EASTERN DAILY PRESS (Norfolk, UK) 28 September 06 Alligator spotted in Norfolk lake? (Jules Stevens)
Photo: Caroline Brett and Philip Sharpe put the model through its paces.
An alligator was spotted gliding menacingly through the steely grey waters of a lake at a Norfolk stately home yesterday.
But luckily for gentler home-grown wildlife - and fishermen tucking into their sandwiches - there were no cries of "see you later alligator," because the beady eye fixed on them was just that - a glass bead.
The not-so-dangerous reptile was a life-like, propeller-propelled model carrying a small film camera, which was being tested in the lake at Gunton Park, near North Walsham, to capture footage for a television nature programme.
It will allow award-winning Norfolk film maker Caroline Brett to get up close to caiman alligators to take never-before-seen images when she goes to Brazil this week.
But the idea almost fell through when a caiman could not be found - until the Castle Museum, in Norwich, came to the rescue.
"We searched all over the country for a stuffed caiman," said Ms Brett, who used to produce the Survival series for Anglia Television.
"We asked all the big natural history museums in the country. We searched the web and wracked our brains."
Ms Brett, who lives near Gunton Park, said: "And then, as we were giving up hope and thinking of dropping the idea, I phoned the Castle Museum."
And it came up trumps, with not only a caiman, but also a larger alligator in its store, which the film makers ended up using because of its greater size.
With a suitable alligator found, a film special effects technician - who worked on Batman Begins, and made the guns on the villain's car move in the last Bond film - came to the museum to take a cast of the stuffed beast.
Philip Sharpe, from Oxford, used the same quick-drying substance dentists use to take moulds of teeth to make a perfect imprint of the animal.
It was then cast in plaster, after which a mould was made in silicon, before the final scaly-black glass fibre model was produced.
Tony Irwin, the natural history expert at the museum, had originally worried that the alligator might get damaged, but the casting process had, in fact, cleaned the skin, he said.
And the alligator had provided an unusual insight into the past.
"I was bringing the alligator down in the lift, hugging it around its waist as if I was wrestling it when some Tic Tacs fell out of its mouth. I gave it a shake and sweet wrappers and cigarette butts fell out. People had been using its mouth as a bin for many, many years," he said. "It was like a little social history of our visitors."
Now there are plans to display the discovery, when the programme is screened, alongside the museum's beast, which is thought to be from the beginning of the last century.
And the model, which goes forward at around walking pace, and has stabilisers to keep the expensive high definition video camera out of the water, made a perfect test run. But Ms Brett said it was still a gamble, as they had no idea how the caimans would react to the new member of their pack.
"Caimans are notoriously inquisitive and there is a possibility they will investigate it with their jaws," she said.
The film will be the first made about the rare reptiles, which are an endangered species after thousands were hunted and killed to make handbags in the 1940s.
But a friend and colleague of Ms Brett's discovered thousands swarming around an lake in the Amazon in 2003, stumbling across them whilst making a film about dolphins.
The film will be screened on the National Geographic channel in the summer.

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