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By Kiri Cashell, Director on Seven Worlds, One Planet

One of the most memorable experiences I had working on Seven Worlds, One Planet was filming Barbary macaques in Gibraltar.

We were lucky enough to film with a troop that’s been closely monitored and studied for years - so even before filming had begun we had a detailed insight into the members of the troop and more importantly the family hierarchy.

In macaque society, much like our own, there are ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ – the high ranking and low ranking individuals. Understanding a monkey’s position within this hierarchy was therefore key to us making sense of their complex lives.

Armed with this knowledge, cameraman Mark MacEwen and I spent every waking hour with the troop for over a month. These highly intelligent and entertaining characters, became our daily companions. They sat with us in the shade, groomed our hair, raided our bags, inspected the cameras and generally kept Mark and I on our toes.

But aside from the general havoc and hilarity this close relationship provided, being accepted by the troop ultimately allowed us to capture the more tense and dramatic aspects of their lives.

We kept a particularly close eye on one young female who had just given birth to her first baby.

She was of low rank, so bottom of the pecking order and was something of an outcast. She spent a lot of time alone and she often looked nervous when around the other members of the troop.

Naturally we empathised with the new mother, but it wasn’t until we filmed her baby being snatched from her, that we really understood the full implications of her position.

We watched in shock as another female manhandled her baby away from her, ran across a busy road and then up a huge pylon.

It was hard to watch - the mother's distress was clear, but she was powerless to act because of her low rank. With no idea of what the outcome would be, we filmed the whole thing with our hearts in our mouths.

Luckily, after what seemed like an eternity, mum finally managed to get her baby back and we could all breathe a huge sigh of relief. It was a dramatic and fascinating insight into the complex social lives of these monkeys.