"(BIRDS CHIRPING)" "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." "(HISSING)" "I think that was pretty clear." "(CHUCKLING)" "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." "KEARTON:" "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." "KEARTON:" "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"." "(CHUCKLES)" "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." "1956 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1956 ATTENBOROUGH:" "And down came the door." "Hastily, we piled boulders on the door so that he couldn't lift it up." "We'd got him." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(SEALS SQUEALING)" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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..." "(GURGLING) ...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... (GURGLING)" "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." "(DOLPHINS SQUEAKING) 1990 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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 shoot 10 minutes' worth of film underwater 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. (INHALES) 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." "(PANTING) 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... (GROANING) ...makes... (COUGHS)" "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." "(GROWLING)" "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." "(ROARING FROM SPEAKER)" "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." "(ROARING)" "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." "(ROARING CONTINUES)" "Those are not aggressive roars, they are communication roars." "But they are quite enough to chill the blood in the blackness of the night." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(TRUMPETING)" "2006 ATTENBOROUGH:" "A solitary lion stands no chance but the whole pride is here." "(SNARLING)" "There are 30 of them, and they are specialist elephant hunters." "(THUNDER RUMBLING)" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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 kill 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." "1998 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(BLOWS)" "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." "(SIGHING) 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." "1956 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "SCIENTIST:" "There it is." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1995 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "MAN ON RADIO:" "There, there, there, there it goes, there it goes." "They're racing, they're racing, they're racing." "MAN 2:" "Three, four dogs, all spread out." "They are pulling up fast." "MAN 1:" "Tighten up, tighten up as much as you can." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "MAN ON RADIO:" "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." "1998 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1998 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Nevertheless, Doug took to his hide and waited." "(SIGHING)" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "And things didn't improve, even after two weeks." "Yeah, of course it's boring." "It's boring as hell." "(CHUCKLES)" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "SMITH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Finally, Mark was rewarded with his first-ever glimpse." "SMITH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "2006 ATTENBOROUGH:" "Silently, she positions herself above her prey." "(SQUEALING)" "(SNARLING)" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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... (RAZZES) ...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." "(CHUCKLING)" "(GEESE CHEEPING)" "BUCK:" "Hi." "Off you go, then." "Good boys." "Come on, then!" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "So now, they too follow her everywhere." "On foot..." "And eventually even in flight." "(GEESE HONKING) (BUCK LAUGHING)" "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." "1979 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1984 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(KNOCKING ON WOOD)" "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?" "(SNAPS FINGERS)" "Oh." "The noise is awful." "In Minnesota, it's not difficult to summon a wolf." "(HOWLING)" "(HOWLING)" "(ATTENBOROUGH MIMICS CHIRPING)" "On Australia's Lord Howe Island, there are other conversations to be had." "(BIRDS CHATTERING)" "(BIRDS CHATTERING)" "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." "(MIMICKING CHIRPING)" "And In Florida, you can get little lizards to reply to a mirror." "And there, that's it." "(CHUCKLES) 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." "1990 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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."" "(MONKEY CHATTERING)" "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." "(MONKEYS CHATTERING)" "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." "1957 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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 30 birds of paradise." "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." "(CHANTING)" "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." "1957 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(SPEAKING TRIBAL LANGUAGE) "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 rape 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." "(BIRDS CHIRPING)" "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." "(SQUAWKING)" "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... (VOCALIZES) ...with two, and one... (VOCALIZES) ...with three." "When we came back, I joined the two together so they ran, and we could play it throughout the display." "(WARBLING)" "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." "(COOING)" "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." "(SQUAWKING)" "Can it really be worth all this, just to mate with a female?" "(SQUAWKING)" "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." "(SQUAWKING)" "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." "(SQUAWKING)" "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." "(MEERKATS CHATTERING)" "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 cocked." "(WARBLES)" "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." "1990 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(SOFTLY) 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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(SOFTLY) 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... (CHIMPANZEES GIBBERING)" "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." "(GIBBERING)" "(SHRIEKING)" "They've got one." "And nowthe kill 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." "(ELECTRONIC WHIRRING)" "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." "(TRIBAL MUSIC PLAYING)" "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." "1964 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1964 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "(SQUEAKING)" "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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... (LAUGHING)" "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." "(TORTOISE GROANING)" "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 captive 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 captive-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." "(GRUNTING)" "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 killed 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." "(GRUNTING)" "(WHISPERING) 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." "(CHUCKLES)" "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 killed 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 killed 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." "1979 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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 2,000 years or so, we seem to have broken loose from the restrictions that have governed the activities and numbers of other animals." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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 killed as the forest was cleared." "If their babies didn't die with them, then they were usually taken and sold as pets." "(CHATTERING)" "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 killed 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." "1956 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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, 30 meters, nothing like 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 killed 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 war, 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 killing whales was reducing their numbers alarmingly." "NEWSREEL NARRATOR:" "Six hundred yards of rope are drawn out in the wounded giant's death struggle." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "By the 1960s, there were fewer than 2,000 blue whales surviving, 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 killed 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 killed 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 killer." "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 killed them is now sweeping round the world, exterminating hundreds of different species of amphibians." "The killer 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 captive 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." "(LAUGHS)" "(SNORTING)" "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." "1973 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "1956 ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "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." "ANNOUNCER:" "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." "ASTRONAUT:" "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 kill 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." "(WIND HOWLING)" "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... (CHUCKLES)" "Than..." "Heavier than the adult." "These parent birds reunite once they come back here..." "(BIRDS SCREECHING) ...onto their own patch of, patch of shingle." "(CHUCKLES)" "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." "(BIRDS CHIRPING)" "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."