Leading wildlife cameraman Nick Gordon has died suddenly of a suspected heart attack while filming in a remote rainforest region on the borders of Venezuela and Brazil.
Leading wildlife cameraman Nick Gordon has died suddenly of a suspected heart attack while filming in a remote rainforest region on the borders of Venezuela and Brazil.

The 51-year-old, who has worked on numerous high profile nature shows, notably ITV1's Survival , was in South America filming a documentary about the world's biggest spider with scientist Rick West. He died on Sunday.

Mike Linley, who was supervising producer on Gordon's Survival programmes, said: "He died doing a job that he loved and at which he was exceptional. His thirst for knowledge and eagerness to find a way to portray it on film was insatiable."

Gordon's career spanned 20 years, made a number of groundbreaking programmes including the BBC's Life of Birds.

He had his own camp in the Amazon where he rescued sick and orphaned animals, but after 12 years living and working in the heat and humidity and with bouts of malaria, he decided to spend more time in Britain.

During his career he survived shipwreck, war, kidnapping and malaria to deliver images of the natural world.

Among his best work was a series of films shot in the Amazon rainforest for Anglia Television's Survival unit, which ended in a seven-year project to finish the first definitive account of the most elusive of the big cats, the jaguar.

One-hour documentary for ITV Jaguar - Eater of Souls , screened in 1999, show unprecedented footage of the animal's behaviour and looked at the relationship between the big cat and a community of forest Indians. It took him seven years to gather the footage he needed.

His first Survival commission was a film about the giant otter of Guyana and the efforts of a Scottish woman create a haven for them. Other one-hour specials included Web of the Spider Monkey and Gremlins: Faces in the Forest. Creatures of the Magic Water , broadcast in 1995, was a celebration of wildlife and a local hunter turned protector.