[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS CHIRPING][/font]
In a lifetime of natural
history filmmaking,
I have seen many odd animals
but few odder
than these proboscis monkeys in Borneo.
I first saw them some 50 years ago.
1956 ATTENBOROUGH: Late one evening
we had a great stroke of luck,
for a troop of the extraordinary
long-nosed proboscis monkey
had come down to the riverbank to feed.
ATTENBOROUGH: When I started
filming such creatures,
it was quite easy to show viewers
animals that hitherto had only been seen
in the wild by intrepid explorers.
As the years passed, one way and another
we got better and better shots
and in the process,
I had some memorable encounters.
Boo!
This is a very intelligent animal.
And top of the menu right now is...
Salmon.
[font color="#D900D9"][HISSING][/font]
I think that was pretty clear.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLING][/font]
I've been lucky enough to live through
what well might be considered
the golden age
of natural history filmmaking.
Almost every year, it seemed,
we found some new way
of revealing new things
about the natural world.
In the 1950s,
much of the wildlife of the planet
was still unfilmed, even unknown.
And in the following 60 years,
a succession of technical innovations
enabled us to reveal more and more
of the natural world in increasing detail.
This is the first
natural history film I ever saw,
back in 1934, when I was eight.
And I thought it was wonderful.
Ladies and gentlemen,
let me put you out of your misery at once.
You are not going to see me for long.
Although I'm inviting you
to come on this trip with me,
you will only see me occasionally.
The man in the pith
helmet is Cherry Kearton,
one of the first people
to try and capture the lives
of wild animals on film.
[font color="#808080"]KEARTON:[/font] There are 5 million penguins
on this island,
which are called the jackass penguin.
I am always polite to animals.
And as I intend to stay with
the penguins for several months,
I am naturally adopting
my most friendly manner.
Kearton traveled round the world
filming wild animals
that of course had never
been filmed before.
His approach was hardly scientific
but nonetheless, he was very entertaining.
[font color="#808080"]KEARTON:[/font] His sister, a typical flapper,
not content with being one of the fair sex,
wants to join the air sex,
but resigns herself to just a flip here,
a flap there and a flap in between.
For all its obvious flaws,
Kearton's films captured
my childish imagination
and made me dream of traveling to
far-off places to film wild animals.
My first natural history series, Zoo Quest,
recorded the progress
of animal-collecting expeditions
arranged for the London Zoo,
and brought to the screen
places and animals
that had never before been seen
on television,
or in the cinema, come to that.
One targeted the largest
lizard in the world,
which lived on the small
indonesian island of Komodo.
Few people had heard of it
and in Indonesia, no one seemed
very sure where the island was.
Eventually, we set off with a fisherman
who said that he did
but after a couple of days at sea,
I had my doubts.
I said to the captain,
"You have been to Komodo before,
haven't you?"
And he said, "Belum,"
and I didn't know what belum meant,
so I had to go down into the hold
and find my Indonesian dictionary.
I looked up belum and it said "not yet".
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font]
So it was clear that he
didn't know the way.
After a week at sea,
and having survived encounters
with coral reefs and Whirlpools,
we arrived at what I thought
must be Komodo.
And I remember
wading ashore across the coral lagoon
and finding a tiny little
village and saying,
"Excuse me, but, um, is this Komodo?"
And they said,
"Yeah, this is Komodo." That was okay.
The locals recommended
that we should use a dead goat as bait.
Once in the bush, we began to build a trap
using materials gathered from nearby.
[font color="#808080"]1956 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] And now,
all we had to do was to wait.
There was a rustle in the bush
and there was the dragon.
Our first sight of this
magnificent monster.
To my surprise,
we were looking out at the trap
and I heard a noise behind me
and I turned round
and there was the dragon,
that was taken at that particular moment,
looking at me straight in the eye,
from only about a couple of yards away.
And I looked at it and it looked at me
and I thought,
"Well, at least I might
take your photograph."
So that was the photograph I took of him.
And then eventually he rather wearily
heaved himself up and strolled round us
and went down into the dry riverbed
where we'd made the trap.
[font color="#808080"]1956 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
And down came the door.
Hastily, we piled boulders on the door
so that he couldn't lift it up.
We'd got him.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
During the days of Zoo Quest,
traveling to far-flung
locations took weeks.
But 20 years later, when
I embarked upon the
biggest natural history
series ever attempted
international air travel
made things much easier.
I was able to film in 30 countries,
appearing to move from one continent to
another in the space of a single sequence
as I traced the history
of life on the planet.
The South American rainforest,
the richest and most varied
assemblage of life in the world.
These lime stones here in Morocco...
Macaques live in many parts of Japan.
[font color="#D900D9"][SEALS SQUEALING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Life on Earth was shown
in a hundred different countries
and seen by perhaps
as many as 500 million people.
Natural history television
was now a global phenomenon
revealing our wonderful world,
in color, to all.
During the series, we made full use
of both color and scuba gear
to help show the underwater world
as never before.
One of the problems
with underwater films, of course,
was that you can't talk underwater.
Most of the time, if you've got
a breathing apparatus on your back,
you've got something in your mouth,
but Alastair, one of my
producer colleagues,
was very keen that we should
try and introduce the presenter
talking to camera underwater.
There was a wonderful new invention
called the bubble helmet.
This is it.
And you could put a microphone in
one side of it.
So we went down to the swimming pool
in the hotel where we were staying,
and this was screwed on my head.
It took a long time to screw it down tight,
to make it watertight,
I put it on like this and
I waded into the water
and I hadn't gone more than
about a foot underwater when suddenly,
water started bubbling in.
Very alarming, water rising...
[font color="#D900D9"][GURGLING][/font] ...around you.
And I was going to drown,
and how long would it
take me to get this off?
So I came out in a hurry.
"There was a fault," I said.
"Nonsense," said Alastair.
"Give it to me."
And so he changed this, put it
on his shoulders, put it on his head...
I, with some pleasure,
screwed it down quite tight,
and he waded into the pool.
And he came out even quicker
with me, then... [font color="#D900D9"][GURGLING][/font]
He was gesticulating to get it off
and I finally took it off.
And he said, "There's a fault."
I said, "Yes. There is."
So, I happily left the helmet behind
and reverted to my old mask and scuba gear
when it came
to my next underwater assignment,
to reveal the extraordinary social behavior
and intelligence of dolphins.
[font color="#D900D9"][DOLPHINS SQUEAKING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]1990 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
They're full of curiosity.
They play with odd things they find,
such as twigs.
And swimming among them
leaves you in no doubt
that they are highly intelligent.
They will even mimic you
as you spin or hang in the water.
Until the 1980s, you could only sh**t
before you had to come back to the surface,
open the underwater housing,
take out the camera
and put in a new roll of film.
But then video cameras solved that problem.
Videotapes ran for 30 minutes.
And now, at last, we had the chance
of properly recording
animal behavior underwater.
In addition, video cameras
were far more sensitive,
so we could record
at much lower light levels,
making artificial lights unnecessary.
It was a huge breakthrough
for underwater filming,
and crucial to the success
of The Blue Planet series.
Now it was possible to record,
for the first time, marlin hunting.
The seas and oceans were full of animals
whose extraordinary behavior,
up till now, no one had ever seen.
And the shots just got better and better.
Cameramen could now stay underwater
long enough
to capture every moment of the action.
And be in the right place at the right time
for the most dramatic events.
So now we can capture
previously unseen animal behavior
throughout the seas of the world.
On land it had, until now,
been impossible to film animals
behaving naturally at night,
when most mammals are active.
All we could do was shine a spotlight
on them and film them as they ran away.
And it was the same problem
wherever animals lived in darkness.
Caves are fascinating places,
but difficult places to work in.
When I first came here to this one
in Gomantong in Borneo back in 1972,
we had to bring a lot of lights with us
in order to film the many millions
of birds and bats that live in here.
And the droppings of all those creatures
make the cave reek of ammonia.
Ah. [font color="#D900D9"][INHALES][/font] Ah!
The smell brings it all back to me.
When I was here 40 years ago,
the director said,
"There's a pile of droppings
at the far end of the cave
which goes right up to the roof."
"Why don't you climb up to the top?"
And as I got to the top, he shouted,
"Say something!"
So I tried.
[font color="#D900D9"][PANTING][/font] And... And what it is is
these bats, packed tight on the roof here,
they are flying now all around my head.
This cave, this particular part of it...
[font color="#D900D9"][GROANING][/font] ...makes... [font color="#D900D9"][COUGHS][/font]
The ammonia is really quite, quite choking.
Makes for a very perfect place for a home.
One of the really astounding things
is that this immense number of bats,
flying round here in a panic,
not one of them is
colliding with the other.
Nor indeed am I in any danger whatsoever
of being hit by them.
And then the director said, "Cut!"
The camera stopped, the lights went out
and a bat flew straight in my face.
So perhaps their much-praised echolocation
is not quite as perfect as people say.
The film cameras we used then
needed normal white light like these.
But the problem with that, of course,
is that they disturb animals
that are accustomed to living in the dark.
But then the security industry
developed a new type of camera
like this one,
which uses infrared light
and doesn't need these lights,
but nonetheless can see in the dark.
As you can see, I turn off one,
I turn off the other,
and now, even though it's pitch dark,
you can see me.
Most animals, like us, can't see infrared.
And that meant that with these cameras,
we could now watch them
behaving perfectly normally in the dark.
And that revealed
some extraordinary behavior
and also led to one or two
pretty uncomfortable moments.
Lions are mostly active at night
and seldom roar during the day.
[font color="#D900D9"][GROWLING][/font]
We tried to persuade them to do so
with the help of scientists
by playing back the roar
of a strange lion to a resident pride.
[font color="#D900D9"][ROARING FROM SPEAKER][/font]
Even that didn't work.
But 12 years later,
I set off in an open-sided Land Rover
with the latest infrared technology
to try again.
As usual, they were sleeping.
I would have to wait for darkness.
[font color="#D900D9"][ROARING][/font]
We drive up, I go on one side,
the camera goes on the other
and the lion starts roaring.
But the problem is I can't see where it is.
I can't even see where the camera is.
"Cue," says the producer,
so I start trying to say my piece,
trying not to be too
frightened of this lion,
which is somewhere in the blackness,
as far as I can make out
within a couple of yards of me
and no side on the Land Rover,
and I then had to do my piece to camera,
looking around to see
where on earth the camera was.
And now in the darkness,
there are a number of them roaring
just around here.
There are two, I know within three
or four yards of where I am now.
And there's a third
perhaps 20 yards over there,
though it's difficult to tell
because it's pitch black.
[font color="#D900D9"][ROARING CONTINUES][/font]
Those are not aggressive roars,
they are communication roars.
But they are quite enough
to chill the blood
in the blackness of the night.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] A few years later,
similar technology made it possible to film
one of the most extraordinary
hunting sequences ever recorded,
using whole batteries
of infrared lights mounted on vehicles.
[font color="#D900D9"][TRUMPETING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]2006 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
A solitary lion stands no chance
but the whole pride is here.
[font color="#D900D9"][SNARLING][/font]
There are 30 of them,
and they are specialist elephant hunters.
[font color="#D900D9"][THUNDER RUMBLING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] This remarkable behavior
could not have been filmed
in any other way.
And it proved conclusively
what many had doubted,
that a big pride of lions
can indeed bring down and k*ll an animal
as big as an elephant.
Other cameras were developed
that worked simply by concentrating
what little light comes
from the stars and the moon.
And we used such a starlight camera
to record an encounter I had
with a wonderful New Zealand
nocturnal bird, the kiwi.
We heard of a place
where kiwis came out of the bush
and walked along the beach
looking for sandhoppers.
Now, they find their way by smell,
so I thought, "How can I conceal myself?"
Sol lay on the tide line,
where all the rotting seaweed
was lying around.
I just lay on it, and this little,
enchanting little creature
came slowly along,
probing its beak into the sand...
Blowing out the sand, coming closer.
[font color="#808080"]1998 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Probing sand
with your nostrils is all very well,
but it does clog them up.
And so you need to blow them clear
every now and then.
[font color="#D900D9"][BLOWS][/font]
Its sense of smell is so acute
it can pick out the largest,
juiciest hoppers deep in the sand,
without even seeing them.
Our starlight camera
can see much better than I can.
I need a torch to see
this extraordinary creature properly.
But it doesn't seem to mind.
He comes right up to me,
because his eyes are very small.
Poor eyesight, putting it mildly,
but he can smell, but he didn't,
because the seaweed
was even stronger-smelling than me.
There are other ways of
filming in the dark,
by using thermal cameras like this one.
Up above me there are a lot of bats
and the camera shows them
as different colors.
The yellow lights here are bats
that have just flown into the cave
and are still warm from their exertion.
As well as revealing where animals are,
the thermal camera can also show
something about the condition they're in.
For example, my face now,
because I'm rather hot,
is likely to be an orange color.
Where I'm cooler it'll be red,
and this probably is verging on the blue.
But if I take a bottle of cold water,
why, that's likely to be black.
[font color="#D900D9"][SIGHING][/font] Very good, too!
Thermal cameras also proved useful
in the Galapagos
to demonstrate some of the remarkable
physiological adaptations of reptiles.
Once they are thoroughly warmed up,
marine iguanas can maintain
their body temperature
just about as constantly as I can.
And what's more, at about the same level
or indeed slightly higher,
around 37 degrees centigrade.
But when they go into the cold sea
to feed on submerged seaweed,
their temperature falls very rapidly.
A recently emerged iguana is black.
It's chilled to the bone.
Now, they need heat
in order to be able to digest
that meal of seaweed.
And they get that
by spread-eagling themselves
on these black, hot, sun-baked rocks.
So thermal cameras reveal
just how skilled reptiles are
at harnessing the power of the sun.
These are tree ants in Borneo
and they have a wonderful way
of making their nests.
First tried to film how they did so
when I was herein Borneo back in the '50s.
[font color="#808080"]1956 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
Then we noticed this group,
with their jaws locked
tight in the lower leaf
and their hind legs
attached to the upper leaf.
The colony is constructing a new nest.
And these patient workers
are holding two leaves
of the future nest in position
so that other members
can fasten them together
to form the outer wall of their new home.
To get those shots,
we had to tear apart the nest
to get the ants to work out in the open.
These days, we can do better than that.
This is an optical probe that I can
make move forwards or backwards,
and even from side to side.
And so with that, you can go into the nest
and get shots of the ants
behaving totally naturally.
That is a stranger in the nest.
That's a little bug which
they are attacking.
It was technical developments like these
that allowed us, eventually,
to enter the world of the insect.
A motorized jib-arm enables filmmakers
to suspend a camera
above a column of aggressive driver ants
and watch the organized way
they hunt through the forest.
Workers carry the colony's larvae.
Ferocious soldiers link legs
to form a defensive roof and walls,
enclosing the column.
Were the camera or the cameraman
to accidentally touch
just one of these soldiers,
they would all immediately attack.
But they're blind and
they can't see the camera
hanging just inches above them.
So we can track along with them
as the army takes its
prey back to the bivouac
where the queen is waiting.
Wildlife filmmaking can
take a lot of patience.
Cameramen may have to spend
hours and hours,
if not days and weeks,
to film one particular action.
But that can be helped using
modern security technology.
And we used such technology
to get a shot of something
that as far as I know
had never been filmed before in the wild.
Rattlesnakes hunting.
Scientists working in New York state
had implanted radio-transmitters
in a group of rattlesnakes
so that each could be
found using an aerial.
[font color="#808080"]SCIENTIST:[/font] There it is.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] The camera crew placed
remotely controlled cameras
and infrared lights
next to a snake lying in ambush.
The cameras were attached to
motion detectors
that would tum them on if
anything moved in their field of vision.
The following night, I checked the replay.
There's a mouse.
It's pitch dark and the mouse clearly
has no idea that the snake is there.
But the snake is well aware of the mouse.
He's worked out that that is the path
along which the mice run.
Oh! Oh, my goodness!
That's a dead mouse, all right.
So it was that technology designed to
keep burglars out of our homes
enabled us to record the rattlesnakes
hunting strategy in the wild.
Another revelatory film technique
involves playing with time,
slowing down the action.
Cameramen have long done that
simply by increasing the number
of images taken per second.
Kestrels are known as wind-hoverers
because of their apparent ability
to hang motionless in the air.
And slow-motion photography enables us
to see details of their flying technique
that we can't see with the naked eye.
By filming this trained bird
with this special camera,
we can slow down the motion
and see exactly how they do it.
It's flying at the same speed
as the oncoming wind
and the air flowing over its wings
provides just enough lift
to keep it airborne.
By flying as slowly as
this, they risk stalling
because the wind-flow over the wing
doesn't provide enough lift.
Slowing down the action by 10 times,
we can see how the kestrel extends
the finger-like projection
on the leading edge of its wing
and spreads its tail feathers
to generate more lift.
One of my favorite slow-motion moments
was when I was able to fool
a lovesick hoverfly with a peashooter.
It might seem that
he's absolutely motionless.
But in fact, he's having to make
continual changes
to adjust for slight currents in the air.
It's an amazing piece of acrobatics,
far better than anything
that we could do in a helicopter.
And it's all done in order
to impress the female,
to show her that he is superb
at holding his territory.
With his superb eyesight
he's ready to spot anything
that might whiz by him at high speed
that could be a female.
And I might just be able to fool him
with a peashooter.
By watching his response,
slowed down by about 50 times,
it's clear that the male
is indeed so hyped up
that he will pursue any fast-moving
object that comes near him
in the hope that it might be a female.
Those poor males must have been exhausted
by the time I had finished with them.
By combining the best macro lenses
with digital slow-motion cameras,
we were able to reveal
the extreme athletic prowess
of some even tinier creatures.
These springtails, as their name suggests,
have a rather novel way of jumping.
They have a tiny two-pronged lever
beneath their abdomen.
One small flick from it
can catapult them six inches,
some 15 centimeters, into the air.
It's the equivalent of a human being
jumping over the Eiffel Tower.
So with slow motion-cameras,
we can watch actions and
distinguish details
that are impossible to
see with the naked eye.
At the other end of the scale,
we can manipulate time
to speed up excessively slow action.
This is a time-lapse studio,
where you can control lights
and cameras very precisely.
A film camera shoots 25 frames per second,
but if you modify one so that
it only shoots one frame per second
and then show the film at normal speed,
well, then you increase
the speed of action by 25 times.
And as the sophistication of
time-lapse photography has increased,
so we have been able to show
that plants can be as competitive
and as aggressive as many an animal.
And it was the mastery of time-lapse
that allowed us to make a series called
The Private Life of Plants.
[font color="#808080"]1995 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
Condense three months into 20 seconds
and the desolation of winter
quickly warms into the riot of spring.
Speed a week into a minute,
and you can sense the urgency
with which the ground-living plants
race to unfurl their flowers.
Of all the woodland plants,
the humble bramble is
one of the most aggressive.
It waves its shoots agitatedly
from side to side,
as if feeling for the best way forward.
The invading stem's
backward-pointing spines
give it the grip it needs
to climb over almost anything
that stands in its way.
It can advance as much as
three inches in a day.
Now digital cameras allow us to see
how a shot is developing
while we are still taking it,
instead of having to wait
till it was finished,
as we used to have to do with film cameras.
And we can also use computers
attached to small motors
to move a camera in between exposed frames
so that the camera can, in fact,
travel alongside a plant.
Using this new technology,
it became possible to condense
the arrival of spring in a woodland
into a few seconds.
But the wonderful thing
about wildlife filmmaking
is that no matter how much
you've seen and filmed,
there's always going to be
something to surprise you.
I remember back in 1994,
we were filming Nepenthes rajah,
the largest pitcher plant in the world,
growing up in the mountains of Borneo,
and I made an assumption about
how it obtained its nitrogen fertilizer.
I guess this one contains
two or three pints of liquid.
It's so big that it
catches not just insects
but even small rodents.
And one was recorded that had in it
the body of a drowned rat.
So if ever there was a carnivore
among plants, this is it.
But I was wrong.
In 2010, scientists discovered
that the plant gets its nitrogen
in a quite different way.
And we couldn't resist going back
to see if we could find out
what the truth was.
Mount Kinabalu in Sabah is home
to many rajah pitcher plants.
They certainly seem to attract insects
that fall into their bowls
just as other pitchers do.
But they also have larger visitors.
A tree shrew.
It's licking the underside of the lid,
where the pitcher secretes nectar
with which it lures visitors.
But even though its backside
is hanging over the bowl,
it doesn't seem to be in any danger
of falling in and drowning.
So what's going on?
It leaves a clue, a dropping.
So the pitcher is a tree shrew toilet.
The tree shrew feeds
by licking the secretions
from the pitcher plant's lid
and the pitcher plant gets its fertilizer
by collecting the tree shrew's droppings.
Wildlife cameramen are
always trying to film
some piece of animal behavior
that no one has ever seen before,
and aerial photography
enabled them to do just that.
In the early days, we occasionally
managed to get up in a small plane
to get a shot of the landscape.
But the plane vibrated so much
that you couldn't use long lenses
to get close-ups of animals,
and if you went low, the roar
of the engine frightened them.
So we tried other forms
of aerial transport.
Balloons were a little quieter
but they took you where the wind blew them,
not where you wanted to go,
and getting steady shots
was still difficult.
It wasn't until the invention
of a kind of mount
that could hold the camera
almost miraculously free of vibration
that it was possible to use
the long lenses necessary
in order to film animals from a height
when they didn't even know you were there.
It's almost impossible to follow
a wild dog hunt at ground level
through the treacherous swamplands
of the Okavango delta in Africa.
But the Planet Earth
series used a helicopter
with a new stabilizing mount
that kept the camera vibration-free.
And you could get close-ups from so high up
that the animals below
didn't know you were there.
[font color="#808080"]MAN ON RADIO:[/font] There, there, there,
there it goes, there it goes.
They're racing, they're
racing, they're racing.
[font color="#808080"]MAN 2:[/font] Three, four dogs, all spread out.
They are pulling up fast.
[font color="#808080"]MAN 1:[/font] Tighten up, tighten up
as much as you can.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] By intercutting
aerial shots and shots from the ground,
we could show how the dogs
worked as a team,
with fresh animals joining the hunt
to harry their prey and cutoff its escape.
This new perspective
gives us the big picture,
helping us to understand behavior
we could only see fragments of before.
[font color="#808080"]MAN ON RADIO:[/font] Stay with him,
he's almost got him.
So he's heading towards the water.
Oh, the croc's going to get the impala.
So now we have the techniques
to film almost anything
on land or in the sea or in the air.
But to get pictures of animals
that lived in the past,
you have to recreate life.
In the early days, our attempts
were pretty crude.
We used solid models of
extinct fish placed in swamps
to show the arrival of amphibians on land.
We moved on to line drawings of dinosaurs
and I even appeared alongside one.
It's easy to imagine some 12-foot species
of a pelycosaur like Dimetrodon
lying basking on the rocks
in the early morning sun.
And then we began to animate the drawings,
but not very realistically.
It would take the advent
of computer animation
to make them move like real animals.
We wanted to use these
new computer techniques
to bring to life a moa,
the giant extinct ostrich-like bird
of New Zealand.
First of all, I had to walk into
a woodland glade
holding a moa bone.
Then what would happen would be
that that bone would be suspended,
I'd take my hands away,
and all the rest of the
bones and the skeleton
would appear from nowhere, materialize
to form the complete skeleton.
So I had to walk in, hold the bone
and then actually take my hands away
and let it drop,
which seemed a silly thing to do.
But electronic trickery made it stay there,
and then added the rest of the bones
of the mods skeleton.
[font color="#808080"]1998 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
It had just three toes.
Its pelvis and its spine lead up
to an extraordinarily long neck.
This bird stood over six
feet, two meters tall.
But then we wanted it to walk away
and so what the computer
expert got us to do
was to imagine where it was going to stand
and then conceal ourselves
in the vegetation,
each of us holding a bit of
fishing line attached to a branch.
And with our computer expert conducting us
as though he was conducting an orchestra,
the moa came in,
this branch was brushed away
and then it reached up
and pecked another leaf
and the leaf moved and then it moved away
and the bushes moved.
It was really quite convincing.
[font color="#808080"]1998 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] The first
human settlers on these islands
saw these giants alive
and called them moas.
Among them were the tallest birds
that ever existed,
that weighed over 200 kilos, 400 pounds.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] So now we could recreate
extinct creatures whenever we liked,
in their entire, full-color,
animated glory.
A succession of technological advances
has certainly changed the way
we make natural history films.
These days, with every year that passes,
we seem to get more and more equipment.
Longer lenses, more electronic bits of kit.
But in the end,
often the most memorable shot
comes from just one camera and one person
with a deep understanding
of the natural world.
To film a wild snow leopard
was once the ultimate challenge
for a wildlife cameraman.
Doug Allan went to the Himalayas
to attempt to do what so many cameramen
before him had tried, but failed.
I guess this is where
you could say it really starts.
We're up here in snow leopard country.
You look around and anywhere,
anytime, you might just see it.
These are big, big mountains
and there are not many snow leopards.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Nevertheless,
Doug took to his hide and waited.
[font color="#D900D9"][SIGHING][/font]
This is tedious stuff. Not a sign.
If you got just, just a
little bit of a hint,
a wee bit of a sighting now and again,
your spirits would be lifted.
But right now, I'd swap
a little bit of this animal's charisma
for a little bit more visibility.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] And things didn't improve,
even after two weeks.
Yeah, of course it's boring.
It's boring as hell.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font]
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] After seven weeks
of patiently sitting and watching,
these distant shots are all
Doug managed to film,
so he had to return home empty-handed.
The following winter, cameraman
Mark Smith took up the challenge
and tried a different location,
this time in Pakistan.
[font color="#808080"]SMITH:[/font] We just got a lot of snow
and we'll be able to
track the snow leopard,
and so we'll have a lot better chance
of filming it.
So it's just fantastic.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
After that promising start,
things didn't go so well for Mark.
He and the crew spent a fruitless month
trudging through the snow.
Mark spent all Christmas in the mountains
with no sign of a snow leopard,
but it was a much happier New Year.
We just got... We just got a report that
there's a snow leopard up on the ridge.
We were too low where we were before,
so we're just trying to get some height
to get a better view of it.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Finally, Mark was rewarded
with his first-ever glimpse.
[font color="#808080"]SMITH:[/font] I looked up onto the ridge,
I could see this leopard-shaped rock
which I've seen a million times before.
And I looked through binoculars
and it was a leopard just sat there.
It was perched like just on top of the rock
and it looked down at us
and it sort of sat down
in a sort of sphinx-like posture.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] A few days later,
Mark's patience paid off.
There was not just an adult female
but with her, a one-year-old cub.
Overall, Mark spent eight
months in Pakistan,
and his dedication enabled him to document
the most intimate moments
of a snow leopards life,
including a hunt.
[font color="#808080"]2006 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Silently,
she positions herself above her prey.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUEALING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][SNARLING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] The revelations brought
by wildlife films today
were beyond my imagination
when I set out 60 years ago.
They have transformed not only
our understanding of the natural world
but our attitudes towards it.
When I first started making programs,
The origin of life and the structure
of DNA was unknown.
The fact that continents might drift
across the surface of the planet
was ridiculed.
Then, science was something you did
in museums and laboratories.
Today, that's very different.
Today scientists travel
to the farthest ends of the Earth.
As a result of their discoveries,
we can now make sense of what
not so long ago
seemed baffling mysteries.
And for the last 60 years,
I've been traveling in their footsteps,
trying to translate
some of their insights into film.
Early in my television career,
I met the distinguished
Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz,
who was one of the first to try
and understand animal behavior.
He worked with geese and he discovered
that if he was the first thing
young goslings saw when they hatched,
they would follow him wherever he went.
It was as if he had become their parent.
He called this process "imprinting"
and as a result of it,
the young continued to follow him
even as adults.
In 1952, Professor Lorenz published a book
explaining how he could talk to animals
and in particular, to greylag geese.
It was called King Solomon's Ring
and this is it.
And I was given the job
of interviewing him
on live television about it.
And I started by saying,
"Now, Professor Lorenz,
"I understand you can speak
greylag goose language,
and I've actually got a greylag goose
here for you to have a few words with."
And the goose was very upset,
flapped its wings and went... [font color="#D900D9"][RAZZES][/font]
...like that, and Lorenz said,
"Oh, dear, all over the trousers!"
And very embarrassed, took his handkerchief
and then blew his nose,
which produced a great smear
of goose droppings all down his cheek.
And I had to continue asking him
serious questions about animal behavior
while he was covered in goose droppings.
But at least he saw the joke,
because after it was all over,
he took his book
and he drew a nice little cartoon
of the whole event in the front for me.
Today, filmmakers use
this imprinting technique
for their own purposes.
The first living creature these
young goslings saw was Rose Buck
and they stayed with her.
They even shared her bed with her.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][GEESE CHEEPING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]BUCK:[/font] Hi.
Off you go, then.
Good boys. Come on, then!
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] So now, they too
follow her everywhere. On foot...
And eventually even in flight.
[font color="#D900D9"][GEESE HONKING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][BUCK LAUGHING][/font]
These are greylag geese,
the same species
that Konrad Lorenz worked with.
And they are following me
because like his geese,
they've been imprinted on a human being.
And that human being, of course, is Rose.
You see, they're all flying
straight in line behind one another
just as they do in the wild,
because there's a little turbulence
from the end of the wing there,
which makes it easier for
that one to get lift.
So they save energy by flying in this way.
But who could have dreamt
that it would have been possible
to be sitting alongside
one as they do that?
Look at them! Isn't it wonderful?
The discovery of imprinting, of course,
was more than just a boon to filmmakers.
It threw a new light not only
on the behavior of many birds,
but of animals of all kinds,
including mammals and indeed ourselves.
Lorenz was a pioneer
in zoology and studied
the behavior of living
animals in the field.
And I was able to follow
In his footsteps to
film animals behaving
naturally in the wild.
[font color="#808080"]1979 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] There are some
four million different kinds
of animals and plants in the world.
Four million different solutions
to the problems of staying alive.
This is the story of how a few of them
came to be as they are.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] It was Charles Darwin
who made sense of this astounding variety
by suggesting the mechanism
that had brought it about.
So during the Life on Earth series,
I went to the Galapagos
to have a look at the animals
that had provided him
with evidence for his theory,
the giant tortoises.
This one, for example,
with its deep, rounded shell,
comes from a well-watered island,
where it can feed mainly
on vegetation on the ground.
This one, on the other hand,
has a peak to the front of its shell
that enables it to stretch
its long neck upwards.
It comes from an arid island,
where the tortoises often have to crane
up to reach the only food available,
the branches of trees and cactus.
The suspicion grew in Darwin's mind
that species were not fixed forever.
Perhaps these tortoises were all
descended from common ancestors
and had changed to suit
their particular islands.
The differences that Darwin had noticed
amongst these Galapagos animals
were, of course, all tiny.
But if they could develop them,
wasn't it possible that
over the thousands or millions of years
a whole series of such differences might
add up to one revolutionary change?
He gave the idea irresistible force
by suggesting a mechanism which
might have brought that about.
He called the mechanism natural selection.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] So Darwin had explained
how different species evolved.
But he also proposed
that all life was inter-related,
having come from a common origin.
That, of course, implied
the existence of intermediate forms,
links between the great animal groups.
One living candidate
connecting fish to amphibians
had already been discovered in
the rivers of northern Australia.
The lungfish.
Although it lives in water
just like an ordinary fish,
it can also breathe air
through a pouch in its throat,
like a simple lung.
And it punts itself along the river bottom
using two pairs of muscular fins
placed low on its body,
just like simple legs.
But the actual ancient creature
that linked fish
and the first land-living creatures
wasn't found until very recently.
Fossils of fish very like
these Australian lungfish
are known from rocks
that are some 400 million years old.
And we can be pretty sure that those
ancient fish could breathe air.
But could they manage to get out
of the water and up onto the land?
How could they have managed that?
Nobody could be sure.
There was a missing link.
And then, this turned up in 2004.
This was found in arctic Canada,
and was called Tiktaalik.
You see, it's about
the same size as a lungfish
but it's got a skull which
is flattened that way
and a row of formidable teeth.
But what about its limbs?
Well, a number of specimens
of its limbs have been found
and here's one of them.
It had a fleshy base, just like a lungfish.
But it also had ajoint
in the middle of that limb,
an elbow, and at the
end, a range of digits.
This almost certainly was the first limb
to move a creature up onto land.
So Tiktaalik probably looked
a bit like present-day amphibians
such as salamanders.
The link between fish
and land-living animals had now been found.
Another piece in the jigsaw of life
had been put in place.
But 60 years ago,
there was another baffling puzzle,
the odd way in which animals
are distributed on our planet.
For example, why is it
that closely related groups of animals
can occur on both sides of an ocean
in West Africa and South America,
for example?
Well, birds could fly
across the ocean, yes.
Mammals and reptiles, well, conceivably
they might have floated across
on rafts of vegetation.
But what about frogs?
Frogs like this one?
Frogs have permeable skins
and they're poisoned by saltwater.
So they couldn't have floated across.
But maybe it wasn't the frogs that moved,
maybe it was the continents.
By the time I came
to make The Living Planet in 1984,
the answer had become clear.
And I thought that one of the most
dramatic ways to reveal it
would be to stand high up
in the greatest mountain range on Earth,
the Himalayas.
[font color="#808080"]1984 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
They were raised to their present height
about 65 million years ago,
from the bottom of the sea.
And what is the evidence
for that extraordinary statement?
Well it can be found
all over the place, just up here.
These slopes
are littered with fragments...
Like these.
This is obviously a shell
that's been turned to stone, a fossil.
But I'm about as far as possible
as it is to be from the sea.
Not only am I in the middle of Asia,
hundreds of miles from the sea,
but I'm over two vertical
miles above its level.
What forces could possibly have raised
the sea bed to these heights?
Well, we now know
that those forces are still in action.
These Icelandic volcanoes erupt
from huge cracks, or fissures,
which regularly open up
in a line which runs right across
the width of the island.
But that line itself is
only the northern end
of a huge line of weakness
that runs for thousands of miles
southwards from Iceland
right round the side of the globe.
The sheer weight
of these molten ingots of rock
prevents them being swept away
from the vent by the gale,
so there's little danger of them
suddenly coming our way.
Well, there were pieces of lava
the size of a suitcase
landing with a thud
into the ash plain as we stood
and you could see them
glowing red hot and thumping down
into the ash. And the question is
just how close could you get?
Well, we got quite close enough
and when a lump of lava did actually land
only about three or four feet behind me,
I thought the time had come to leave.
Now we know that it was
eruptions like these,
but at the bottom of the sea,
that explain the mystery.
Molten rock rises from the Earth's core.
Near the surface the rock spreads
in two directions and goes sideways.
It begins to lose heat.
Eventually, the much cooler rock
sinks back down.
Through this spreading process,
the Earth's crust
is very slowly dragged apart.
And it is this that ultimately
makes the continents move.
So what in my youth was no more
than a speculative theory
is now fully accepted.
Continents do drift.
The Indian subcontinent has moved north,
pushing up the sediments
that had accumulated on the seafloor
ahead of it to form the Himalayas.
Which is how my fossilized
seashell came to rest in mountains
over two miles high.
So, continental drift
explains why animals are distributed
in the way they are around the world.
But why do they behave in the way they do?
Well, that has also been the subject
of investigation in the last few decades.
In particular, how do they
communicate with one another?
Filming that gave me a chance
to join in those conversations.
A double knock on a tree is a statement
used by a Patagonian Woodpecker to say,
"This patch of the forest is mine."
And if someone else claims it,
he'll certainly knock out a challenge
and come to investigate.
[font color="#D900D9"][KNOCKING ON WOOD][/font]
North American male cicadas
singing their deafening song
can be summoned by the noise
of a female's wing flick
that sounds like a finger snap.
Now, can I bring you back?
And a male wants to investigate that.
How about coming this way?
[font color="#D900D9"][SNAPS FINGERS][/font]
Oh. The noise is awful.
In Minnesota,
it's not difficult to summon a wolf.
[font color="#D900D9"][HOWLING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][HOWLING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][ATTENBOROUGH MIMICS CHIRPING][/font]
On Australia's Lord Howe Island,
there are other conversations to be had.
[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS CHATTERING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS CHATTERING][/font]
Nobody knows why it happens
but when you make strange noises here,
seabirds fall from the sky.
Perhaps the calls sound like challenges
to the birds above,
which then drop down to investigate.
[font color="#D900D9"][MIMICKING CHIRPING][/font]
And In Florida, you can get
little lizards to reply to a mirror.
And there, that's it.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font] The full works.
By the 1990s, long-term studies
were showing that much more was going on.
There were creatures with
very specific things to say,
they had actual vocabulary.
[font color="#808080"]1990 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] At dawn,
vervet monkeys come down from the trees
to search for food on the ground.
Down here, of course,
they're much more vulnerable
than they were up in the trees,
but there's always a sentinel on watch.
A python:!
The sentinel gives a call
which means "snake."
[font color="#D900D9"][MONKEY CHATTERING][/font]
The meaning is very precise,
and is only made when a snake appears.
It could be called a word,
and when other vervets hear it,
they know exactly what the danger is.
From monkeys, to dolphins,
to elephants, to turkeys,
we're finding that many creatures chirp or
bark or whistle what we might call words.
A call that means "danger from the air."
And the vervets run into
the denser branches,
where the eagle won't pursue them
for fear of damaging its wings.
[font color="#D900D9"][MONKEYS CHATTERING][/font]
From the safety of the thorny branches,
the vervets scream furiously,
and one is even brave enough
to launch a lightning attack.
Communication between
males and females of a species,
not only by sound
but by visual signals, has of course
long fascinated naturalists,
particularly in the 19th century.
When I was a boy of about nine,
I read a book that thrilled me to the core.
This is it.
It's called The Malay Archipelago:
The Land of the Orang-Utan
and the Bird of Paradise,
by Alfred Russel Wallace.
And it contained one
particularly exciting illustration.
This is it.
It shows native tribespeople
hunting birds of paradise,
which are displaying in the tree.
And I dreamt that sometime
I might get there to see it for myself.
Well, in 1951, I did.
From the capital
of New Guinea, Port Moresby,
we chartered a plane and flew inland,
heading for territory that was
still regarded as being pretty wild.
[font color="#808080"]1957 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
After an hour's flight,
we were nearing the middle
of the mountains,
when suddenly we saw a wide,
fertile valley ringed with mountains.
This was our destination,
the place in which we planned to work
for the next few months.
The valley of the Wahgi river.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] The Wahgi people knew
about birds of paradise, all right.
They used their plumes as money,
and they were essential elements
in all important transactions.
Watched a ceremonial dance in which
each man had decorated himself
with the plumes of at least
Here I was looking at the remains
of 20,000 dead birds.
They were clearly so keenly hunted,
we stood little chance
of finding them here.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHANTING][/font]
So cameraman Charles Lagus and I
decided to go
into wilder country to the north.
It was hard walking,
but when we reached the top of the ridge
that formed the wall of the valley,
we ran into trouble.
[font color="#808080"]1957 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
I found, to my horror,
that the men were refusing
to go any further.
They told me very firmly that this
was the end of their tribal frontier.
I thought for a bit
that we weren't paying them enough,
so I thought, well, you know
another cake of salt all round,
that'll be all right. But no, the...
It turned out that they said
that the people who lived beyond there
were bad men.
[font color="#D900D9"][SPEAKING TRIBAL LANGUAGE][/font]
"They eat people," they said.
"We won't go there."
And I was saying, "Now, come along,
lads, we... We can manage this."
When suddenly I noticed a white feather
flickering behind a boulder
and I looked round
and there was another one behind a tree,
and while I was wondering what this meant,
suddenly, these men leapt out of hiding
and came charging down the path towards us
waving stone axes and spears.
And I simply couldn't think of what
to do except to go towards them
and stick out my hand
and said, "Good afternoon."
And to my astonishment,
they seized my hand,
pumped it up and down and said,
"Good afternoon, good afternoon."
And it turned out that the reason was
that this tribal frontier was where
when two people met, they made sure
that the other person thought
they were still warlike and tough.
Because if they didn't,
and appeared to be soft and peaceable,
then obviously they were ready
for a bit of r*pe and pillage,
so whenever the two people met,
they always looked ferocious.
It certainly convinced me.
Much relieved, we carried on.
We heard calls of birds of paradise,
but we just couldn't find a place
where we could film them.
[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS CHIRPING][/font]
And then, after three weeks,
one morning at dawn, our luck changed.
Low down in a tree,
a plumed bird of paradise
and there, his unplumed female.
As far as I knew,
this was the first film ever taken
of a bird of paradise
displaying in the wild.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUAWKING][/font]
The pictures were okay as far as they went,
but Charles' camera
was an old clockwork one
and it made a noise like a cement mixer,
so I couldn't record the sound
while he was filming.
But when he had finished,
I turned on the recorder
and I got two sets of calls,
one which went...
[font color="#D900D9"][VOCALIZES][/font] ...with two, and one...
[font color="#D900D9"][VOCALIZES][/font] ...with three.
When we came back,
I joined the two together so they ran,
and we could play it
throughout the display.
[font color="#D900D9"][WARBLING][/font]
And after the show had gone out,
I got a letter from my old professor
of zoology and he said,
"Many congratulations
on this wonderful documentation
of bird of paradise displays"
but had I noticed that in fact this bird
did its two-note call and then
its three-note call alternating,
never two together and three together?
Would I perhaps write a learned paper
about this strange phenomenon?
And I had to explain to him
that actually, it was the limitation
of early natural history photography.
But the pictures produced
by our primitive equipment
were black and white and fuzzy.
So, 40 years later, I made
another attempt to film the birds
that Wallace had described so vividly.
As far as I know,
Wallace wasn't able to climb the tree
to get a closer view of the birds,
but these days we've got ways
of doing so relatively simply.
You fire a thin line with a catapult
over one of those high branches,
haul up a thicker rope,
attach a system of counterweights,
now all you have to do
is to clip yourself on and up you go.
And here's the top.
The birds are in another emergent tree,
just like this one,
and I've got... I've got
an absolutely clear view of them.
This, at last, is Wallace's
picture come to life.
He was the first European to glimpse
this extraordinary spectacle,
and he knew well, in general terms,
what was happening.
This is a female,
and she's come to pick a mate
from among the gorgeous males
who are displaying.
[font color="#D900D9"][COOING][/font]
The female has hopped onto the perch
of the male of her choice,
that's a straight invitation to mate.
This is all he does as a father.
Now she'll fly away
and raise her young unaided.
The females are comparatively drab.
It's only the males
that have extravagant plumes.
Each of the 40-odd species
has its own kind.
Growing them and displaying them
must take a huge amount of a male's energy.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUAWKING][/font]
Can it really be worth all this,
just to mate with a female?
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUAWKING][/font]
Well, it seems that it is,
at least for the male who puts on
the most impressive performance,
for he will mate with virtually
all the females in the area.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUAWKING][/font]
So, generation after generation,
it's only the winner
whose genes are passed on,
and it is this, over many generations,
that produces such great extravagance
of plumage and display.
It's a process known as sexual selection.
The males of another family
of New Guinea birds
impress their females not with feathers
but with brightly colored objects,
which they collect and display in bowers.
And this is the work
of the master builder among bowerbirds.
I'm in the Vogelkop,
on the far western tip of New Guinea,
and this is the bower
of the Vogelkop bowerbird.
And what an astonishment it is,
surely one of the wonders
of the natural world.
The bower has been completely roofed over.
There are orange fruit, there are these
glowing orange dead leaves,
behind me there are black fruits,
all of which has been brought
specially by the bird.
A further step in our understanding
of such spectacular behavior
came in 1976 when Richard Dawkins
published this book, The Selfish Gene.
In it, he brings together evolution,
genetics and animal behavior
and argues that it is the gene
that drives evolution.
The survival of an individual animal
is of less importance
than the survival of its genes.
And thinking about selection
at the level of the gene
also enables us to understand
why it is that some animals sometimes
behave in an unselfish way.
These ants are all female,
and they're prepared... Ow!
They're prepared to... They're prepared
to attack me in defense of their colony
and to die in the process,
because the genes they carry
are the same as their sister workers
and indeed their mothers.
So in attacking me, they are, in fact,
doing their best to help ensure
that their genes are passed
to the next generation,
you don't have to breed yourself
to pass on your own genes.
The colony acts as a kind
of single super-organism.
Almost all the ants in this nest
are so closely related
that they share 75% of the same genes.
Which is why blood is thicker than water,
why family bonds are so hard to break.
Meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.
They spend the night in burrows,
they find all the food
they need on the ground,
they're swift and expert runners.
But oddly enough, they also climb
and they have very good reasons
for doing so.
But first of all they have to
warm up in the early morning sun.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUAWKING][/font]
They live in groups
in which the only dominant pair breeds
and some of their
offspring, even when adult,
do not breed but stay around
to help rear the young.
[font color="#D900D9"][MEERKATS CHATTERING][/font]
While one helper watches out for danger,
another catches a scorpion
and encourages
one of the youngsters to eat it.
These helpers appear to be very unselfish,
but they' re acting in this way
probably because they share
the same genes as their charges,
and by helping them, they're ensuring
the transmission of those genes
to the next generation.
The first meerkat film we made
turned these animals into stars,
not, I must admit,
because of their selfish genes
but because of their
enchanting personalities.
The factors that make these animals
behave in the way they do
are transmitted in their genes.
But what kind of physical structure
could carry all this information?
That was one of the great puzzles
that had intrigued geneticists
ever since the beginnings
of their science a century ago.
But that mystery too was
about to be solved.
In 1953, here in the
Cavendish Laboratories,
two young researchers,
Francis Crick and James Watson,
were building models like this.
It was their way
of thinking about and investigating
the structure of a complex molecule
that's found in the genes
of all animals, DNA.
The crucial bit are these chains
which encircle the rod, one,
and here is a second, and entwine.
This is the double helix.
An extraordinary feat
of intellectual deduction
and it led to a whole
new branch of science,
molecular genetics.
More recently,
DNA has given us new insights
into the family relationships of animals,
using a technique called
DNA fingerprinting.
It was developed by Sir Alec Jeffreys
of Leicester University in 1984,
and using just a simple smear of blood,
it's possible
not only to the identify
one particular individual,
but to establish whether or not
it's closely related to another.
For example, we used to think
that most birds lived in
straightforward pairs.
We watched them courting
and mating and rearing their young,
and so we assumed
that they were faithful to one another.
But DNA fingerprinting showed us
how wrong we were,
as I explained in The Life of Birds.
Perhaps the most bizarre behavior of all
takes place in the suburban gardens
of England.
And it seems that until very recently,
nobody even noticed.
A young female hedge sparrow,
a dunnock, ready to lay.
This is her mate, Alpha, singing lustily,
declaring his ownership of the nest
and the territory around it
from which he gathers food.
The pair often feed together,
a devoted couple if ever you saw one.
He seldom lets her out of his sight,
for she is not as faithful as she might be.
There's a third bird around, Beta,
another younger male.
He's not popular with Alpha
and they're continually squabbling.
Sometimes the fights can get
quite vicious and feathers fly.
But in spite of that, Beta stays around,
skulking in the hedge.
Alpha, it seems, has the female
to himself once more,
but she has got her eye c*ck.
[font color="#D900D9"][WARBLES][/font]
Beta is still in the hedge,
calling quietly to her.
She joins him.
And now, while Alpha
is preoccupied with feeding,
she and Beta get together.
Twirling her tail is an invitation
and in a split second, they mate.
Beta flies away.
But now, out in the open,
she is courting Alpha
with that same old tail-twirling.
And now, he mates with her.
She has kept two males happy,
both of whom will help to feed
the young when they hatch.
DNA fingerprinting has now revealed
that only about a fifth
of the apparently monogamous birds
are actually genuinely
faithful to one another.
Molecular genetics,
combined with long-term studies
of animals in the wild,
have challenged our preconceptions
about how animals live their lives.
And there are also long-term studies
that have shed light
on our own evolution and ancestry.
In particular, those by Jane Goodall,
who started her work in 1960,
in Tanzania, on chimps.
The 26-year-old Jane Goodall
arrived in Africa with
no scientific training
and had to patiently
follow the chimps for two years
before they allowed her
to get close to them.
In order to identify them,
she gave them the sort of names
we use for one another,
which got her into a lot of trouble
with more conventional scientists,
who accused her of crediting
her animals with human characteristics
for which there was no evidence.
But she made some
revolutionary discoveries,
including proving that chimps use tools
and even modify them
for particular purposes.
They fish for termites with twigs
which they make more effective
by stripping off the leaves.
Manufacturing tools in such a way
had until then
been thought to be something
that only human beings could do.
But in the late 1970s,
chimps on the other side
of the continent, in West Africa,
were discovered using different tools
in a different way.
[font color="#808080"]1990 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
Placing the nuts in a hole in a root,
they crack them open
with specially selected hammers.
Repeated use has deepened the hole
and produced an anvil
that holds the nut in place.
Using these tools, experienced chimps
can crack two nuts a minute.
For the hardest nuts, they keep
and transport rare stone hammers.
Cracking is not easy,
you have to choose both a good anvil...
And a good hammer.
Only West African chimpanzees
have developed this nut-cracking ability.
And it takes more than 10 years
to learn the technique.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] It's now known that chimps
use up to 20 different types of tools.
Nut-cracking was first discovered
by Christophe Boesch,
who had been studying
these chimps since 1976.
And in 1989, I went out
to the Ivory Coast to visit him.
[font color="#D900D9"][SOFTLY][/font] How did you manage to get
these animals so accustomed to you,
so that we could stand
as close to them as this?
Oh, just patience, took us five years.
- Five years?
- Five years,
just following them, being always
very quiet, never aggressive.
Always the same colors
and clothes and patience, patience.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] But Christophe
wasn't entirely sure
that he wanted a 63-year-old
with him in the forest.
"Who is this old man?" he said.
"Who is this old man who wants to come?
"Is he fit, can he run?"
The answer to those was "no"
on both but nonetheless,
I managed to get there.
And his technique was that
he would travel with them all day,
wherever they went,
and when they moved, he moved,
and he didn't leave them until they
had made their nests at night.
And only then would he go back to his camp,
but then get up at 4:00 the next morning
in order to run back there,
to catch them before they went off again.
And he was quite...
Christophe was quite right.
I mean, it's hugely demanding.
I've never been so tired in all my life.
But Christophe had also discovered
a darker side to chimps' personalities.
[font color="#D900D9"][SOFTLY][/font] You don't normally
think of them as hunters,
more as gentle vegetarians,
munching fruit and picking leaves.
But if you follow them for any length
of time in their true home,
these forests in West Africa,
you discover that they are hunters.
What's more, they hunt in teams
and have a more complex strategy
than any other hunting animal except...
[font color="#D900D9"][CHIMPANZEES GIBBERING][/font]
Except, of course, man.
The technique they'll almost certainly use
is that one of them will be driving
the colobus ahead of him.
Then there will be others that go up
on either side who are the blockers,
who won't make any attempt
to catch the monkeys.
And then there are chasers who go
and grab at the monkey if they can,
and finally, there's one male
who will go up ahead and ambush it,
so bringing the whole trap closed.
The monkeys are now getting alarmed.
A driver's going up to prevent the group
from settling and to drive them
towards an area
where they're more easily trapped.
Now it looks as though
they're all in position.
The drivers have gone up,
the blockers have gone up.
And now, the one
who's going to make the ambush
and close the ring, he's gone up, too.
The colobus will be very lucky
if they escape now.
[font color="#D900D9"][GIBBERING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][SHRIEKING][/font]
They've got one.
And nowthe k*ll is brought down,
so that the females and
others can share it.
And there's the reward for that long chase,
the divided body of a colobus monkey.
These blood-stained faces
may well horrify us,
but we might also see in them
the face of our long-distant,
hunting ancestors.
And if we are appalled
by that mob violence and blood lust,
we might also see in that, too, perhaps
the origins of the teamwork
that have, in the end, brought human beings
many of their greatest triumphs.
But the studies of chimpanzees
started by Jane Goodall,
continued by Christophe Boesch and others,
have shown us something else.
It's not just that chimpanzees
are capable of developing
their own techniques
for hunting or tool-making,
but that each community of chimps
is capable of developing its own version.
In other words, chimpanzees' communities
have their own cultures.
And that was thought to be something
that was uniquely human.
Everyone knew, of course,
that chimps are our biological cousins,
but it's only in the last 20 years
that we've discovered
that we share
about 95% of our DNA with them,
and that's because
we now have the tools to find out
exactly how closely we are all related.
In 1990, scientists in 20 labs
around the world
set out to identify
all the 3,000 million
separate chemical units
that make up the human genetic code.
[font color="#D900D9"][ELECTRONIC WHIRRING][/font]
It took nearly 13 years,
and then exactly 50 years
after Crick and Watson
had worked out the structure of DNA,
the human genome was cracked.
And this is it.
In these volumes
is all the information needed
to define the genetic structure
of the human species.
Each number refers
to one of our 23 chromosomes.
If I open it up, you can see
that the text consists
of just one very, very, very long list
of just four letters, A, C, T, G.
Each combination represents instructions
for one element in the human design.
This is the secret language of DNA.
This is the book of life.
And each one of us has our own edition.
When I first heard back in 1953
that the structure of DNA
had been worked out,
I could scarcely have imagined
that it would ever be possible
to print out the whole
of one genome in a book.
But today the process has been
so speeded up that it's possible
for anyone to have it done in half a day.
And the comparison between the genome
of one species and another
has proved very revealing.
The hot chemical springs of Yellowstone
contain the very simplest form of life,
single-celled bacteria,
about as far removed
from our complex selves
as any organism could be.
But we share some 200 of our genes
with those very early life forms.
Indeed, there are some genes
that are common to every single species
of life on the planet.
Our DNA extends in an unbroken chain
right to the beginning of life
four thousand million years ago.
So now, we can trace
our evolutionary heritage
back through geological time.
Back to the age of dinosaurs.
And further still, to the early amphibians.
Back to the fish...
And the first back-boned animals.
And further still,
to the single-celled organisms
that were the very earliest form of life
to appear on this planet.
So in my lifetime,
science has solved many of the riddles
which 60 years ago seemed so baffling.
How mountain ranges are formed.
Why animals are distributed
in the way they are
and how they communicate with one another.
How a complex chemical molecule
can transfer the characteristics
of one generation to the next.
So nowthe natural world
makes more sense than it ever did,
which is why studying it
is so rewarding and so delightful.
For me, as for countless others,
the natural world
is the greatest of all treasures.
And yet, in my lifetime
we have damaged it more severely
than in the whole of
the rest of human history.
Indeed, significant parts of it now
are in danger of total destruction.
When I first came to Borneo in 1956,
the rainforest stretched unbroken
on either side of the river
for hundreds of miles.
Today, it's very different.
Just beyond the trees lining the riverbank
there is nothing but oil palm plantations.
And the forest and all the rich
variety of animals and plants
that it had once contained
has been destroyed.
And yet, as we have transformed
the natural world,
so our attitudes towards it
have changed fundamentally.
Again and again, I have seen
the impoverishment and desolation
caused by the way we have ruthlessly
taken what we want from the land,
no matter what the cost.
But I have also seen how the natural world,
given just the slightest chance,
can manage to survive.
And I have met the far-sighted
and dedicated conservationists
who've labored to protect it.
People who by their own example
have shown that there is something
that can be done about it.
I was born in 1926, at the end of the
age of the great naturalist collectors.
It was a time when it was
perfectly acceptable
to go out and collect
creatures from the wild.
If the London Zoo wanted
a new animal or a replacement,
they simply commissioned
a collector to go out and get it.
And in the 1950s,
as a young television producer
obsessed with the natural world,
I was delighted when we got permission
to go along with an expedition
from the London Zoo.
It was going to go to West Africa
and be headed by one of the zoo's
animal-collecting experts, Jack Lester.
I thought it would be a good idea
if we called the series
Quest For... something or other,
so I asked Jack Lester whether
in fact there was an animal there
that we could have a quest for
that no one had seen before.
And he said, "Oh, yes, and it's called
Picathartes gymnocephalus."
So I said, "Well, that's not really
a very catchy,"
"Quest for Picathartes gymnocephalus.
Isn't there another name?"
And Jack said, "Yes, it's also called
the bald-headed rock fowl."
And I said, "Well, even
Quest for a Bald-Headed Rock Fowl
isn't likely to grab people, you know."
So in the end we just called it Zoo Quest.
[font color="#D900D9"][TRIBAL MUSIC PLAYING][/font]
We spent weeks collecting
all kinds of creatures.
And because there weren't
any scientists there,
we relied on local people
to help us find Picathartes,
initially, without much luck.
And then at last, one man recognized
our drawing of Picathartes,
and told us that the birds were
nesting in the hills nearby.
In the finished programs, of course,
we didn't reveal this immediately.
Instead we ended each by saying,
"So we went on to look for Picathartes."
Nonetheless, we were a bit concerned
as to whether anyone
would really care about Picathartes.
But I was reassured
when I was traveling down
Oxford Street in an open car
and a bus driver leant
out of his cab and he said,
"Hello, Dave. Well, are we or are we not
going to find Pica-bloody-thartes?"
So I knew that actually we had
made an impact with somebody.
And the bus driver got his answer
in the last episode.
[font color="#808080"]1964 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
We took our places behind the hide.
And now came the most tense moment
of the expedition,
the moment for which
we'd all waited so long.
Would we see the adult birds?
And then suddenly we saw one,
a few yards away in the twilight
of the bush, preening itself.
This was enormous excitement.
Then up it fluttered onto the nest.
And as it did so, the
other parent flew across
and drove the first one away.
This was a great thrill for us,
for as this happened,
we became the first Europeans
ever to see the white-necked Picathartes
on its nest.
Having filmed Picathartes,
we managed to collect a young nestling
and brought it back, together
with sunbirds and Emerald Starlings,
to live here in the bird house
in the London Zoo.
It had been my first opportunity
to film animals in the wild
and this happy collaboration
with the London Zoo
resulted in a whole succession
of Zoo Quest series.
Sadly, after the first,
Jack became seriously ill.
So I took over
and tried to give the impression
that I knew what I was doing.
[font color="#808080"]1964 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
It's important to grab his tail
as soon as you grab his head.
Otherwise, he'll wrap
his great coils round you
and give you a very nasty squeeze.
I was more than happy
that we'd been able to take it away
without it harming us.
First I grabbed the tail with my left hand
and then tickled his tummy with
my right, so that he doubled up,
lost his grip and out he came.
[font color="#D900D9"][SQUEAKING][/font]
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Of course,
I wouldn't behave like that today.
Things have changed.
Thanks to their breeding programs,
zoos can get most of what they want
without going to catch them in the wild.
And once the animals we had collected
had settled in at the zoo,
we got permission to take
some of the more interesting ones
to the studios to show them off
on live television.
And here he is in the studio.
He can bite, he's got quite powerful fangs.
Um, I have been bitten by a python,
it doesn't hurt much.
Well, helping me... Helping me
control this python... [font color="#D900D9"][LAUGHING][/font]
Is Mr. Lanwarn from the reptile house
in the London Zoo,
who in fact has it in his care now.
But he's quite a...
Quite a handful now, isn't he?
These... You could quite imagine
how these powerful coils...
- Oh, yes.
- ...could really give you quite a crush.
Our attitudes to wildlife
were so very different in the '50s.
But then they were
about to undergo a transformation.
Early wildlife conservation
was largely a domestic affair.
Americans worried about their bison.
The British worried about
Britain's seabirds.
Foreign wildlife was of tittie concern.
But in 1961, conservationists from
several countries came together
and created the World Wildlife Fund
with its famous panda logo.
The Fund was the first international body
to spend money on conservation projects
around the world,
and one of its first projects was
to help the endangered and rare animals
on the Galapagos islands.
And these extraordinary islands
still remain wonderlands today.
[font color="#D900D9"][TORTOISE GROANING][/font]
This is the giant Galapagos tortoise.
They live longer than any other animal
on Earth, well over 150 years.
They weigh up to a quarter of a ton
and have shells over a meter across.
They really are giants.
Some 15 subspecies of these reptiles
evolved on the Galapagos,
but in the 17th century,
human beings discovered the islands.
The tortoises were a valuable
source of fresh meat,
and visiting sailors
took them away by the thousands.
By the middle of the 20th century,
one third of the original subspecies
had been totally exterminated
and only 3,000 of the
remainder still survived.
In the early '60s, the World Wildlife Fund
got involved in trying to halt the decline.
They put money into a pioneering
c*ptive rearing program
at the Charles Darwin Research Center
on the Galapagos.
Tortoise eggs were collected from the wild
and carefully raised
away from introduced predators.
By the 1970s, when I first
visited the Galapagos,
the first c*ptive-bred tortoises
were ready to be released.
And a dramatic discovery
had been made on Pinta Island.
The subspecies that evolved there
had long been thought extinct,
but in 1971 a single male tortoise
was discovered there.
He was brought back
to the Charles Darwin Research Station,
where he quickly became a celebrity
in his own right.
This is the rarest living animal
in all the world.
There is none rarer.
This is Lonesome George.
It was hoped that a female
Pinta tortoise might be found
with which he could breed,
but it was not to be.
Lonesome George, it seems, is doomed
to be the last of his kind.
Sadly, he died in June 2012.
But other surviving Galapagos tortoises
have had to deal with a different threat.
Goats.
They were brought to the island
long ago by both sailors and settlers
and have now gone wild.
They crop the vegetation so severely
that there's little or nothing
left for the tortoises.
So the island's conservation authorities
decided to eradicate feral goats
on several of the islands
so that the vegetation could recover,
and the tortoises get
their natural food back.
Now on Isabella island,
as I saw for myself in 2008,
the plants have returned
to their former lushness,
and the tortoises' future has been secured.
[font color="#D900D9"][GRUNTING][/font]
Saving large, dramatic species
was one of conservationists' first aims.
But soon we realized
that true conservation means
protecting the entire habitat,
of which this spectacular
species is just one element.
And one way of doing that is to establish
nature reserves or national parks.
The first national park in Africa was
created in 1925 around the volcanoes
that lie in the heart of the continent.
Its aim was to protect
the rare mountain gorillas
which were being k*lled by
trophy hunters and poachers.
But what has happened there since
has made it quite clear
that effective conservation isn't just
a question of governments
drawing lines on a map.
Very often it requires
the passion and determination
of one highly motivated individual,
as I saw myself in Rwanda.
An American woman, Dian Fossey,
had been studying the mountain gorillas
in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park
since 1967.
By patiently sitting near
to them year after year,
she had eventually won their complete
trust to a quite astonishing degree.
In 1978, she agreed that we might come
with cameras to film them.
On the first day, Dian came out with us,
I think to keep an eye on us,
to see we were going to behave properly.
She was quite suspicious
of what we were doing,
so we were on trial.
She introduced us to the gorillas,
in the sense that they saw that
we were with Dian.
So I suspect that that may well have
been that they therefore thought
we were okay.
But without Dian, that sequence
could never have happened.
[font color="#D900D9"][GRUNTING][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][WHISPERING][/font] There is more meaning
and mutual understanding
in exchanging a glance with a gorilla
than any other animal I know.
We're so similar.
Their sight, their hearing,
their sense of smell are so similar to ours
that we see the world
in the same way as they do.
They walk around on the ground
as we do, though they're...
immensely more powerful than we are.
And so if ever there was a possibility
of escaping the human condition
and living imaginatively, hmm,
in another creature's world,
it must be with a gorilla.
And this is how they spend
most of their time,
lounging on the ground,
grooming one another.
Sometimes they even allow
others to join in.
We never thought for a second that we would
get physical contact.
Today that's frowned
upon, quite right, too,
because many of the diseases that human
beings have can be caught by gorillas.
Their curiosity is revealed
by my photographs.
One of them was very interested in
the long sort of sausage-shape housing
that holds the microphone,
and you can see this
young male just feeling
it, seeing what it is.
And also, they were fascinated
by the camera,
and they came to Martin Saunders,
who was the cameraman,
and were peering inside the camera to see
if they could see another animal inside it.
And finally, the adult male,
the big silverback appeared.
Dian's name for him was Beethoven,
and Beethoven was a huge, powerful animal
and really quite alarming because
if he'd lost his temper with you,
he could simply smash
your skull with one blow of his fist.
The thing you don't do is to pick up
your camera and look directly at him,
that's a challenging thing to do.
Sol have quite a lot of
pictures of Beethoven
gazing to the right or to the left,
or even looking away from me.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font]
Yeah. So he is.
But behind this extraordinary encounter
lay a tragic and shocking reality.
We had arrived in Dian Fossey's camp
in January 1978,
just days after Dian's favorite gorilla,
a young male,
name was Digit, had been savagely
and brutally k*lled by poachers.
Dian was grief-stricken, it was
as though she had lost a child,
and on top of that, she was in
extremely poor health, spitting blood.
We became witness
to a slow-motion tragedy.
Gorillas had been illegally k*lled
in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park
throughout the '60s and '70s.
When Dian had arrived,
there were about 500 left.
But there were only about half that number
at the time of our visit
and Dian had taken it upon herself
to organize anti-poaching patrols.
Never before had it been so clear to me
that a species was heading for disaster.
It was just Dian Fossey
who was standing between
the mountain gorillas and extinction.
On our last evening at her camp,
Dian called me to her sickbed
and made me promise to do something
to help save the gorillas.
And when I got back to Britain,
I kept that promise
and got together with
other conservationists,
and jointly we created
the Mountain Gorilla Fund.
We raise money for education programs,
for developing gorilla tourism
and for anti-poaching patrols.
Building relationships with the local
authorities along the way.
When Life on Earth broadcast,
the sequence with the gorillas caused
something of a sensation
and helped people realize that the gorillas
were not only endangered,
but had to be helped.
Meanwhile, Man's health improved,
and she resumed her efforts to protect
the gorillas and their habitat.
She fought as hard as she could
to prevent great areas of the forest
from being cut down
and turned into farmland.
And she continued
her battles with the poachers,
destroying their snares and arresting them
when her patrols captured them red-handed.
Although there's no doubt that
Dian Fossey's anti-poaching methods
were controversial and certainly
antagonized many of the local people,
they nonetheless succeeded in saving
much of the forest.
Efforts to protect the gorillas' habitat,
by Dian and the charity I helped create,
which became the International Gorilla
Conservation Project, have paid off.
Despite the region's wars,
there are now about 480 Virunga gorillas
twice as many as when we visited.
But they are still threatened
because of the great speed
at which the human population
of the region is increasing.
And that danger is in fact a global one.
[font color="#808080"]1979 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] You and I
belong to the most widespread
and dominant species of animal on Earth.
There are something
like four thousand million of us today.
And we've reached this position
with meteoric speed.
It's all happened within the last
we seem to have
broken loose from the restrictions
that have governed the activities
and numbers of other animals.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] That was St. Peter's Square
in Rome in 1978.
Since then, our population
has nearly doubled.
There are now over seven billion of us,
by some estimates, there may be
nine billion people in 2050.
That growth ls largely attributable
to medical advances
and to the highly efficient ways
we have found to grow our food.
In just a few thousand years,
the revolution of agriculture
has spread to virtually
all human societies.
Today, over a third of
the surface of the land
is devoted to producing food
for human beings.
And that has changed some landscapes
in the most dramatic way.
Our scientific and technological ingenuity
has enormously increased
agricultural productivity
in the last 60 years.
World grain production
has more than tripled.
But even that has not been able
to keep pace with the needs
of the world's growing human population.
In some parts of the world,
the natural forest was cleared
for agriculture many centuries ago.
But elsewhere, that transformation
has happened in my lifetime.
When I first came to Borneo in 1956,
all this was rainforest.
Now all those trees have gone.
The logging industry took out the wood.
The palm oil industry cleared
what remained of the forest
and replaced it
with its own uniform plantations.
All those extra human
mouths have to be fed,
and the country needs the cash.
But the effect on the natural world
has been catastrophic.
Few have suffered more
than the orang-utans.
Many adults were k*lled
as the forest was cleared.
If their babies didn't die with them,
then they were usually taken
and sold as pets.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHATTERING][/font]
A few fortunate ones
ended up in sanctuaries,
like this one at Sepilok.
These baby orangs are orphans,
mostly rescued from the pet trade.
It's easy to see why they make
such engaging pets when they're young.
Indeed, when I was here 50 years ago,
I had one as a pet
which I became very fond of.
His mother had been k*lled by a villager
as she raided his banana plantation.
London Zoo, I knew, wanted to establish
an orang breeding colony,
so he joined our floating menagerie.
[font color="#808080"]1956 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
But it wasn't long before Charlie,
as we had christened him,
began to calm down.
Slowly we managed to win his confidence.
And then, for the first time,
four days after we had had him,
we encouraged him
to come right outside his cage.
And here is Charlie,
safe and sound back in London.
Hey, Charlie. Charlie?
Whoa, dear. That's it. And with him
is Mr. Smith,
the Head Keeper of the Monkey House.
And how is he, Mr. Smith?
Very much recovered from his long
and arduous journey here, David,
and he's going to settle down
and I think he's going to be with us
for a very long time.
Good.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] And that he was.
And a few years after
his arrival at the zoo, he took a shine
to a young female.
Back in 1961, I went into the Ape House
in London Zoo
to see Charlie, as I often did,
and the Head Keeper came over
and he said, "I've got good news."
He said, "You are about
to become a grandfather."
"Really?" I said. "Yes," he said,
"your young Charlie has fathered a baby
and it should be born
in a few months' time."
"And as grandfather," he said,
"you have the privilege of christening it."
So, eventually I decided
it should be called Bulu,
which in Malay means "little hairy one."
Bulu. Can we have Bulu?
Now, this is Charlie's daughter.
All right, dear. All right, all right.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Bulu was
the first orang-utan born in Britain
and she was just as endearing
as Charlie had been.
I look back on those days
when I had Charlie the baby orang
with mixed feelings,
because the fact of the matter
is that these are not pets,
these are wild animals
and they should be in the wild.
The problem is that although
many people in Borneo
support the rehabilitation of orang-utan,
their rainforest home
continues to be destroyed
as the rest of the world increases
its demand for palm oil.
So, the question that hangs over
these orangs' future
is whether there will be enough forest left
for them to return to
when they've grown up.
Strong measures will have to be taken
if that is to be so.
There is one place where our destructive
impact on the planet
is less immediately obvious.
The oceans.
I can see its tail just under my boat here
and it's coming up, it's coming up, there!
The blue whale is 100 feet long,
that can grow on land,
because no bone is strong enough
to support such bulk.
Only in the sea can you get such huge size
as that magnificent creature.
I had to wait until I was 76 years old
to see my first blue whale.
Part of what made the encounter so special
was that for much of my lifetime,
blue whales were being
k*lled at such a rate
that it seemed quite possible
that they would become extinct
before I ever saw one.
The fact that they've survived
is a conservation triumph.
And that only happened because
there was a fundamental change worldwide
in people's attitudes to whales.
Men had hunted whales for centuries,
primarily for the sake of the oil
in their blubber.
And the skeletons of just a few of them
ended up here in the
Natural History Museum.
When I was growing up, whale products
were used mostly in food.
I must have unconsciously
eaten a fair amount of blubber,
because it was an ingredient of margarine.
And during the w*r, when meat
was really scarce, I certainly ate
what was euphemistically
called Arctic steak, whale meat.
But it never occurred to me
that whales could actually be endangered.
But improved methods of tracking
and k*lling whales
was reducing their numbers alarmingly.
[font color="#808080"]NEWSREEL NARRATOR:[/font]
Six hundred yards of rope are drawn out
in the wounded giant's death struggle.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] By the 1960s,
there were fewer than
just 1% of their probable
original population.
The species seemed headed
towards extinction,
until whaling nations finally banned
the hunting of blue whales.
However, what changed the fortunes
of the other great whales
were anti-whaling campaigners,
who turned whole nations
against the industry.
During the 1970s and early '80s,
anti-whaling groups used direct action
and mass rallies
to put pressure on the whaling nations,
finally securing a total ban on commercial
whaling which came into force in 1986.
Since that time,
whales have only legally been k*lled
for scientific purposes
or by indigenous communities.
I can only hope that ban will remain,
so that future generations could see
what wonderful creatures they are.
Today the world's blue whale population
appears to be recovering slowly.
It has doubled in the last 50 years
to perhaps as many as 4,500.
Of course, it's not just the big,
charismatic species
that we are exterminating.
Life on Earth is a complex web
and we ignore the millions
of tiny creatures in it at our peril.
One kind of animal is right now in the
grip of the greatest extinction event
since the disappearance of the dinosaurs,
animals like this, amphibians.
Globally the numbers of amphibians
are declining at an alarming rate.
One third of all species
are now critically endangered.
In the rainforest of Costa
Rica in the late '70s,
we filmed the Montverde Toad.
Ten years later, inexplicably,
it had become extinct.
It was only in the last few years that
the mystery of what k*lled the toad
was finally solved, and that was not
before many other species of amphibians
had also died out.
In fact, while we were
filming Life In Cold Blood in 2007,
I actually witnessed
the extinction in the wild
of the Panamanian golden frog,
which fell victim to the
same insidious k*ller.
Individual males set up their
territories beside the river
and then wait for females to turn up.
And since good positions
for the territory are not common,
they may have to hold them
against intruders.
And here one comes.
Just in case his call is inaudible,
he makes his message clear with a wave.
And his rival waves back.
He repeats his message
so there's no misunderstanding.
Sadly, there are no longer
any Panamanian golden frogs
waving in the wild,
and the disease that k*lled them
is now sweeping round the world,
exterminating hundreds
of different species of amphibians.
The k*ller is a fungus.
It's highly infectious and believed to
have originated in South Africa,
from where it was transported by the
international trade in c*ptive animals.
It was spreading across Panama
while we were filming
and when we had finished, scientists
collected the last few survivors
and took them into a specially
quarantined building
where other endangered amphibians
were being kept.
Here they may breed,
and then, if a cure for
the fungus is found,
or it runs its course in the wild,
the frogs may be returned
to their former home.
In the last 60 years,
I've come face to face with many species
that we've put at risk.
Sea otters.
Chimpanzees.
[font color="#D900D9"][LAUGHS][/font]
[font color="#D900D9"][SNORTING][/font]
Manatee.
Sadly, this magnificent animal
is getting rarer and rarer.
How many of these wonderful things
will still be around in another 60 years?
What an extraordinary creature!
Although the threat to the natural world
from humanity
has never been greater than it is today,
there are nonetheless
causes for hope here and there.
In recent decades,
when people have become involved
with the local population of animals,
they have started to take part
in the conservation process.
And that's certainly the
case here in Borneo,
in the caves at Gomantong.
The only visitors here
when we first came in 1972
were the local people,
and the people came to the cave
for one particular and
extraordinary purpose.
[font color="#808080"]1973 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] They collect what is
surely one of the strangest commodities
to be found in any cuisine.
It's so valuable that
they risk their lives to get it.
They are harvesting the nests
that swiftlets construct
using their own glutinous spittle.
And this is the end
product of all this labor
and sweat and danger and sheer courage.
One can't help wondering who it was
who first looked
at these extraordinary objects and said,
"That'd be great for making soup out of."
But whoever he was,
he lived over a thousand years ago,
because there are Chinese records
in the 9th and 10th centuries
which speak of the wonderful delicacy,
birds' nests, that you can get from Borneo.
I wanted to see what all
the fuss was about,
so I went into a local restaurant
in Sandakan to see what bird's nest soup
actually tastes like.
The consistency perhaps is a little odd,
it's a little sort of gelatinous.
But for the rest of it, well, I'm afraid
there is one great secret
about birds' nests.
The fact of the matter is
that pure birds' nests
taste of nothing whatsoever,
provided, that is, it's been well cleaned.
Even in the '70s,
the birds' nests were so valuable
that there was an obvious risk
that the cave would be over-exploited,
but today that risk is even greater.
A nest like this is worth as much as £100.
If you take too many of them,
then the birds will have
nowhere to raise their young
and the colony is doomed.
But a total ban would deprive
the local people
of a very important part of their income.
So a plan was agreed.
Some caves should be regularly harvested,
others should be protected
from any human interference,
and one should be open for the public
to visit and wonder.
It's an almost ideal situation.
The local economy benefits,
the wildlife benefits and an ancient
tradition, with luck,
is kept alive for many years to come.
Other creatures in Borneo
are now also being protected
by people who once put them in danger.
This is Selingan Island off the
northern coast of Borneo,
and turtles come up here
onto beaches like this at night
in order to lay their eggs.
And back in the 1950s,
local people would come to such places
in order to dig up those eggs and eat them.
And I have to admit,
they weren't the only people to do that.
[font color="#808080"]1956 ATTENBOROUGH:[/font]
If turtles use this beach,
it occurred to me
that there might be a chance
that we could find a
turtle's nest, with eggs,
which would be a very welcome addition
to the rice, bananas and bully beef
on which we'd been living almost
entirely for the past week.
And here, buried three feet deep,
were the eggs.
There were 88 eggs in that nest,
enough to provide us
with breakfast for many days to come.
And they were all produced
by one female turtle.
[font color="#808080"]ATTENBOROUGH:[/font] Looking back,
it all seems rather shocking
and I hadn't got a clue how to cook them.
The result, wasn't, I'm afraid,
particularly delicious.
Turtle eggs may not have been to my taste
but the local people loved them,
and they were an important source
not only of nutriment, but income.
The trouble was that the human
population was growing so fast
that the turtle eggs
were being collected in huge numbers
and turtles worldwide were in decline.
In the decades that followed,
the Malaysian government stepped in
to save their turtles.
Harvesting the eggs was banned
and a hatchery established
on Selingan Island, which people
visit to see what's going on.
During the breeding season,
the eggs are collected
from the beach and
reburied in the hatchery,
each clutch being kept together
inside its own tittie fence.
But it's only after dark that
the adult turtles reveal themselves,
crawling out of the sea
and laying their eggs,
to the delight of the onlookers.
There may be another location.
Anybody else? You can take picture.
Come more forward.
The visitors pay good money
for the privilege of watching
the turtles at close quarters
and that gives an income
to the local people.
That's about the age...
Once the eggs hatch,
the youngsters are collected
and taken down to the shore.
Off you go.
Off you go.
Millions of baby turtles
have now been released
under this conservation program,
and as a consequence,
the population of adult green turtles
here is now increasing.
But the survival of green turtles
needs more than their protection
by local people at their nesting beaches.
Turtles migrate.
They swim across national borders
into unprotected foreign waters.
And that can be a problem.
It's now clear that
many conservation projects
will only succeed in the long term
if they transcend national boundaries
and allow wildlife
to cross frontiers without hindrance.
And that's exactly what's happening here
in the rainforest in the island of Borneo.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei signed
the Heart of Borneo agreement in 2007,
declaring that the
rainforest will be protected
while allowing sustainable use
and access by local people.
This sort of international
cross-border cooperation
is vital if we are to
safeguard an area of wildlife
and ultimately the health of the planet.
And thinking about the health
of the planet as a whole
was not something many people did
until one truly extraordinary
and historic event.
[font color="#808080"]ANNOUNCER:[/font] The engines are armed.
Four, three, two, one, zero.
We have commit, we have...
We have lift-off.
Lift-off at 7:51 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
Pictures of the launch of Apollo 8
arrived in Britain back in 1968
by way of the BBC's central control room
here in the Television Centre in London,
where I had a job as a network controller.
[font color="#808080"]ASTRONAUT:[/font] Looking
at the top is the North Pole,
in the center, just forward
to the center is South America,
all the way down to Cape Horn.
Those images were instrumental
in changing the way
that many of us viewed the planet.
We began to think globally.
Looking at the Earth from outer space
made us realize just how small our world is
and how finite its resources.
It also helped us understand
that we have to cherish
not just individual species nor even
individual patches of wilderness
but the whole planet
as a single integrated ecosystem.
But back in 1968, few people could imagine
that the activities of just one species,
our own,
could interfere with the way
that the planet worked,
that we could actually change
the climate of the Earth.
It was in the oceans that this threat
first became apparent.
I'll never forget the first time I put
my head beneath the surface of the sea
and saw all around me
a coral reef in all its complexity
and richness
and almost unbelievable beauty.
If the jungle is the place on land
where there are the greatest number
and the greatest variety of life,
then this, the coral reef,
is surely the jungle of the sea.
Although coral reefs occupy
just 1% of the oceans,
they support a quarter of all their fish.
The fragility of these complex ecosystems
suddenly became alarmingly clear In 1998.
Almost overnight, in oceans
all around the globe,
coral turned white.
The temperature of the sea had risen
and it had devastated 16%
of the world's coral reefs.
Even a rise of a couple
of degrees Fahrenheit
can be enough to k*ll the organisms
that build the coral,
leaving their limestone skeletons
a naked white.
If the rise is brief, then
the coral can recover,
but if it is sustained,
then the coral may die completely.
And this coral bleaching hints
at an even bigger problem.
The average temperature of our planet
has increased by 1.26 degrees
Fahrenheit over the last century,
and it seems likely to rise still further.
And that could lead to
changes in sea level.
Even a very small rise in sea temperature
could have a devastating effect.
Small islands like the one behind me
could be totally submerged.
Major cities could be at risk.
And the reason for that lies
far away from here,
where the change is already
beginning to be seen,
at the Poles.
[font color="#D900D9"][WIND HOWLING][/font]
I am at the very center of the great
white continent, Antarctica.
The South Pole is about half a mile away.
For 1,000 miles in all directions,
there is nothing but ice.
I'm now at the other end of the Earth,
in the North, the Arctic.
I have been lucky enough to travel
in the polar regions several times
in the last 30 years, making films
about their rich wildlife.
His sole object in life at the moment
is to make quite sure
that he and he alone
mates with every single one of them.
And for that he must fight.
It's heavier even... [font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font]
Than... Heavier than the adult.
These parent birds reunite
once they come back here...
[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS SCREECHING][/font]
...onto their own patch
of, patch of shingle.
[font color="#D900D9"][CHUCKLES][/font]
And although the Antarctic is virtually
lifeless over vast areas,
there are one or two small oases
that teem with life.
Slowly I began to realize that things
were changing
in ways that will affect the wildlife,
and eventually ourselves,
no matter how far away from the Poles
we might be.
This is the ice that covered
the Arctic Ocean in September 1980.
Since then, there has been a 30% reduction
in the area covered by ice.
And not only that, what ice remains
is only half as thick as it was.
If the sea ice continues
to melt at this rate,
there will be open ocean in the summer
at the North Pole within decades.
The very whiteness of the snow and ice
contributes to the pace of change.
Light bouncing off it takes 90%
of the sun's energy back into space,
and this has helped to
keep the planet cool.
But when the sea-ice melts,
it exposes the dark sea water.
That doesn't reflect the sun's heat,
it absorbs it,
so the temperature of the sea rises.
Here in the Arctic,
the climate is warming twice as fast
as the rest of the Earth,
and that could have global consequences,
including rises in sea
level around the world.
Climate change is already
affecting the lives
of not only wild animals
but ourselves, all over the globe.
[font color="#D900D9"][BIRDS CHIRPING][/font]
I've spent my life filming
the natural world
and I've traveled to some
pretty remote and exciting places
in order to do so.
I've enjoyed every minute of it.
But every journey seems to have got
quicker and shorter.
It's as though the world has shrunk.
But then, sadly, so have the wild places.
The increasing size of the human population
is having a devastating
effect on the natural world.
But fortunately,
people are becoming aware of that
and doing something about it
and I'd like to think that
natural history films
have helped in that process.
And there are some signs of hope.
Animals that I thought might become
extinct in my lifetime
are still with us and growing in numbers.
We now have a better understanding
of the natural world than ever.
We know how best to protect it
for future generations.
I can only hope that we will.
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