"Ever wondered what it must be like to fly like a bird?" "Well, with the help of the latest technology we're beginning to find out..." "woo hoo hoooh!" "From eagle cam to bumblebee radar, first on 'Animal Camera' we're going to start unlocking the secrets of animal flight." "And then it's back down to earth for a desert stakeout where we'll be finding out just what it takes to survive in the blistering heat of the Namib desert." "So whether your head's in the sand or up in the clouds, join me, Steve Leonard, for Animal Camera." "Using the latest technology unravel the mysteries of animal behaviour." "The wind in your hair and the world at your feet, weightless, free..." "To fly like a bird is mankind's oldest dream." "And now, thanks to modern technology, there are ways we can get pretty close to achieving it." "Whoo whoo!" "This vertical wind tunnel is designed to train freefall parachutists." "Up above me, five massive fans create a wind speed of 200 kilometres per hour - enough to lift me clean up into the air." "Floating in this extraordinary machine is about as close as you can get to flying like a bird without sprouting wings." "It's the most amazing feeling to be able to fly... to glide on the air." "Ok, I'm not really a peregrine falcon or a sack of potatoes but it feels fantastic..." "Yoo hoo hoo!" "And it's the quest for that flying feeling that has been the driving force behind some of our most astonishing technical achievements... lt's been a bumpy ride, but driven by the dream, inspired by nature's genius, ever since Icarus," "we've been doing our best to shed the shackles of gravity and reach for the sky." "And we're getting there, but can all our efforts ever really match the supremacy of nature?" "Well, with our modern technology we're now getting a fresh look at nature and are finally beginning to unlock some of the secrets of animal flight and as we do so, we're starting to learn a thing or two from the masters." "These incredible pictures are from one bit of kit that is completely revolutionizing the way we look at the world of animal flight - miniature cameras." "Quite literally 'a lens on a microchip', and less than 30 grams, they can be harmlessly placed on tame birds to give us that on-board perspective." "Once 'on board' we can start to see just how birds are using those all - important tools of the trade - wings and tail." "Three birds, three designs, all specialists in their field." "First, the Golden Eagle... ultimate soarer." "As she floats on the updraught of mountain winds, we can see exactly what she's doing." "An eagle's wing is flexible, all the time playing the air... bending in the middle, and at the tip primary feathers spread like fingers for fine control - feeling for the tiniest current, giving maximum lift for least effort." "It's all about feeling the air and reacting to it." "The reason why birds find it so easy is, because just like me in the wind tunnel, they've got so much movement in their wings, unlike a rigid winged aircraft." "An aeroplane wing uses flaps of metal to move the air in crude ways, whereas a bird wing constantly flexes and twists to give much more subtle control... lt's amazing what a bit of twist can do." "Just a little dip of my elbow and round l go..." "With infinitely adjustable wings, an eagle makes the most of the fickle updraughts and can stay soaring for hours on end." "And it's not just the wings..." "Turn our cameras backwards, and we can see that the tail is also constantly twitching, working with the wings to fine tune flight even further." "For that extra bit of lift, it sometimes fans right out to join the wings and make one big delta wing..." "Or simply, drawn back in, gives that extra burst of speed for the kill." "And it's only with such precision control from wings and tail that an eagle can become such a stable platform for its main weapon - its eyes." "Despite the ever-changing buffeting wind, it can spot a mountain hare at two kilometres with telescopic vision." "This is a level of control aeronautical engineers can only dream of." "But today's dream is tomorrow's reality - because with the help of these on-board pictures," "NASA is now designing the planes of the future to be just as flexible." "Soaring like an eagle, however, is only part of the story..." "Time for the ultimate in speed flight - and the fastest animal on the planet - the peregrine falcon." "If we can catch up with her!" "It's only when we get on board that we can really get a feeling for how fast she's going, even as she warms up swooping back and forth, attracted to bird handler Lloyd's yellow lure." "Wings that are stretched to gain height one moment, the next are suddenly tucked away, as the peregrine slips round in a stoop for her party piece." "A 250 kilometre per hour nosedive straight at the ground." "Then seconds before impact, the wings swing out again to pull a brain numbing 10 G's bottom turn that would cause a mere human to black out." "And this is only playing." "And just look how quick these wing movements really are." "This time a split second barrel roll keeps her target in the sweet spot of her vision, without the need to turn her head." "At this speed even a head turn would send her wildly out of control." "Every little nuance counts when you're on the edge of what's possible." "And finally..." "The Goshawk..." "the master of manoeuvrability... solving the ultimate challenge - flying through woodland." "It feels for the air like an eagle, swings its wings like a falcon and all the time just inches from the ground and a breath away from collision with a tree Split second timing, the envy of any fighter pilot." "Just watch as it slips through the tiniest gap in the trees..." "And again wings in bank right, left, with long tail taking over for fine control... then spread and twisted for recovery..." "and all in a fraction of a second." "Scientists examining these images have concluded that no aircraft invented comes anywhere close." "So can we ever match a Goshawk?" "Well, finding out exactly how wings and tails are moving is a good start - but we can do better than that." "To really get a grip on how animals fly, we need to see what their wings and tails are doing to the air..." "And the best way to understand the air is to see it." "And to do that we need a horizontal wind tunnel." "This time fans accelerate the air in a horizontal direction... then smoke introduced into the airflow allows you to see exactly how the air behaves." "Scientists once famously proved that bumblebees can't fly - their tiny wings are far too small to lift their fat, fluffy bodies." "But what do scientists know?" "Well ... fly a bumblebee in a wind tunnel, film it at 2000 frames per second, and you can watch it comfortably defying the rules of conventional aeronautics eighty times slower than real life." "Just look at those tiny wings go..." "They twist and flex far more than even a goshawk's..." "But what's most interesting is that, when the bee enters the smoke, it sends it into a mass of tiny swirls and eddies." "When anything moves air it makes these eddies - or vortices  like this air cannon." "A vortex has energy and it's this energy that the birds and bees are harnessing to fly." "At every stroke you can see how this bee shoots a vortex downwards to give it lift." "But the secret to how it produces so much lift from such tiny wings can only be seen if we watch the wing move into the smoke plume in slices of a 2000th of a second." "As the far wing hits the top of its upstroke it flicks around at the shoulder and makes a swirl... there ..." "This tiny vortex, filmed here for the very first time ever on a bumble bee, literally sucks the wing upwards and helps give the bee as much as fifty per cent more lift." "All is revealed when we can see the air." "But there is a limit to what we can do with smoke alone - it just doesn't pick up the detail - and that's where we need lasers." "This time, it's birds..." "like this knot." "The tame knot is trained to fly in the wind tunnel where it quite happily flaps away as though flying forwards but is actually just hovering right in front of your nose." "Non-toxic smoke is blown into the air stream, then a sheet of lasers plots the movement of each particle of smoke in the air behind the bird." "Like with the bumblebee, these scientists at Lund university in Sweden are trying to see exactly what the bird is doing to the air." "Revealed by the laser, this is what they get... lt doesn't mean much to us, but to the trained eye these psychedelic blobs are a blueprint for bird flight." "To move itself forwards and upwards, the bird pushes air in the opposite direction - back and down in swirling energized vortices - just like the bumblebee." "But with lasers we can not only see more detail we can also build up a picture of what's happening in three dimensions..." "And once we can do that... we can start solving some more mysteries of animal flight." "These tame geese are having a flying lesson." "They're being trained to fly alongside a car so that they can get the kind of practice they would in the wild." "And a big part of being a goose is learning to fly in formation." "OK, a goose is not a knot, but it works in a similar way." "As we've seen in the wind tunnel, as each bird flies it leaves behind it a trail of vortices, giving it lift and propelling it along." "Of course birds can't see vortices, but they're very good at feeling them." "Naturally they know what to do..." "most of the time." "Watch what happens if you try and fly directly behind one of your flock mates." "Look at the goose at the left of the picture." "It gets caught up in the downdraught of the one in front." "And again, third goose from the back... lt's like slipping on a flying banana skin." "So if you want to learn to fly in a flock, you need to get organised." "By avoiding the bad air from the goose in front, a familiar pattern starts to emerge..." "The characteristic straight line called a skein." "But flying in formation is not just about avoiding the bad air and staying in the good air - it's also about finding the really good air." "These NASA F-18s are looking into the nature of another vortex called the 'wing tip vortex'." "You often see it in vapour trails as a long spiral left behind each wing tip." "Because vortices hold energy, if you can get yourself in just the right place so that your wing tip is touching this vortex you can gain a little extra lift." "You can see it as a nudge as the plane begins to surf the vortex." "There." "And if you've got free lift, you can save energy..." "For commercial airliners that could mean saving half a million dollars per plane per year if they flew in formation." "And amazingly, in the bird wind tunnel, they've now found that, as a bird reaches around 30 Kilometres per hour it too starts shedding vortices from the wing tip just like a plane." "...so, by flying in formation, birds save energy as well." "It's not a big saving, about 2 or 3% , but for wild geese on thousands of miles of migration it could make the difference between life and death." "Flying is not just about being flash - it's about getting from A to B for the least possible effort." "Which brings us back to bumble bees." "Scientist Juliet Osborne is fascinated by bumblebees." "Bumblebees are very obliging - they do sting but they're much more docile than honey bees and because they live in small colonies, you can happily keep a whole hive in a cardboard box." "These are all workers and their job is to collect pollen and nectar to feed the queen and colony - that's the queen there - the big one." "Of course that's why they need to fly and as we've seen they're very good at it." "But what Juliet's interested in is not how they fly, but where they fly." "She can watch them leave the hive and she can watch them return with their cargo - but what exactly do they get up to out there?" "Well, thanks to the latest technology, she's beginning to find out." "Where bees go when they leave the hive has long been a mystery for scientists and beekeepers alike, but Juliet and her colleagues came up with a tiny and very effective piece of kit that gave them the breakthrough." "First, however, she has to catch a bee." "Now, this might look like a radio-controlled bee but it's actually a bee with a little radar transponder on it." "When a radar beam hits this transponder it bounces back a return signal that can be detected by a receiver dish." "Less than ten percent of the bee's body weight, it's simple and harmless to put on and take off." "And now all we need is some radar." "And in a Land Rover, in the middle of the field, air traffic control." "The radar beam sweeps out across the meadow and beyond." "And as the bee flies, the transponder bounces back its signal to the receiving dish, which is plotted on a screen." "For the first time ever we can see exactly where the bees go, which direction, how fast, how high, how far." "Even pinpoint what their favourite food is." "And once a bee's done its work we can watch it fly back home again." "Coming back laden with pollen." "And as the tracks plotted themselves on the radar this is what Juliet discovered." "First of all the bees are flying much faster than predicted, an incredible 30 kilometres per hour, even when fully laden." "The next surprise is where the bees go." "They almost always overfly potentially decent food, like this oil seed rape, in favour of more distant rewards." "Juliet thinks this is probably to avoid competition with other members of the same hive - the further out you go, the more choice you get." "And once they have found their patch they then repeatedly shuttle to and from it." "And this is the really clever bit." "ln spite of 30 kilometres an hour crosswinds, whether out or back, they all fly in dead straight lines - beelines." "For an animal of a few grams with a brain the size of a grain of salt this is no mean feat." "But it's vitally important because, like the geese, they're on a knife-edge energy budget" " the straighter their beelines the less energy they expend." "Air traffic controller" "A typical sunset in southern USA." "But here in the darkening skies, an aerial invasion is about to commence." "An invasion of millions, moving steadily northwards, unseen in the night - but not undetected." "Way down south, in Louisiana, again it's radar that's beginning to reveal all." "Sid Gauthreaux, radar ornithologist, fires up his early warning systems." "As his radar dish spins, its beam reaches out into the night sky above him." "And this is what it sees." "Birds, in their thousands." "Each sweep of the dish describes a cone of 10 kilometres of airspace, whilst each blip is not an individual but an entire flock..." "The invasion Sid is spying on from the comfort of his trailer is the annual spring migration." "ln April and May, birds all over Central and South America say goodbye to their temporary tropical home and head north to their summer breeding grounds." "And because the air's less turbulent and there are fewer predators around, most of them fly by night." "All these birds, right above our heads and without Sid's radar, we'd never know." "But what he can see is only the half of it." "To get the whole picture we need something bigger." "This giant golf ball is NEXRAD." "A radar designed to look at the weather, it has a sweep of not tens of kilometres, but hundreds." "Because there is a network of Nexrads right across the USA, it can cover a whole continent." "And if it can see weather it can see birds." "First, a single NEXRAD station at exactly 30 minutes after sunset where something really big is about to happen." "The trace literally explodes as birds in their millions take to the sky." "Resting by day, every evening at the same time they continue their trek north." "And just watch what happens across the whole network as the sun sets from right to left." "Each of those blobs is a Nexrad explosion." "A wave of hundreds of millions of birds rising from the east with the night." "One of the biggest animal spectacles on the planet." "But this radar can tell us more - don't forget it's designed to study the weather... and there's a link between weather and migration." "If you've gotta get somewhere fast but want to save energy, weather fronts can be really useful." "This is a weather front swirling from west to east across the US." "As it moves, the air swirls around it in a giant anticlockwise vortex." "One side goes from north to south;" "the other side goes from south to north." "It's like a giant conveyor belt in the sky." "And if you can get on it you can get a free ride." "So look what happens when we overlay the bird data..." "Sure enough, as the front moves from left to right, the birds all take off ahead of it, rising up into winds that are travelling just where they want to go" " North." "Hundreds of millions of birds, taking advantage of favourable winds to save fuel." "Just like pilots do." "And in the autumn, when the breeding season's over, they wait till the front has passed overhead and take off behind it to ride the vortex back down south." "It all makes complete sense - but we wouldn't know any of it if it weren't for radar." "It seems the more we look, the more we find out that, from a tiny swirl on a bumblebee's wing to a weather front a thousand kilometres across, the secret of animal flight is all in the air." "And the more we learn from animals, the closer we get to flying just like them and reaching our ultimate dream." "But before we get too bigheaded about our own abilities, just remember where we'd be without the technology. ..." "Ah!" "Yep, it's back down to earth." "...which is exactly where we're going next, to one of the most hostile places imaginable - the Namib Desert in Africa." "You might as well be walking on another planet, just sand, wind and 60 degrees of searing heat." "Can anything survive out there?" "Well, with a little technology we're going to find out that it can." "But first we've got to look in the right place." "It's not surprising that there are no animals hanging around in this searing heat." "If anything's got any sense it's going to try and find somewhere pretty cool and in the midday sun there's only one cool place in the whole of this desert." "Just a few inches under the surface and the sand is very much cooler." "These amazing pictures are from one piece of kit that totally transforms our view of the desert world..." "A thermal camera." "It sees heat and turns it into colour." "You can see from the scale on the bottom of the picture that the red surface sand at a scorching 60 degrees is 30 degrees hotter than the cool blue sand." "I'm somewhere in the middle at around 45." "Of course, every day, the desert starts off near to freezing." "But as the sun rises in this thermal world it soon begins to heat the dunes." "As the thermal camera shows, the side facing the sun warms first." "And this early morning warmth draws out life." "Like this Chameleon." "It turns side-on to get the most of the sun and thaw out from the cold night." "Just like the dunes, its sunny side is almost 20 degrees warmer than the other." "But as the sun climbs higher, the dunes start to cook and that's when it's time to go underground, out of sight and out of the pounding heat." "You might still catch a glimpse of the chameleon, however, out and about and unfazed in the midday sun." "But then it's up to a chameleon's tricks and has now turned a reflective white" " in thermal speak, that's ice-cool blue." "And if you're really clever, even the minute drop in temperature just above the ground can help cool you down." "Just watch how this shovel-snouted lizard defies the desert furnace." "Has the heat gone to its head?" "Not at all - with a thermal camera we can see what this fancy footwork is all about." "One at a time it raises its red-hot feet into the cooler air just inches from the scalding surface..." "Here they shed their heat - it then swaps for another." "It's a fine balance, but with this fire dance it can keep its feet just the right side of burning." "From radiator feet to radiator ears." "Desert elephants cool the blood by pumping it through massive ears and flapping them." "But when you're too big to dive underground, it's not long before there's only one way left of dealing with this infernal heat." "Water." "If you can get to water, you can cool down." "Easier said than done - because there's not much of it around in this place." "Of course it helps if you can fly." "Once they've had a drink, these sand grouse soak up water with their chest feathers, so they can carry it back home and cool their chicks." "For many, the secret of surviving the heat of the desert is in knowing where the water is." "On thermal camera we can see just what a difference a drink makes." "Hot, thirsty eles arrive on the left to drink with cool, quenched ones over on the right." "As they cool, they shut down the blood flow to their ears, which drop from a hot 32-degree orange to a cool black 21 ." "If you're a human, this place will soon kill you if you've got no water." "To keep alive you need to drink 20 litres of the stuff a day." "But no matter how much you drink, it's so hot here it doesn't seem to make life any more bearable." "Oh well, there's only one thing for it." "That's better." "Much better." "When you get right out into the dunes, the challenge of living in a place like this, day or night, becomes really apparent." "Nothing here is permanent" "just wave after wave of endless dunes in a shifting sea of sand." "But amazingly, for some animals it's the sand itself that holds the secret of survival." "Believe it or not, that noise is coming from the sand." "As my bike digs in it kicks off an avalanche and the whole sound starts up." "ha ha ha" "Once I've started the sand moving with my quad bike, it all seems to feed itself." "The sound bounces around deep beneath the surface, getting louder and louder until the whole dune is roaring like a jumbo jet and you've no idea where it's coming from" " even after you've stopped at the bottom, it can go on for ages." "It's the most extraordinary sound." "No-one really knows how this all works, but it makes you realise there's a whole other world down there, a world of underground sound." "But to really know what's going on down there you need one of these - a geophone, an underground microphone." "It picks up vibrations from the ground and turns them into an electrical signal, which is translated into a sound we can hear." "Suddenly, when you've got one of these... quite commonplace events take on a whole new meaning." "The geophone is your passport to the sound of the ground." "And just imagine what the world would sound like if you could hear like this." "Even grassy tussocks blowing gently in the breeze would sound like an underground train." "And it's something to do with this sound in particular that desert expert," "Paul Brehem, wanted to show me." "Paul believes the animal that left these tracks is using the sound of grassy tussocks to find its way around in the desert night." "Very strange indeed - it burrows underground and then pops up above." "It walks across the sand and every so often little dips, and always ending up at a grassy tussock." "And to get a look at the animal behind these tracks is, according to Paul, quite simple." "Just fence off the tussock, dig in a bucket - and come back later." "Let's have a look and see what's in here." "It looks like we've caught something in our bucket, but what is it?" "There we go, look at that" "And there it is, quite happily nestling in our bucket, all smooth and shiny, a golden mole." "With beautiful streamlined fur, a strong shovel-like snout that has no problem squeezing through my fingers and no eyes to get clogged up in the sand the golden mole is perfectly designed for a life of burrowing." "Look, no eyes." "No eyes, skin has grown right over them." "Though they don't have any eyes, hidden beneath their smooth fur they do have ears and that's what really interests Paul." "Because these ears are designed to hear sounds not from the air, but directly through the ground, just like a geophone." "The theory is that as the mole moves around at night it dips its geophone head into the ground." "Every time it dips, it homes in on the sound of grassy tussocks..." "Dip, listen, dip, listen..." "Navigating from tussock to tussock across the desert night." "And why the tussocks, you may ask?" "Well, because that's where the mole's favourite food is - termites." "Very neat... but is it true?" "Well to find out we need a transducer a special speaker designed to play sound not into the air but into the ground." "By playing the sound of a grassy tussock through the transducer and seeing if the mole comes towards it we can try and prove the theory." "We have to film in infrared because even though the mole has no eyes scientists believe they can pick up visible light so we don't want to interfere with its navigation." "Once the mole's released it's back to the car on tiptoe so as not to disturb its sensitive hearing." "Then on with the tussock sound, watch the monitor and listen through geophones..." "A bit of movement there." "According to Paul, he'll probably pop up onto the surface because it uses up less energy when moving large distances." "Oh there he goes, good lad..." "There he goes, still nowhere near the speaker though." "Then he dips his head underground, well he seems to be listening." "Here he comes, he's getting right up close to the transducer and he buries right under." "And that's it - a first for Paul and for our technology" " it looks like grassy tussocks are friendly beacons, guiding golden moles across the desert night to their favourite prey...." "Lovely." "But to really understand the desert, you need to get up above it..." "Since the 1960's we've had a whole new perspective on our planet..." "From space you can really appreciate just how big some of these places are... you get the bigger picture of what life has to put up with in the desert." "Now with five thousand satellites spinning around above our heads, we can really spy down on the desert, find out everything from how the sands are moving to where the water and vegetation is..." "With the latest satellite collar technology, we can even track animals from space." "And there's one animal that really deals with the desert on a massive scale..." "Now for the first time ever, we can really see where elephants are going in the desert." "And the most impressive thing that we are seeing is the sheer scale of the distances they travel." "A spider may travel metres, a mole kilometres, but an elephant, several hundred kilometres." "And as they travel the wilderness they tell a story of survival, the endless trek for food and water." "But there's one thing that satellites can't explain" " how elephants seem to know exactly where to go and when." "Well, to find out more..." "our desert stakeout finale..." "From a hi tech surveillance tower, scientists are spying on a bunch of eles at a remote desert waterhole." "They're preparing to play the sound of an elephant alarm call into the ground through these elephantine transducers..." "You can't hear anything through the air" " you have to stand on them to check they're working." "They wait for night to make sure the elephants have settled in." "Spying on the eles with night vision equipment, we can carefully observe their every move..." "Here goes..." "Through the air, we hear nothing but through the ground..." "Something like this... a seismic rumble." "And this is what the scientists are waiting for." "The elephants immediately stop drinking and turn to face the tower." "Then they lift one leg in the air and lean forward onto the other." "Every time they play the call this is what the elephants do, time and time again." "And remember, they can't hear anything through the air." "So the conclusion?" "What we are looking at here is elephants hearing seismic sound just like the golden mole - not through their heads, but through their feet." "No one knows quite how they do it, but it could bring a huge advantage in the desert." "There's no limit to how far seismic sound can travel, so just think what else they might be hearing." "The distant rumblings of life-giving rain, or rivers in flood." "Some think that elephants might even be able to bounce sound down into the ground and detect hidden springs." "Not so far fetched as it might at first seem, and it could well just make the difference... the difference between life and death in this vast alien desert." "So from the ground beneath our feet to the skies up above, on Animal Camera we're really starting to get an all-new understanding of nature with a little help from the latest technology."