01x03 - Deserts & Grasslands

[bunniefuu]

This is Guelta d'Archei

in Central Africa.

A hostile, seemingly empty world.

There is life here.

But it exists at the

very limits of survival.

For this is a world

with almost no water.

Lands like these cover

over a third of our planet.

Here, life is forced

to do things differently.

This is the most

ancient desert of all.

The Namib - in south west Africa.

It is one of the

hottest places on Earth.

Yet this male ostrich and his mate

have come here to start a family.

Few predators venture

out during the heat of day.

But such safety comes at a price.

Out in the open, the

newly-hatched chicks are exposed

to the crushing heat of the sun.

But not all of

the brood have hatched.

Until they do, the

family will stay here.

The adults take it in

turns to protect the brood.

So whilst the female

takes a well-earned break,

the male takes over for

the most testing shift.

He gently rolls

the unhatched eggs

calling to the young within them.

He doesn't want to

leave anyone behind.

The temperature continues to rise

by five degrees Celsius every hour.

He protects the chicks

that have emerged

shading them with his own body.

At the end of another

gruelling day in the sun

he's lost almost all his energy.

But he must resist the urge to rest.

The cool of the

night brings some relief

but now predators

are out and about.

It's going to be a long night.

Dawn brings a surprise.

Three additions to the family

to greet the returning female.

But there's a problem.

The chicks won't survive another

day in these temperatures.

Yet the male is reluctant to leave.

Some of the eggs

have still not hatched.

But time has run out.

They must depart.

Just a few minutes too late.

Alone and without the

protection of its parents,

this hatchling's chances are slim.

HATCHLING CALLS

CALLING CONTINUES

Survival here, as in all deserts,

is on a Kn*fe edge.

So desert dwellers have had

to evolve in remarkable ways.

Some have even given rise to

legends of dragons and unicorns.

And even the dunes have

their own magical quality.

Indeed some have their own voice.

Here in Arabia,

this extraordinary sound

is created by billions

of moving sand grains

vibrating against one another.

The eerie song they produce

can be heard for miles

across the world's

biggest sand desert.

Winds have also built

sand into surreal shapes.

Deserts around the

world can appear so alien,

that they seem to belong

to another planet altogether.

Few more so than here in Australia.

Yet one little creature

chooses this desert

to prepare for a most

important event in its life.

A male spotted bowerbird.

For the last two months,

he has been busy in

anticipation of brief rains

That is when females

will look for a mate.

So he's built a bower,

a sort of theatre,

a stage on which he will dance

with a female, if she is willing.

He decorates the entrance with piles

of empty snail shells and bones.

How could any female resist?

The rains are due any day,

so it's his last

chance for improvements.

You can never have too many shells.

But in his absence

a rival male drops by,

to size up the competition

and cause trouble.

Wreck your neighbour's bower

and your own might look better.

And perhaps one of the best bits

would look good in his bower.

The owner is back.

And something isn't right.

Repairs are needed.

Still no sign of rain or females.

Undeterred, he continues

his preparations.

Time to rehearse

his courtship display.

But sadly he may

only ever dance alone.

For the last three years,

the rains have failed.

Without them,

the females won't mate.

They need the rains to provide

food for their family.

Changes in the climate

are affecting these birds,

just as they are affecting us.

A quarter of the world's

people live in arid lands.

So we, too, have to deal

with climate change.

Less rainfall and extended

droughts allow deserts to grow.

And as they do,

so does the likelihood

of one of nature's

most intimidating events.

A dust storm.

A wall of dust up to a mile high,

travelling at almost 70mph.

Today these destructive storms are

some of the most powerful ever seen.

Unstoppable, they can

travel thousands of miles

overwhelming towns and

cities across the world

in an instant.

It takes millennia for life to

adapt to the extremes of deserts.

These baboons manage to survive

in one of the driest

environments on Earth.

The Erongo region in Namibia.

Not a single drop of rain has

fallen here for eight months.

Life here for these

baboons is as hard as it gets.

And it's especially difficult

for this young female.

She has just given

birth to her first baby.

She's desperate for water.

Without it, she can't produce milk.

The tiny of amount of

moisture in her food

is simply not enough

for both of them.

The troop must constantly

search for water.

And they won't wait for her.

At last, one of the troop's scouts

finds a tiny trickle on a rock face.

Relief!

But not for everyone.

The young mother will have to wait.

Access to the precious

water is determined by rank.

She is so low in

the pecking order

she might fail to

get any drink at all.

Because jumping the queue

is severely punished.

It's risky, but she

can't wait any longer.

A dangerous move.

But there's no match for

a mother's determination.

This will be enough to keep her

and her baby alive until rain falls.

Rain brings salvation not

just to her and the troop,

but to the thirsty land.

When it does fall,

it can transform a desert.

And turn it into one of

Earth's most productive landscapes.

Grasslands.

They support the greatest

concentrations of large animals

to be found anywhere on the planet.

Here nature is at

its most spectacular.

This leopardess, believe it or not,

is ready to hunt at

a moment's notice.

She is one of the few

special leopards that have

learnt to hide in the tree tops,

and wait for their

prey to come to them.

Without making a sound,

she gets into position.

Not this time.

And now her

presence is known to all.

But leopards will go to

astonishing lengths to succeed.

And some are more

daring than others.

This leopard climbs up to a

branch nine metres above the ground.

She's higher than the

roof of a two-storey house.

Leopards have k*lled themselves

jumping from these heights.

To succeed on these

equatorial grasslands,

you must be adaptable

and sometimes brave.

The Eurasian Steppe,

the largest grassland on earth.

It tests animals in a different way.

Here, the wind can blow

at speeds of nearly 80mph.

And temperatures drop to

below minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Yet one bizarre creature has evolved

ways to survive in these extremes.

Saiga antelope.

Small but tough animals that lived

alongside woolly mammoths.

The male's enormous nose

both filters out the dust

and warms up the cold air

before it reaches his lungs.

But at this time of year, it also

serves a very different purpose.

It impresses the females.

And the bigger it is, the better.

This old male knows what it

takes to hold their attention.

But they make him work for it.

And if that isn't effective

he has other ways

of impressing them.

A bush - very majestic.

But when you are king of the steppe,

there's always someone

waiting to claim your crown.

This young buck fancies his chances.

He aims to steal the king's harem.

The challenger charges,

ready to do battle.

This could be a fight to the death.

70% of rutting males will die.

The older male eventually

begins to gain the upper hand.

And with one final effort,

he drives the young rival away.

The king has kept his crown -

and his harem.

Only the strongest saigas

can endure and succeed

in one of the harshest

places on Earth.

But close to the equator, where

there is constant warmth and water,

there are grasslands

close to paradise.

This is the most bio-diverse

grassland in the world

the Cerrado in Brazil.

Here there are thousands of

species of both animals and plants

found nowhere else.

A rich and complex community

that is kept in balance

by this ghostly creature.

A maned wolf.

Quiet and shy, it's

little known and seldom seen.

Unlike any other wolf in the world,

their diet is mostly vegetarian.

And they particularly

like lobeira fruit.

This plant increases

the fertility of the land,

and helps to sustain

the entire Cerrado.

The maned wolves,

odd though it may seem,

are, in effect, the gardeners

of these unique plains.

The dense grass in

turn provides this female

with a comfortable home

and somewhere to

hide her three puppies,

just one month old.

She is so rare that she's

been fitted with a radio-collar

so that scientists can

study her continuously.

And our remotely controlled

"den camera" reveals a mother

only comes here for a few

hours a day to suckle her pups.

She spends much of her time foraging

to provide for her growing family.

Now, alone in the den,

her puppies are suddenly in danger.

Not from other predators

but from fire.

Their home is being

burnt all around them.

These fires can race

through a mile of grassland

in a matter of minutes.

The Cerrado devastated.

Why?

In order to clear

land to grow crops.

This particular fire

didn't reach their den.

But it's empty.

This time, the family were lucky.

But her species faces an

alarmingly uncertain future.

At the current rate

of habitat destruction,

these may be some of the last

maned wolves to survive in the wild.

In grasslands,

the land and the animals

are so closely interconnected,

that the loss of one key species

could well trigger the collapse

of the entire ecosystem.

That's what happened

here in central Africa,

when 95% of the elephant population

were k*lled for their ivory.

Without these essential gardeners -

life couldn't flourish.

This male is one

of the few survivors.

He still bears the scars

from his persecuted past.

But the slaughter

was stopped just in time.

With an end to poaching,

this male is part of a growing

herd that now lives in safety.

Today, it's thought this is

one of the largest groups

of African elephants

surviving in the wild.

As they recovered their numbers,

their grazing encouraged a

healthy growth of new grasses.

And they created

space for other animals

bringing life back to Zakouma.

This miraculous transformation

shows what can happen

if nature is allowed

to restore its own balance.

Abakar is part of the team of local

rangers who risked their lives

to protect these elephants.

And the elephants

didn't just heal the land.

They did something

no-one had anticipated.

As we understand more

about the wonders,

the connections and the

fragility of these landscapes

the consequences of our

actions are thrown into sharp focus.

They show we urgently need to do

everything we can to

help nature heal itself.

To film maned wolves,

the Planet Earth crew joined

pioneering scientists in Brazil.

If you get a direction, Bela,

please let me know.

Yeah, she's like three o'clock

from the car here.

Like 800 metres, too.

Without their help the wolves

are almost impossible to track,

let alone film,

in the dense grass of the Cerrado.

It's so hard to find them,

they're sort of solitary

animals in a huge grassland

with sort of metre high grass,

which is the same

height as the wolf.

And it's like looking for a

needle in a haystack currently.

Shall we turn the car around,

if she's going to head that way?

Yeah, maybe.

The researchers have radio

collared two female wolves.

Both have puppies.

They hope to track one to a den

and set up remote cameras inside.

The footage would provide the

researchers with crucial information

and help to protect

this endangered species.

She's in here somewhere.

Maned wolf, they're so special.

It's very important to

understand more of this species.

When we get more knowledge,

its getting easier to protect them.

But the signal from

one of the females

takes them in a worrying direction.

So it's led us directly into

this huge epic scale farmland,

the likes of which, to be honest,

I've never seen before.

And it shows you what little is

left of their natural habitat.

50% of maned wolf habitat

has been lost to farmland.

And the radio collars show

they now regularly stray

into this unfamiliar landscape.

Tragically, the researchers

discover the body

of one collared mother wolf

on farmland.

The cause of her death unknown.

Her puppies won't

survive alone for long.

Without delay, the

researchers set out to find them.

They rescue five,

one-month-old pups,

hidden in the long grass.

To assess their condition,

the pups are taken to

an emergency rescue facility.

They will be cared

for around the clock,

until they are strong enough to

be released back into the wild.

Their mothers death is

a huge blow for everyone.

For the crew, the only

chance of filming in a den

now lies with one remaining

collared female known as Nhorinha.

She's more here to the right.

Is that her there? No.

Yep, I can see her,

she's there. She's here.

Yeah, got her, got her, got her.

She's coming towards

two o'clock now.

50 metres away from the car.

She's coming behind this tree

in the middle here, let's wait.

I've got her, I've got her. OK.

Eventually the team capture the

first images of Nhorinha on camera.

To finally see our wolf is amazing.

Using a drone camera,

they follow her to her den.

The drone reveals the first

glimpse of Nhorinha's puppies.

Oh, my God.

And she's moving them

something that's never

been witnessed before.

This is very special,

my heart stopped there, like

I can't believe what

I'm really seeing here.

We know where the den is now.

The following morning,

they return to the den site.

They want to rig their cameras,

but can only approach when they

know Nhorinha is not at the den.

Is she nearby?

No, no signal yet.

Nhorinha is out of

here, at least 1km.

So it's very good news for us.

Let's try to approach it.

Barbara checks that

Nhorinha is away from the den,

so the team can go

in without disturbing her.

Very good.

The den isn't immediately obvious,

but the grass here is flattened,

so they place their cameras

and hope for the best.

We're about 80m from the den.

This is as close as

we can be safely.

This is the moment of truth,

we're turning them on.

And we're live,

and the camera hasn't moved.

Luke keeps watch over the cameras,

while the team continue to

monitor Nhorinha's movements.

Before long,

they are stopped in their tracks.

Just see this huge plume

of smoke in the distance,

you know, directly behind the

den where our mother maned wolf

has been with her puppies.

I'm quite anxious. I'm sure the

other researchers are as well.

And the fire may well have

been started by farmers,

in order to clear land to grow crops

that will be used to feed

chicken and cattle around the world.

The heat from the fire

when we're working that close

is so intense that I can feel

it burning the skin on my arms.

It moves so fast, there's no way

you'd escape something like that.

Every single cell in your body

just wants to get out of there.

But actually this whole place,

this whole Cerrado, is

surrounded by farmland and roads,

so, actually, when you

really think about it,

the wildlife has nowhere to run.

After a difficult few weeks for

Barbara and the research team

Hello, how you doing?

How was it? It was good.

The crew have some

good news for them.

Oh, track, there's one right there.

Right now. Yeah.

Can you see? That's live?

Yeah, yeah, that's live.

Oh!

Oh, my God!

I've never see anything

so cute in my entire life.

No! Me neither. Me neither, guys.

Look at this! Look,

it's looking at the camera.

Unbelievable.

That's the first

record in the world,

so intimate inside the den.

Nobody ever saw this.

Such new information

of such important species.

You feeling emotional, Barbara?

It's difficult not to be.

I don't have words to describe it.

It's too much for me.

The cameras continue to gather

first-of-its-kind footage,

providing insight into the

all-important first weeks

of a maned wolf's life.

And, crucially, how much

space must be protected

to support future generations.

I really hope that every

person in the world could see

from their house, how special,

and how beautiful,

amazing these animals are.

I feel quite worried,

but not hopeless.

I will fight every day

and every year to help them.

I was born in Cerrado,

I grew up in Cerrado,

and Cerrado, it's my home,

I have to protect it.

Next time

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