Polar bears, up close and personal

For our story on polar bears and British filmmaker John Downer's genius method of capturing them on film, "60 Minutes" traveled to Svalbard, Norway, in August 2010.

You may have seen polar bears shot from a distance, but have you ever seen them up close? Probably not. Polar bears are usually shot at the end of a long lens but Downer found a way to film them using "spy cams."

Downer's film, "Polar Bears: Spy on the Ice," will air on Animal Planet October 4, 2011. For the last two years, the polar bears have been under constant surveillance, scrutinized by cameras disguised as snowballs, mounds of snow, and tiny icebergs drifting by.

The bears wander right past or up to the cameras, but the nearest cameraman can be miles away.

So what's the idea behind the spy cams? "Well, the thing about a spy cam is it actually gets you close to the animals. You're in the scene, you're in the picture. You're picking up a magic that you cannot capture with a normal camera. It is like a secret world," Downer told "60 Minutes" correspondent Bob Simon.

John Downer's technical wizard is Geoff Bell. Bell had been a model airplane designer for years when Downer realized how useful his talents and his toys could be in the espionage game.

Downer explained why keeping a distance from the polar bears is crucial: "Polar bears see something on two legs and think, 'Well that might be food.' Everything it sees that moves in this environment could be food. And of course, food is everything in this world."

If the lion is the king of the jungle, then the polar bear is the king of the ice. He's at the top of the food chain on the top of the world, and he's revered by the few people who live in the Arctic Circle.

The few people who live in the Arctic Circle call the polar bear "God's dog" or the "ever wandering one" because he can roam hundreds of miles searching for seals.

John Downer's new film, "Spy on the Ice," is just the latest in his 30-year career which began with the BBC's Natural History Unit.

For his first project in the mid-1980s, he wanted to capture what it's like to be a bird. That meant flying with one.

For a three-part series on tigers in India, Downer used a spy cam on an elephant. He mounted trunk cams and tusk cams and the tigers were not at all self conscious because elephants have always been part of their world.

Africa's famous wildebeest migration has been filmed hundreds of times, but not with a croc cam or a skull cam - or a dung cam, an HD camera smothered in dung.

The "croc cam," used to capture Africa's famous wildebeest migration.