low light performance so the sun set about maybe 20 minutes ago and I'm sure you can see me very clearly. Did you get that? That was a chisman gerbil. A wild gerbil. It also has a three axis stabilisation gimbal so this means I don't need to set up a tripod and it is just stable. This is really important for when you're trying to get cinematic footage. Just being stable is a game changer. As you've seen it's really compact and portable. It's tiny. I've been using this little satchel and it fits in there and I can fit all the extras as well inside and yeah it's so small. It also has built-in storage. You don't know the amount of times I have gone out and forgotten to bring an extra card and that means I can't film myself because there's not an extra card and it has 107 gigabytes of internal storage so if you forget your micro sd card no problem it can film directly on camera. So those are a few of the features that are important for me and I'm excited to test it out in the Sahara this week and hopefully share my experience photographing wildlife. Some of you may know that several years ago one of my baby squirrel recordings was in the Hollywood movie Doom. In the story the desert mouse faced off a Jeboa is seen as a creature wise to the ways of the desert. So tonight we're looking for the Jeboa and other small gerbils that call the Sahara home. First we found the fat-tailed gerbil. These gerbils have a prey response of sitting still when shined with light. We spent a few minutes with each and let them run off into the night. We also found the cheeseman's gerbil and then after an hour of searching we found the Jeboa. It almost feels full circle to see it in real life. At only around 10 centimeters in length the Jeboa can reach 15 miles per hour and can travel six miles each night. The Jeboas were a little shy so I couldn't capture their long legs. I hope you've enjoyed the first part to the Sahara. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you to my patrons who support my work and I'll see you in the next video.