How do nature documentaries avoid disrupting the animals?
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A variety of ways and sometimes not at all. Extremely long zoom lenses can allow crews to film from a considerable distance. Automated cameras can be placed in carefully selected locations and record without anyone being near and so on.
Animals are largely very predictable. They’re habitual, we know what they want and need. So rather than running around trying to catch them on camera. We can set up and watch places like watering holes, popular trails, resting places and so on.
But it’s also important to understand that wildlife documentaries are highly edited. They’re edited to give an accurate picture of reality but the way they do that is very manufactured.
For instance, when lions hunt, most of their hunts end in failure. And the hunts that do succeed can cross a lot of distance very quickly as the animals run and chase. That makes it very difficult to film from start to finish.
So when you see a lion hunt in a documentary, you might be looking at footage from dozens of different hunts all edited into a single running scene. It’s an accurate depiction of a hunt but it’s not like you can tell that the lioness that leaves the resting place isn’t the same one that runs after the zebra or brings it down.
In a similar vein, many shots of small subjects like two insects mating, are often filmed in entirely artificial settings. Often the documentary makers build tables covered in plants in a greenhouse studio setting and then introduce the insects hoping they’ll do what they do. The insects still show their natural behaviour because they really don’t have the ability to differentiate between an artificial set and their natural environment.
And sometimes the animals do get disturbed and that’s likely footage you can’t use.
[For example, here’s a polar bear examining a plexiglass camera position.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G1aHkLHQ2I&ab_channel=AnimalChannel) The camera position was set up to watch a seal breathing hole that bears use to hunt. But this one was more interested in the cameraman.
[Here’s a fun article about a cameraman who specializes in filming insect behaviour in artificial sets for documentaries.](http://retouchist.net/blog-1/2016/7/12/have-you-ever-wondered-how-some-nature-documentaries-are-filmed)
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