Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild (2012) s01e01 Episode Script

1
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 travelled 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 flap in between.
For all its obvious flaws,
Kearton's films captured
my childish imagination
and made me dream of travelling to
far-off places to film wild animals.
And this is one of the very cameras
that Cherry Kearton used.
It's enclosed in a wooden box,
it was driven by hand
and it used 35-millimetre film,
this distance across.
Within a few years, it was superseded
by improved models like this one,
which had a metal box
and it worked by clockwork
and it had a variety of lenses.
But it still used
hefty 35-millimetre film.
Happily, however,
there were smaller versions available.
A camera like this.
This used 16-millimetre film,
which was only half the size,
and it was powered by clockwork.
But unfortunately the BBC thought
cameras like this were unprofessional.
And there was a huge row
as to whether or not
I could be allowed to take it.
But in the end I did,
and it was with this that I set off
to ramble around
the jungles of the world
looking for unfilmed 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".
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,
as I recorded in my journal.
This was the dragon trap,
with a little bait in there
and when the dragon,
if he went in the front end,
trod on there, that pulled it down,
which then pulled the ring down,
which released that rod,
which then pulled down,
because there was a lump of rock
on the bottom,
so clunk, down it would go.
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.
And down came the door.
Hastily, we piled boulders on the door
so that he couldn't lift it up.
We'd got him.
Those early films
seem pretty ordinary these days,
but they were nonetheless popular
because whatever we showed
was new to most of our viewers.
So, in the 1950s,
we were taking cameras like this
all over the world.
And then, an Austrian biologist
and filmmaker
decided to try and take it underwater.
His name was Hans Hass.
And he developed
his own special housing to do that.
Hans and his wife Lotte
were the first to bring the wonders
of life under the sea to television.
And their programmes
were all the more sensational
because few people at that time
had scuba-dived.
Take care, down there are sharks.
We are right on the reef's edge.
In the '50s,
sharks, of course,
had a terrible reputation.
I mean, they were
the killers of the sea.
Anybody in water alongside a shark
was clearly courting certain death.
And yet, here were Hans and Lotte
swimming alongside them.
The nation was astounded.
The sequence certainly had shock value,
but perhaps it was also the first step
in changing our perceptions of sharks.
And like all television,
it was still shown in black and white.
So, during the Zoo Quest series,
I had to describe an animal's colour
in words.
This one
was among the most brilliantly coloured
of all chameleons in the world.
His eyeballs are bright rust red
and his body and legs
striped and blotched with a vivid green.
But television was changing fast.
In the 1960s, the BBC
was given a second television network,
operating on a higher technical
standard, with the specific job
of introducing colour television.
And in 1965, I was put in charge of it,
with an office here
in the Television Centre in London.
To demonstrate that colour on television
could be both accurate and not garish,
I commissioned a series
about the history of art.
It was called Civilisation.
I am standing in the Sistine Chapel
and above my head
is one of the greatest works of man,
Michelangelo's ceiling.
It was presented by kenneth Clark
and became a great success.
So we followed it with other series
on a similar scale,
about science, economics
and the history of America.
But I knew well that
the most dazzlingly colourful series
would be one about wildlife.
After eight years in administration,
I decided that I wanted to
go back to making programmes.
And I put up a suggestion
that we should make
13 one-hour programmes,
in colour, tracing the whole history
of life on Earth.
Thanks to the development
of jet air travel,
we were able to film
in 30 countries around the globe,
and as I traced
the history of life on the planet,
I could appear to move
from one continent to another
in the space of a single sequence.
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.
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 colour, to all.
During the series, we made full use
of both colour and scuba gear
to help show the underwater world
as never before.
I even tried to follow Hans Haas's lead,
exploring the underwater world.
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
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
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 behaviour
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.
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 behaviour 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 behaviour,
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 behaviour
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. 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.
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
makes
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 behaviour
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.
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.
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.
Those are not aggressive roars,
they are communication roars.
But they are quite enough
to chill the blood
in the blackness of the night.
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.
A solitary lion stands no chance
but the whole pride is here.
There are 30 of them,
and they are specialist
elephant hunters.
This remarkable behaviour
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 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.
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.
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 colours.
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 colour.
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.
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.
One of the things we discovered when
we were starting work on Trials of Life
was that there was a new lens
which enabled you to have
an object close to the camera,
a small little creature, perhaps,
and yet have all the distance
right to the far horizon
completely in focus,
so that I would be able to walk up
from the distance
to something that was
quite close to camera,
all the time being in focus.
It's not always easy to decide
in these partnerships
which is exploiting which.
The balance of advantage
is often very delicate.
Take, for example,
these ants in Australia.
They are extremely ferocious
and normally they'll rip apart
any caterpillar,
but see how they're treating this one.
When we first saw that shot
in the viewing theatre,
we all went down to the canteen
and have a cup of tea and talk about it,
and I heard someone next to me
who had just joined the team
talking to her friend, and she said,
"Fantastic stuff they've got
in Australia. Amazing!"
"But I would never want
to go there myself
because you know there are
caterpillars there
that are two feet long!"
So sometimes with all our optical tricks
we can get too clever.
Nevertheless, insects filmed in close-up
are truly fascinating.
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 motorised jib-arm enables filmmakers
to suspend a camera
above a column of aggressive driver ants
and watch the organised 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 centimetres 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 it is.
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 rattlesnake's
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.
Commercial airliners do the same thing
when they adjust their wing flaps
to slow them down for landing.
If a kestrel is to see
its prey successfully while hovering,
it has to keep its head perfectly still.
Not easy when the wind is constantly
trying to blow you off position.
But in slow motion, you can see how
the kestrel responds immediately
to changes in the wind,
constantly adjusting
the set of its wings
and allowing its neck
to stretch and contract.
So that while its body
is constantly moving,
its eyes stay fixed
and can spot the slightest movement
on the ground below.
One of my favourite slow-motion moments
was when I was able to fool
a lovesick hover fly 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 centimetres, 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
seven centimetres 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 fertiliser.
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 fertiliser
by collecting the
tree shrew's droppings.
Wildlife cameramen are
always trying to film
some piece of animal behaviour
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 stabilising 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.
There, there, there,
there it goes, there it goes.
They're racing, they're racing,
they're racing.
Three, four dogs, all spread out.
They are pulling up fast.
Tighten up, tighten up
as much as you can.
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 behaviour
we could only see fragments of before.
Stay with him,
he's almost got him.
So he's heading towards the water.
Oh, the crock’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, materialise
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 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 metres 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.
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-colour,
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,
any time, 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.
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.
And things didn't improve,
even after two weeks.
Yeah, of course it's boring.
It's boring as hell.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, Mark was rewarded
with his first-ever glimpse.
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.
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.
There have been a lot of changes
in the way that we have
filmed the natural world
during the last 50, 60 years.
But there has also been a great change
in the way we understand that world
and that's what I'll be looking at
in the next programme.