Nature

NARRATOR

For 60 years, one man devoted his life to understanding and documenting the natural world... On top of the menu right now... David Attenborough.

ATTENBOROUGH

I can see its tail, just under my boat here, and it's coming up, coming up, there!

NARRATOR

Through Attenborough's eyes and eloquence, this three-hour series reveals an unparalleled period of change on our planet, from shifts in public perception of the environment, to advances in scientific theory and camera technology.

ATTENBOROUGH

I've been lucky enough to live through what well might be considered the golden age of natural history filmmaking.

NARRATOR

We kick off our series with a look at the developments in filmmaking that led to remarkable revelations about our planet and the creatures that inhabit it.

ATTENBOROUGH

Cameramen could now stay underwater long enough to capture every moment of the action.

NARRATOR

Attenborough spent his life in the wild and witnessed a world of change. In a lifetime of natural history filmmaking, I've seen many odd animals, but few odder than these proboscis monkeys in Borneo. I first saw them some 50 years ago.

Young Attenborough

NARRATOR

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. 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. Whoa! 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.

Snarling

NARRATOR

I think that was pretty clear. 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 am 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. There are five 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. 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 flop in between. For all its obvious flaws, Kearton's films captured my childish imagination -- it 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 with 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, "Baloom." And I didn't know what "baloom" meant, so I had to go down into the hold and find my Indonesian dictionary and I looked up "baloom," and it said, "not yet." 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 is this Komodo?" And they -- "Yeah, this is Komodo." "Okay." The locals recommended that we should use a dead goat as a bait. Once in the bush, we began to build a trap, using materials gathered from nearby. 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 this 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. And down came the door! Hastily we piled boulders on the door so that he couldn't lift it up. We had got him. 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 limestones here in Morocco... Macaques live in many parts of Japan.

Squealing, growling

NARRATOR

"Life on Earth" was shown in 100 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. And 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 ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-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, now I with some pleasure screwed it down quite tight, and he waded into the pool. And he came out even quicker with me, the wa-wa-water all over him, there 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 -- and intelligence of dolphins. 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.

Dolphins calling

NARRATOR

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 a new roll of film in. But then, video cameras solved that problem. Video tapes 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.

Bats calling

NARRATOR

And the droppings of all those creatures make the cave reek of ammonia. Ah.

Sniffs, chuckles

NARRATOR

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.

Groans

Panting

NARRATOR

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 --

Gags

NARRATOR

Make --

Gags

NARRATOR

The ammonia is really quite, quite choking -- makes 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. 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.

Recorded roaring being played

Roaring playback continues

NARRATOR

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.

Recorded roaring being played

Lion roaring

NARRATOR

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.

Lions roaring

NARRATOR

Those are not aggressive roars, they are communication roars, but they are quite enough to chill the blood in the blackness of the night.

Lions continue roaring

NARRATOR

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.

Elephant trumpets

NARRATOR

A solitary lion stands no chance, but the whole pride is here. There are 30 of them, and they're specialist elephant hunters. 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.

Lions roaring

Thunder crashes in distance

NARRATOR

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 kiwi's came out of the bush and walked along the beach looking for sand hoppers. Now, they find their way by smell, so I thought, how can I conceal myself? So, I lay on the tide line where all the rotting seaweed was lying around, and 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. 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. 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, he can -- 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. The -- 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. Ahh -- 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 3 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. I first tried to film how they did so when I was here in Borneo back in the '50s. 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 are blind, and 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. There he 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 turn 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 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." 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 has 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, oh, 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.

Helicopter whirring

ATTENBOROUGH

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

There, there, there, there it goes, there it goes, they are racing, they are racing, they race. Three or four dogs, all spread out. They are pulling up fast. 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 cut off its escape. This new perspective gives us the big picture, helping us to understand behavior we could only see fragments of before.

MAN

Stay with him, he's almost got him. So, he's heading towards the water. Oh, the croc's gonna get that impala.

ATTENBOROUGH

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, 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 moa's skeleton. 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 gonna 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. 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. 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. Nevertheless, Doug took to his hide and waited.

Exhales

ATTENBOROUGH

This is tedious stuff. Not a sign. If you got just, just a little bit of 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. 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 there's a snow leopard up on the ridge. We were too low where we were before, so it's just trying to get some height to get a better view of it. 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 the 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 leopard's life -- including a hunt. Silently, she positions herself above her prey. 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. To order this three-part "Nature" series on DVD and Blu-ray, call 1-800-336-1917. To learn more about what you've seen on this "Nature" program, visit pbs.org.