Africa (2013) s01e03 Episode Script
Congo
1 ATTENBOROUGH'.
North Africa.
High in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, Barbary macaques shiver in the icy cedars.
(CHATTERS) The ancestors of these monkeys fled here from a disaster that overwhelmed their homeland.
Now, trapped in this isolated corner of Africa, there's no going back to the land farther south.
Even in this snowy refuge, there's a reminder of what drove them here.
The unbridled power of the African sun.
Under its intense gaze, the snow can't last for long.
Meltwater should bring life to the lowlands.
Hundreds of torrents cascade southwards.
But each is flowing towards extinction.
just 200 miles south of the mountains, the rivers are vaporised.
Life has been burnt off the land.
This was the apocalypse from which the Barbary macaques fled, the sudden and unstoppable advance of the greatest desert on the planet.
The Sahara transformed North Africa.
Today, it covers an area the size of the United States, one-third of the entire African continent.
This is one of the hottest places on Earth.
The merciless sun, a colossal 1 S-million-degree nuclear reactor, blasted life from the surface of the land.
It still wreaks havoc.
A faint breath of wind can be the beginning of disaster.
(RUMBLING) Nomads tell of entire villages being engulfed, camel trains disappearing, and people buried alive inside their tents.
(RUMBLING) A sandstorm can be a thousand miles across.
It seems miraculous that anything can survive such devastation.
The Saharan apocalypse wiped out many creatures, but today, some still cling on in the lands around the margins of the great desert.
It's very dry here.
Some years, the rains fail entirely.
A lone Grevy's zebra.
He weighs close to half a tonne, and can go for three days without drinking.
Like the macaques, his forebears were refugees from the advancing Sahara.
(RUMBLING) The land is scrubby and dry.
(GRUNTING) (NEIGHING) But this stallion has claimed it as his own.
He's been waiting months for visitors.
Female visitors.
If they like his territory, they might stay a while.
It's his first chance to mate for a very long time.
(GRUNTING) Hardly a success.
Perhaps his visitors are looking for a more impressive partner.
There's another setback.
The females were being followed.
A posse of young males - every one a rival.
It's time to separate the men from the boys.
(WHINNYING) One by one, the stallion sees them off.
The females had ringside seats.
And his prowess has not gone un-noted.
Machismo gives way to tenderness.
Around here, you have to take every opportunity, be it for food, for water, or for mates.
Female Grevy's are a fickle bunch.
The herd have decided to move on.
All of them.
The stallion may never see them again.
But there's a chance that one is now carrying his foal.
In this harsh land, that must count as a triumph.
The sun's power cannot, however, reach far underground.
Below, in stark contrast, conditions are stable and tolerable.
And home to one of the planet's strangest mammals.
Meet the naked mole rats.
These sabre-toothed sausages wouldn't last a day in the desert.
Special filming tunnels allow us to see how well adapted they are to the subterranean life.
They can run equally well in both directions, so tight space is no problem.
They have lost their fur.
And most bizarrely, they live in social colonies, much like termites or ants.
After time spent digging, the workers come together to relax.
But one here is very different from all the rest.
Their queen, twice as heavy as her subjects, and not afraid to throw her weight around.
She is the mother of every worker in the colony, and exists in a near-continuous state of pregnancy.
Even now, two dozen babies are pulsating within her swollen belly.
just occasionally, one of her brood is raised differently, a daughter becomes a princess.
Until now, this youngster's enjoyed a lazy, privileged life.
But not for much longer.
She has a destiny to fulfil.
The surface is a place where no naked mole rat can survive for long.
But a princess will risk everything to search for a partner.
The quest is urgent.
There's an enticing smell in the air.
A seductive scent draws her downwards, to safety.
She's sniffed out a partner.
He too is alone, and eager to start a new colony in his lonely burrow.
Two months later, the princess has become a queen.
And a new tyranny begins.
Tough though they are, such refugees living on the edges of North Africa cannot survive in the heart of the Sahara.
And yet here, in southern Nigeria, there are creatures preparing to journey right across the centre of that great desert.
Barn swallows.
(CHIRPING) They've spent the winter roosting in a forest of elephant grass.
But now, it is time for them to leave.
All two million of them.
They're tiny, each weighing the same as a couple of one-pound coins, yet the journey to their breeding grounds in Europe is over 5,000 miles long.
Ahead of them lies a vast death trap.
The Sahara is too large to go around.
The swallows have no choice but to meet it head-on.
It will take one of nature's greatest feats of navigation to cross this lifeless wasteland.
A wilderness that stretches not just to the horizon, but almost beyond imagination.
It's an immense blank space on the map.
In spite of the Sahara's reputation, less than one-fifth of it is sand.
The rest is stone and wind-scoured rock.
The sun not only bakes the land, it warps its appearance.
The super-heated air, rising upward from the desert surface, distorts the distant scene.
A reflection of the sky shimmers on the sands, a mirage.
The sun is an illusionist.
To thirsty travellers, a mirage can resemble a lake which agonisingly recedes as it's approached.
And swaying camels coming to the rescue transform into dry, spiny acacia trees.
To cross this confused, shimmering landscape, many swallows will need to find real water amongst the mirages.
Even in the Sahara, rain does sometimes fall and that is sufficient for plants to survive, providing they have the right adaptations.
Rising from the sand, a dried-out ball of twigs.
In strong winds, it can travel.
This plant may have been dead for 100 years.
Yet its name suggests that all is not lost, for this is a resurrection plant.
Around here, rain might only fall once or twice a year.
But if you're searching for decades, that might be enough.
Dead limbs absorb water and unfurl in a matter of minutes.
But the resurrection plant needs one more miracle.
(THUNDER RUMBLES) Rain must fall on its branches before they dry out and close up again.
Within hours, shoots emerge.
In just a few weeks, they flower and develop seeds of their own.
Then, before they can grow any larger, the sun kills them.
But their seeds live on, ready for when the rains return, even if that is a century from now.
North Africa wasn't always so brutal.
Scattered across the Sahara are glimpses of life before the apocalypse swept over the land.
In the north, a petrified forest, trees turned to stone.
Remains from a far distant, wetter past.
White sediments in the heart of the Sahara are the dried-out remains of what was once the world's largest lake.
In the east, ruined cities hark back to a time of plenty.
And here, deep inside Libya, is Messak Settafet.
Carved here are hundreds of images of animals, all drawn from life.
Ghosts from a greener time.
Remarkably, a remnant of this old North Africa survives.
Bou-Hedma in Tunisia is sustained by mountain rains.
It's a relic of the savannah that once carpeted North Africa.
The vast grassland vanished when a shift in the Earth's orbit drove the rains south, and in perhaps only a matter of centuries, the Sahara Desert overwhelmed North Africa.
The evidence suggests this took place around 6, 000 years ago.
In evolutionary terms, that's no time at all.
And life has had little chance to adapt to this new world.
Only a few tough specialists can cope with life amongst the dunes.
Camels are sometimes called ships of the desert.
But, like the swallows, they're really only visitors here.
These ships can certainly cross the Sahara, but even they can't make their home in the harshest places.
Left to wander the desert by themselves, camels would not survive.
They depend on their human navigators to find oases and wells.
Saharan folklore is full of tales of caravans that missed a well by a few hundred metres and disappeared.
This is the White Desert, in Egypt.
The landscape is littered with giant chalk pillars, carved by innumerable sandstorms.
This glaring white oven is lethally hot.
Food here is almost non-existent.
But there's a rare gift from a passing camel.
The smell has lured dung beetles from miles around.
For them, this is manna from heaven.
One dung ball could provide enough food to last this female beetle the rest of her life.
But she has a problem.
To keep it fresh, she must bury it in moist ground.
And that's not easy to find.
The temperature has already risen 10 degrees.
This lizard avoids the roasting sand.
Only 30 centimetres above the surface, it's significantly cooler.
The reverse-pushing technique is certainly the fastest way to keep the ball rolling.
But it does have one drawback.
You can't see where you're going.
Disaster! Stuck between two dunes.
The dung ball is twice her weight, but the urge to keep pushing is inextinguishable.
Now, it's 41 degrees Celsius.
Soon, she'll be baked alive.
Her survival instinct, in the end, overrides her love for dung.
(WINGS FLAPPING) Much of the Sahara is uninhabitable, but there are rare places where there is some possibility of survival.
Places where, by strange chance, there is water.
Waw an-Namus is an extinct volcano.
From space, it's a remote, black scar on the Libyan Sahara.
Yet there are other colours here, colours rarely seen on the desert floor.
Blue and green.
Rain fell thousands of years ago when the Sahara was green and percolated deep into the ground.
And here water from this vast, ancient reservoir rises to the surface.
These pools offer another glimpse of the Sahara's past.
Wherever there's water in North Africa, living relics from this wetter time have a chance to cling on.
This oasis is fed by a hot volcanic spring.
Slightly away from the stream of near-boiling water, it's cooler and fish can live.
These are Tilapia.
Hatchlings stick close to their mother.
There are other dangers here beside the scalding water.
Particularly at night.
The crocodiles are stealthy.
And the Tilapia are almost blind in the darkness.
In panic, they all leap to escape the hunter's approach.
But this female can't abandon her brood.
The crocodiles won't be thwarted.
They, too, can leap.
With first light, the crocodiles lose the element of surprise, and the battle is over for now.
The mother fish has survived, but where are her young? All present and correct.
They spent the whole night sheltering in her mouth.
The contest will be repeated at sunset.
There is nowhere else to go.
Oases are always sought by desert travellers but not all are as they seem.
This is the great Ubari Sand Sea, in the heart of the Sahara.
These swallows have travelled 1,500 miles since they left Nigeria.
Their superb powers of navigation will eventually guide them to Europe, but now they, and other thirsty migrants, need to find a speck of blue amidst this ocean of sand.
(CHIRPING) And here it is, Umm al-Maa.
Here, too, ancient groundwater wells up to the surface.
(CHIRPING) But the birds need to be careful, for the sun has played a terrible trick.
This oasis is poisonous.
Intense evaporation over thousands of years has left the water saltier than the sea.
As if to underline the horror, the place is infested by vast swarms of flies.
(BUZZING) But this plague is the birds' salvation.
The flies are filled with freshwater, filtered from the brine.
So, like a desert wanderer squeezing a drink from a cactus, the birds get all the water they need from the flies' bodies.
More and more migrants join in.
Wagtails.
(SQUAWKING) This is the birds' only stopover.
It gives them enough fuel to escape from the Sahara and Africa.
Away from an oasis, it seems remarkable that anything can live at all.
The temperature of the sands can exceed 70 degrees Celsius.
There's not the slightest trace of water left at the surface.
And when that happens, the Sahara itself cries out.
(CRACKING AND HUMMING) Billions of sliding grains generate a hum that echoes across miles of empty desert.
These are the Sahara's legendary singing dunes.
(HUMMING) Over time, these avalanches add up.
If you watch the dunes for long enough, something remarkable is revealed.
One and a half years flash past in a matter of seconds.
On this timescale, the dunes are like a stormy sea.
An unstoppable tsunami of sand.
In this immense, ever-shifting landscape, it's easy to see how a lost traveller could succumb to what's been called the Sahara's only endemic disease - madness.
Can anything survive the North African desert when the sun is at its fiercest? It's approaching midday.
A fringe-toed lizard is hungry.
He's on a stakeout.
Flashy scales reflect some of the sun's rays.
Nevertheless, the heat is almost unbearable.
His prey hasn't left home all day.
The lizard is the last animal still out on the dunes.
But even he can't take it any more.
To survive longer, you'd need a spacesuit.
And in a way, that's what these insects have.
Silver ants' armoured skin reflects light.
They can tolerate temperatures that would kill any other land animal.
Even so, they can only survive for less than 10 minutes in the midday sun.
Time is precious.
The ants race to find food as soon as their predators go to ground.
They can't afford to waste a second getting lost, so they spin to take a bearing from the sun.
They log every change of direction, every footstep in order to know exactly where they are and where their nest lies.
Only four minutes to spare and they've found a victim of heat stroke.
A meal.
But it's going to take a monumental effort to get it home.
Three minutes to go and they're nearing their maximum temperature, an astounding 55 degrees Celsius.
But there are already casualties.
One minute left, and they're not going to make it.
Something has to change.
The silver ant is the hardiest of all desert inhabitants.
Even so, it can only survive outside in the middle of the day for a matter of minutes.
Now, the desert belongs to the sun alone.
The sun has scorched life from the Sahara.
And yet the vast desert it created is a source of life half a world away.
The advancing Sahara vaporised the world's largest lake, leaving behind the silvery remains of countless microscopic algae.
In winter, the wind carries away 700,000 tonnes of this mineral-rich dust every day.
It blows from here all the way to South America, where, astonishingly, it fertilises the Amazon Rainforest.
A striking demonstration of the reach of this mighty continent.
Throughout its long history, Africa has influenced the entire planet.
It was the cradle of a remarkable array of land animals that spread across the globe.
And, of course, it was the ancestral home of all of us.
ATTENBOROUGH: This is the tale of two of the Africa team 's most challenging desert expeditions.
(ENGINE REVVING) One focused on a minuscule creature with an incredible turn of speed.
The other on a subject so slow, to film it in action would take years.
(CLANGING) In both cases, the Sahara would push crews to the limit in pursuit of the perfect shot.
In Tunisia, the mission is to capture footage of moving sand dunes, something that's never been tried like this before.
WRIGHT: The problem is that because the dunes move so slowly, we're going to have to leave cameras here for about 20 months, and that just means there's a huge potential for things to go wrong.
ATTENBOROUGH".
And with filmmaking, if something can go wrong, it usually will.
Two local shepherds, Amur and Nasser, have volunteered to tend the equipment full-time.
The camera tower will be the tallest structure for as far as the eye can see.
And there are three other cameras at lower angles.
All this toil will yield surprisingly scant results.
WRIGHT: They've programmed the cameras to take one photo every day, that's only 365 photographs a year.
Which, when you run it at normal speed, just over 14 seconds.
I think it's taken longer to explain what's going to happen than the end result will actually be.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The cameras are left to the mercy of the sun, wind and sand.
In the meantime, crews are shooting all across North Africa.
In Egypt, the challenge is to get into the world of the most heat-tolerant desert animal - the silver ant.
They're really small, they're really fast.
Like, you're not too sure if you've seen an ant.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The crew have three weeks to gather the footage they need.
SLOSS: We're going to try a tracking shot on this ant nest.
Moving forward towards it, as the ants pour out of the hole in their millions.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Not only are these insects super-fast, they also keep antisocial hours.
BARTLAM: The thing is, we need to be out here in the middle of the day to film these ants.
They don't do what they do when it's nice and cool at 7:00, 8:00 in the morning.
WRIGHT: I can't remember ever being in a place where the wind was so relentless and the temperatures were so high.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The insufferable heat is not the only problem.
Dangers are everywhere.
(BARTLAM SCREAMING) There's a really fat scorpion, it's really big! One, two, three (MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) This might kill.
- BARTLAM: Yeah? - Yeah.
It's big and they have a lot of poison in his dart thing.
- SLOSS: What, that thing there? -(BOTH SCREAMING) BARTLAM: Oh, my god! HAWASH: Don't touch it! ATFEN BOROUGH: The scorpion will be released far, far away from the camp, in a shady spot.
No such luck for the team.
They're back to work in the midday sun.
This is This is too much.
This is crazy! This is crazy! ATTENBOROUGH: Indeed.
The heat seems to have given Kat and Warwick a touch of Saharan madness.
SLOSS: The plan is to do an experiment, to find out how fast these little ants can run.
BARTLAM: So we're going to lay this along the floor, and hopefully an ant will run alongside it, and we can film it at high speed.
And from that, calculate their their speed, and perhaps try and relate it to how fast that would be for a human.
Like me.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Silver ants are expert navigators, using the angle of the sun to calculate their position.
But for our team, even basic mental tasks are becoming a challenge.
SLOSS: Count a second.
See one running and then count a second, see how far it gets.
It's quite difficult to count a second, isn't it? No, it's "one".
"One".
yeah! BARTLAM: There he goes.
He's gone 10 centimetres in four seconds, but we're running at 500 frames a second, which is 20 times normal time.
So, in fact, he's covered those 10 centimetres in We know that he does half a metre in one second.
Half a metre per second, yep.
-50 centimetres in one second, roughly.
- Yeah, yeah.
So, how many body lengths is that? He's maybe doing five body lengths a second if he's two metres tall, like I am.
BARTLAM: Are you? Yeah.
That's how much more than a normal man I am.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Eventually, the duo decide that if the silver ants were our size, they'd be doing 280 miles an hour.
They're one of the fastest sprinters in the animal kingdom.
No wonder we've been struggling to film them.
It does explain a few things.
Ant-letics! Knowing the exact speed of the ants is all well and good, but there's still a great deal of work to be done before the shoot finishes.
However, in Tunisia, there's no shortage of time, and hopefully no news is good news as far as Amur and Nasser are concerned.
The final week in Egypt, and the crew seem to be adapting to life in the oven.
Practice is making perfect, and the sequence is coming together.
SLOSS: I think we've got some lovely shots.
Every single shot's been really hard-earned.
ATFEN BOROUGH: But getting down in the ants' world is now taking its toll on the kit.
It's running to stand still, the business of blowing dust off these things.
(SPRAYING) BARTLAM: Oh, no! It's got dust in it! (CRUNCHING) Ooh, crunch.
SLOSS: I think these ants are stunning-looking.
Near-impossible to film, I think, because of the speed they had.
But, you know, I've come to love them over the days and weeks.
ATFEN BOROUGH: With the sequence in the bag, Warwick wants the final traditional sunset shot.
It's the best time of day to film sunsets, in the evening.
That's experience that tells me that, I've been doing this for years.
You learn these things.
Thanks to Warwick's experience, including sunsets, he and Kat have captured the extraordinary life of the speedy silver ant.
Over a year later, in Tunisia, it's time to take down the sand dune cameras.
Bonjour! - Nasser.
- Amur.
Hi.
Hello again.
WRIGHT: So how's it been, has it been good? It's okay, but two days ago, we have a little bit, small problem.
After surviving 600 days in the desert, the small problem is that the cameras have been vandalised.
I'm really hot and bothered now, it's 40 degrees, and someone's smashed the cameras.
Not been a good start to the day, to be honest.
ATFEN BOROUGH: There's no doubt the dunes have moved.
But the question is whether the equipment has survived.
That is amazing.
The camera's still here.
I guess maybe it just took them so long to get through the toughened plastic, that they felt they had made so much noise they were worried about the guards coming, because they only sleep a couple of hundred metres away.
After almost two years of waiting, it's the moment of truth.
I'm going to find out, find out whether or not the cameras have actually recorded anything.
It's just hugely stressful because it's never been done before.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The footage is a surreal window into a secret world, the private life of a sand dune.
(IN DISTINCT TALKING) The Africa team struggled under the burning sun and driving winds that are hallmarks of the Sahara.
They went home with an enormous admiration for the creatures that spend their entire lives battling to survive in this brutal desert world.
ATTENBOROUGH: Afr/ca.
In the four years of making this series, we've been to some astonishing places and seen animals behaving in ways that have never been filmed before.
(ELEPHANT TRUMPETING) But Africa has another story to tell.
The wildlife of this continent has seen more changes in the last 50 years than it has in the last two million.
Changing landscapes and changing climate.
Today's animals are facing unprecedented challenges whilst, around them, Africa's human population is growing at nearly double the global rate.
(HIPPOS BRAYING) There is an increasing urgency to understand and, crucially, to conserve the wildlife of this great continent.
(MEN WHISTLING) Today, there is a new generation of naturalists and scientists who're fighting to save the wild places and the animals that live in them.
- One, two, three! -(INDISTINCT CHATTERING) ATTENBOROUGH".
This is the greatest wildlife continent on the planet.
And what happens here is relevant to us all.
So, what is the future of wild Africa? This animal has become the world's number one target for poachers.
Its kind has been hunted almost to the point of extinction.
It's now so rare that this individual is watched over day and night.
This is the black rhinoceros.
And black rhinoceros are notorious for being rather grumpy and suddenly charging.
But he is in great danger because he has, on his nose that horn which is worth its weight in gold.
(RHINO SNORTING) The demand for rhino horn has rocketed.
There has been a 3,000% increase in poaching just in the last five years.
(RHINO SNORTING) Today, powdered rhino horn can fetch up to $65, 000 a kilo.
Rhinos are a lucrative target for organised crime.
In Chinese medicine, it's believed that rhino horn can reduce fever.
And some Vietnamese sell it as a cure for everything, from cancer to hangovers.
It's made of keratin, the same substance as hair and nail and it has no clinically proven medicinal value.
(RHINO SNORTING) But it has made every black rhino in Africa a target.
They've all been killed in Uganda and Rwanda, and there are only around 600 left here, in Kenya.
But these are not poachers.
- These are protectors.
-(COCKING GUN) (SHOT FIRED) (RHINOS GRUNTING) And that protection is overseen by rhino expert Dr Matthew Mutinda, one of the Kenya Wildlife Services' top vets.
D R MUTI N DA: Black rhinos are critically endangered.
And that is what we at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, we're trying to do.
Save the animal, provide a safe and secure sanctuary, where the animal can breed and live freely.
ATTENBOROUGH".
There aren't many true wild rhinos left in Africa.
Most, like these, in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy are under armed guard.
This young female has reached the age when Matthew must do some health checks, including taking blood samples.
This will help deter poachers and traffickers, as DNA in illegally traded rhino horn can be tracked back to its origin.
If you have to do anaesthesia in the wild, you will expect some degree of risk.
ATTENBOROUGH".
This female has reacted badly to the anaesthetic.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) She's not breathing.
It's a rare and extremely serious situation.
He knows that the next few minutes are crucial.
(IN DISTINCT CHATTER) And when an animal is this big, there's only one way to get the heart going again when you're out in the bush.
Thanks to Matthew's quick thinking, they can hear that she's breathing again.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) They've got to get her back on her feet.
(ANXIOUS CHATTER) Not surprisingly, she's disorientated.
(THUDDING) (RHINO SNORTING) Mission accomplished.
It's been an ordeal, but now this rhino can be tracked and protected for the rest of her life.
Within minutes, she's grazing peacefully again, with her mother.
It may seem heartless to treat an animal like that, but we have to keep tabs on them and be able to identify individuals.
They're in great danger.
Even now, on average, one rhino is killed by poachers every day in Africa.
There are so few black rhino left in Kenya that we're getting to know each individual.
But this is still a creature that can surprise us.
Previously, it was widely believed that black rhinos were largely solitary creatures.
Here in the Kalahari, a starlight camera reveals that they may be much more sociable than many thought.
(RHINOS GRUNTING) This waterhole gathering is an enchanting window into the past.
Early explorers reported seeing a rhino behind every bush.
Before the invention of the gun there were probably hundreds of thousands of rhinos across the continent.
The people protecting rhinos in Africa are striving to ensure that we'll still be able to witness wonderful scenes like this in 50 years' time.
Right across Africa, conservationists have realised that if we want to save our big animals, then now is the time.
The human population of the continent has just exceeded one billion, and many wild animals are being hunted commercially for food.
Some legally.
But many illegally.
(WILDEBEEST LOWING) Wildlife meat is often sold as goat or beef.
The amount is astonishing.
Millions of tonnes are eaten across Africa every year.
At this rate, some species are almost certainly heading for extinction.
But commercial hunting is not just affecting the grazers.
As the prey decreases, it's affecting the predators, too.
Fifty years ago, there were about half a million lions in Africa.
Today, there are less than 30,000.
But in one particular part of Africa, things are improving in a quite extraordinary way.
These hunters have become part of a new and unlikely alliance.
In recent years, hungry lions have increasingly been killing livestock.
(MOOING) One group of traditional Maasai have reacted in a very untraditional way.
The Maasai are cattle herders who don't eat wild animals.
But when lions attack their herds, they've always retaliated.
Maasai and lions are ancient adversaries.
A lion hunt is still a rite of passage for young Maasai warriors like Olubi Lairumbe.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR'.
For me and any Maasai, killing a lion is the ultimate fulfillment of a truly accomplished Maasai.
Nothing compares to that.
ATTENBOROUGH".
There is nobody who knows more about living alongside lions than the Maasai themselves.
I met Olubi and some of the other warriors in his village to find out about their relationship with the local pride.
How many lions are there around here? (SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR: Around here, there are about a hundred.
- Oh.
- Yea h, yea h.
So they all have names? TRANSLATOR'.
Every single lion has a name.
A Maasai name.
And when you see a lion, do you know how it's going to behave? TRANSLATOR'.
It depends on the lion.
TRANSLATOR'.
For a Maasai warrior, lions are nothing to be scared of.
If I saw a lion A lion would be likely to attack me.
TRANSLATOR'.
Only if you threaten it.
Hmm, well, I hope the next lion knows that.
(ALL LAUGHING) ATTENBOROUGH".
Olubi killed his first lion when he was just 17, after it attacked his cattle.
Unfortunately, the lion turned out to be pregnant.
And that led to a remarkable turnaround.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR'.
The Maasai respect all living things.
And I began to feel guilty about the lion that I had killed.
In the end, I came to admire the lions.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Olubi had a dramatic change of heart.
He turned his back on hundreds of years of Maasai tradition.
Along with some other warriors, Olubi became a lion guardian.
Instead of hunting lions, Olubi would be protecting them.
He teamed up with Stephanie Dolrenry, who helped pioneer the project.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) just by respecting their traditions and also bringing in their ecological knowledge, it's been hugely successful.
They know their areas, they know how to track lions, they've been doing it for generation after generation.
They know how to track them, they know how to hunt them, they know how to find them.
ATFEN BOROUGH: This is only a small-scale project.
But with lion numbers as low as they are, they need all the help they can get.
Olubi is tracking radio-collared lions.
He's able to warn villagers to move their cattle when the pride is in the area.
And so they're avoiding conflict.
No lions have been killed in the immediate area since the project began.
By combining the science, both ancient and contemporary, they're beginning to make a real difference.
ST E P H A N I E: There's so much to be learned.
I feel I bring in modern technology, modern knowledge, and, in return, they teach us about the environment, and how things have changed in their environment.
And it's a really neat exchange You can't say the biologists are the teachers or the guardians are the teachers.
We're both teachers and we're both students.
And I think that's That blend is amazing.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Critically, at the heart of this project is a huge attitude change by these Maasai warriors.
An animal that was once their sworn enemy, they now protect.
And their willingness to share knowledge with other communities means that projects like this could be repeated in other parts of Africa.
Traditionally, when a warrior killed a lion, he took the name of the lion.
Now, it's the other way round.
Now the lion takes the name of the warrior who protects it.
The scheme is a huge success.
There are about 100 lions involved in this scheme in this neighbourhood.
This is 21 st century conservation in action.
Perhaps the biggest threat to wildlife is the competition for space with the rapidly growing human population.
The Virunga volcanoes straddle the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The rich volcanic soils are extremely fertile.
It's one of the most intensively cultivated areas in Africa.
But the farmers also share this region with one of our closest relatives.
This is home to the last 800 or so wild mountain gorillas left on Earth.
We know a great deal about these animals.
They've been closely studied for 50 years.
One strong silverback male keeps everyone in order.
And gorilla family life is mostly peaceful.
(MURMURING) Until a few generations ago, mountain gorillas, hidden in the seclusion of their forests, were seldom seen by human beings.
But their habitat was steadily being carved away.
And now these gorillas are marooned on the volcanic slopes in a sea of farmland.
The fact that gorillas now regularly come into contact with people not only means an increased threat of poaching, but also of disease.
Gorillas have little or no resistance to the bugs that we carry.
(GRUNTS) Numbers here once dropped to around 250.
They were facing extinction.
Action had to be taken.
The boundaries of the national park were strictly enforced, halting the encroachment of farmland.
And it was decided that the only solution was to intensively manage the remaining gorillas.
Teams of scientists constantly monitor them.
Their forests are patrolled to cut poachers' snares.
(GRUNTS) And vets watch their health closely.
This is funded mostly through ecotourism and donations from all over the world.
Mountain gorillas are now back from the brink.
This level of human intervention might not be ideal, but it's working.
Every year there are a few more mountain gorillas and possibly just a little more optimism.
Intensive management within a protected area may represent the only future for many African species.
But for some animals that is simply not possible.
(ELEPHANT TRUMPETING) What happens if the animal you're trying to protect is not suited to park life? Elephants require vast amounts of space to roam.
They have a range of up to 1,300 square miles.
Given the chance, they will even move between countries in search of the best food, particularly if conditions get rough.
This was the scene in Amboseli National Park in 2009.
The park is home to nearly one and a half thousand elephants.
And this was the worst drought for half a century.
60% of zebras and 95% of wildebeest were wiped out.
The seasonal rains had failed for the last two years.
And the elephants that lived here were slowly starving.
The park created to protect them is now surrounded by farmland.
The elephants had little choice of where else to go.
Caught up in this catastrophe were three sisters.
They are the frontline for elephant protection in the park.
And they know these animals better than anyone else.
Nora Njiraini, and Katito and Soila Sayialel.
SOILA: All the elephants have been given names.
They're a family to us.
Hello, Anastasia.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The sisters have been following these elephants for over 25 years.
Trying to ensure their safety, particularly at times when life is tough for these animals.
SOILA: It really was terrible.
There was nothing, actually, to feed on.
We even went and asked the old Maasai men whether they have ever experienced such a drought.
The only time it was close to what was then, was in 1961.
SOILA: In 2009, we lost quite a number of elephants.
I think we lost about 400 elephants.
SOILA: Ana' it started with the young ones.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Elephants usually escape drought by moving into other less affected areas.
But Africa's human population is growing at double the global rate.
And traditional migration routes have been cut by the developments of towns, cities, farmland and roads.
Leaving these elephants stuck.
This young calf is starving, and there is nothing they can do to help.
For the sisters, who know each elephant personally, this is a terrible moment.
SOILA: It is something that we feel in our hearts.
You can imagine the kind of feelings that we get.
You know, knowing those elephants and seeing something like that happen.
It really touches us.
ATTENBOROUGH".
It was a tough year for all the young elephants in the region.
We lost all the calves who were born that year.
All of them.
We lost them.
(GRUNTING) ATTENBOROUGH".
There was nothing the sisters could do to save the baby.
But they were determined to save any elephants they could, especially mothers who could breed again.
(OVERLAPPING CHATTER) They found this female stuck in the mud, exhausted, in a dried-up lakebed.
(BREATHING HEAVILY) (MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) The elephant that got stuck in the mud was Qualida.
Poor thing, you know, she was there for quite a long time.
SOXLA".
The Maasai reported it to us, and we had to compile efforts with the Kenya Wildlife Services people.
(ALL SHOUTING) ATFEN BOROUGH: Weighing about three tonnes, Qualida is just too heavy to shift by hand.
She's weakening fast.
So the next morning, heavy machinery is brought in.
(MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) (PEOPLE CHEERING) (MEN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) (WHISTLING) After two days stuck in the mud, Qualida is exhausted.
But she is up on her feet again.
(THUNDER RUMBLES) The rains did return to Amboseli, and, thanks in part to the work of those dedicated three women, elephant numbers are now beginning to rise again.
There's no doubt that this was an extremely severe event.
But is it an isolated incident or a developing pattern? SOILA: Especially with global warming, we actually don't know what's going to happen, but we just have to cross fingers and hope for a better future.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Given the opportunity, the numbers of elephants in East Africa will recover.
Especially if they are given the freedom to range widely, and so avoid the harshest conditions.
One solution to help elephants find the space they need is to link parks together and provide safe routes between them.
Elephants are great travellers, and here, in this part of Kenya, they regularly moved from the lowlands up the side of the mountains to feed in the forests up there.
But then, the human population of Kenya grew, and roads like this one were constructed.
Penning the elephants down in the lowlands where they created havoc amongst the farms.
Not only that, there were dangers of collisions on the road.
And then someone suggested building an underpass.
Within 24 hours of it being completed, one elephant had passed through, and now all the elephants use that route to go up the mountain, often at night, to feed.
Simple ideas like this underpass are a lifeline for these elephants.
Especially in times of drought.
Africa's climate is certainly changing.
Some parts of the continent have become three and a half degrees centigrade hotter in the past 20 years.
At the summit of Africa's most famous mountain, Kilimanjaro, 80 percent of its permanent ice fields have disappeared.
Soon, it will be free of ice altogether.
All over Africa the mountainous regions are often the first indicators of climate change.
Here, in the Ethiopian Highlands, live very unusual-looking creatures.
Gelada Baboons.
Climate change refugees.
Although this region of Ethiopia lies in the tropics, up at 4, 888 metres, it doesn't feel like it.
Unlike most African animals, geladas are adapted to life in the cold.
They used to be one of Africa's most successful primates, found all over the continent.
At one stage, there were six different species.
Now there is only one.
With the warming climate, their grazing is becoming more and more scarce, restricted to cooler and higher places.
These geladas are being forced higher into the mountains.
Soon there will be nowhere left to go.
This is a species living on the edge.
Even though they're isolated on the mountain tops, they're not immune to our influence.
As a result of changing climate, these Gelada baboons may soon be gone from our planet.
Africa is the world's hottest continent.
And, there is no doubt, it's getting warmer.
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world.
Very little can survive in these harsh conditions.
Along the desert edge, life clings on in the face of encroaching sands.
But for how long? Alongside the wildlife, 22 million people struggle to make a living on these desert margins.
Can anything be done to stop the sand overwhelming this fragile land? One idea is to build a green wall of trees across 11 countries.
The project has already started, in Senegal, but, like all big ideas, it has big problems.
Getting 11 countries to work together is not easy, and simply irrigating a 5, 000-mile-long belt of trees is an ambitious task.
But, all over Africa, people are recognising how important it is to have trees as part of their local landscape.
This group of volunteers has planted nearly 100 million saplings.
And they're just one of countless similar groups and individuals, taking it upon themselves to reforest their own part of this great continent.
Trees are essential for the future of the continent, and indeed to the rest of the planet.
This is the Congo basin.
It's one of the most biologically important forests on Earth, and it's not just because of the concentration of plants and animals that live here.
It's because it's also one of the powerhouses behind the planet's wind and rain.
Each hectare of trees releases as vapour almost 190,000 liters of water a year.
This water passes into the atmosphere, to be transported around the entire globe.
That means the heart of the world's weather lies in tropical forests.
Unfortunately, there's an almost insatiable demand in Europe and China, for hardwood from these very forests.
And that is having an enormous impact.
As more tropical forest is felled, some scientists are seeing a correlation with changing storm patterns across Europe and America.
And it's likely to become more extreme.
Staggeringly, 50 percent of the Congo basin forest has been allocated for logging.
The future of Africa's forests has never been more critical for us all.
But the consequences of global warming aren't limited to the land.
Africa is almost completely surrounded by oceans.
Here on the east coast, there are animals feeling the change in climate in a most surprising way.
This is a young female green turtle.
During her lifetime, she will travel thousands of miles, through the ocean, looking for food.
Turtles return to the same beach from which they hatched to lay their own eggs.
The eggs are buried in the sand, and the hatchlings will emerge after about two months.
Now, there's a strange thing.
about turtle eggs, and that is the temperature at which the eggs are kept will determine the sex of most of the hatchlings.
If the sand temperature is high, they will be female.
If it's low, they will be male.
So global warming could have a crucial effect on turtle populations.
And this young female may find it very difficult, in years to come, to find a male with which to mate.
But a local conservation group recognised that the odds are stacking up against these little turtles.
There's not much they can do about climate change, but they have got together with the local fishermen to try and improve the turtles' chances of survival.
Every turtle counts.
So each time one is found injured or accidentally caught in the nets, it's brought to Kahindi Changawa and his team.
CHANGAWA: So we began with only 16 fishermen altogether, in 1998.
Now we have hundreds of fishermen working with us.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Grazing by turtles is essential for the health of the beds of seagrass.
And these are the home of shrimps and lobsters, and that, of course, helps fishermen, too.
The project has a turtle rehabilitation centre, and for the last two years, it's become home to Shelia.
CHANGAWA".
She had an accident with a boat, was hit from behind.
She lost three ribs and her spine was, as well, damaged.
It's now in the process of healing back together.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Sheila's injuries have affected her buoyancy.
She's healed well, and to encourage her to exercise her ï¬ippers properly, she has, every day, a little trip to the seaside.
CHANGAWA: So we usually take Sheila for a sea bath on daily basis, and the whole reason why we're doing that, we're trying to give her enough room to get exercises.
And she gets an opportunity to eat her natural food.
We believe that it keeps her fit, and the other thing is she gets to use her rear flippers quite often.
ATTENBOROUGH".
For Kahindi, it's one of the rewards for all his hard work.
CHANGAWA".
It's really, really enjoyable.
Very few people have the privilege, like I do, swimming with the turtles, and having that fun.
I do enjoy what I'm doing.
ATTENBOROUGH: Sheila certainly did get stronger, but the hope that someday she might swim out in the open was not to be fulfilled.
Unaccountably, she became weaker and eventually died.
This kind of work will inevitably have setbacks.
But there are always new turtles to be cared for.
ATTENBOROUGH: Is she healthy? Yeah, this one is healthy.
I mean, she has a few bruises, could be from the fishing gear.
Um, like these ones here.
ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, yeah, but otherwise healthy? CHANGAWA: Otherwise, the turtle is obviously really healthy.
ATTENBOROUGH: Shall we let her go? CHANGAWA".
Since 1998, till now, we've released over 8,200 turtles.
It fills me feel proud and privileged.
We've done lots of work with the community, on changing their attitudes and their behaviours and everything.
So I guess our job as an organisation is really successful.
A young turtle like that could lay 6 or 7,000 eggs in her lifetime.
So the survival of just one could have huge consequences.
Saving just one individual requires huge effort, and of course, saving a species requires even more.
But these heroic efforts are only ever going to be a partial solution.
Every individual animal is part of a much bigger story, part of an interconnected web of plants, animals, and the landscape itself, that make up an entire ecosystem.
Saving ecosystems is the key to Africa's wild future.
Gorongosa in Mozambique, is a modern-day Jurassic Park.
It's ruled by some of the world's biggest crocodiles.
Some of these monsters are six metres long and close to 50 years old.
Somehow, they managed to escape a civil war lasting nearly 20 years, which swept through Gorongosa.
95% of all the other large animals were wiped out.
But 50 years ago the scene was very different.
This was a thriving tourist attraction, a wild paradise.
Visitors flocked from around the world, drawn by the vast range and abundance of the wildlife.
The most popular spot for tourists was an old restaurant, a lookout post for the local lions.
The restaurant has long gone.
Along with the lions.
Gorongosa looked empty and beyond rescue.
But not to everyone.
A brave and ambitious project began to try and restore the park to its former richness and splendour.
The first stage is to find out which animals, as well as crocodiles, are still here.
So the team is mapping and counting all the big animals they see in the park.
(IN DISTINCT) But it soon became clear that these big animals were only part of the story.
Perhaps even more important might be the little ones hidden underfoot.
It's understanding these creatures that is attracting some of the best minds in the scientific world.
ED WILSON: You were gonna show me something? MAN: Yeah, something new.
Professor Ed Wilson is a world expert on biodiversity.
Ana' at a mere 83, he's still pursuing his passion - ants.
You see, there's a big nest of I think they're Myrmicarias.
WILSON: Wow! Let me just get one specimen.
If you look down at your feet, you may see them, walking by here and there, an ant, a little beetle What I like to call the little things that run the earth.
ATTENBOROUGH".
It's the rich diversity of insect life here that gives Gorongosa the prospect of a future.
These creatures form the basis of life in the park.
WILSON: This is so much fun.
These little invertebrate creatures, the creatures that do most of the work, turn most of the energy, save most of the material, and allow us to re-insert big animals with some confidence.
WILSON: Have you got it in the vial yet? MAN: Yeah, I got three of them.
WILSON: Oh, good.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Professor Wilson was one of the first scientists to explore this area, together with local wildlife biologist Tonga Torcheeda.
That's a good one.
If you could gather them all up, all these little invertebrate creatures, and weigh them, they would weigh far more than all of the big animals put together, even in a fully restored park.
ATFEN BOROUGH: It's these little creatures, together with the plants and trees, that still make this place a viable option for re-introducing bigger animals.
I can't be sure that's a new species but, you know, this is the kind of thing that might be.
This park came that close to vanishing.
And I'm happy to report it is coming back.
And this is one of the great stories.
It's inspirational, I think.
And it's a fine shining example of what to do with all our parks, even those that have been damaged by human activity.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But there's another reason why Gorongosa is important for the future of Africa, and perhaps for us all.
WILSON: So it is here, in this park, that people come to see not just the big animals that thrill us, but they will see Earth as it looked and felt before the coming of humanity.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Saving big animals is important, but to do that with any real success, we have to start understanding and preserving the plants and insects that support an ecosystem.
It's this that will allow the large animals to thrive.
Gorongosa is a real success story.
The government and the management team have pledged themselves to a plan to restore the land to what it was.
While it can never be exactly the same as it was before the war, it can still become a rich and thriving ecosystem.
The scale of the challenge across Africa is enormous.
After all, it's a huge continent.
The United Kingdom, China, the United States of America, India, japan and most of the rest of Europe would all fit within its borders.
Africa still retains 45 percent of the Earth's uncultivated land.
It's still the greatest wilderness on Earth.
And that is why it's important.
Human beings have lived alongside wildlife here longer than anywhere else.
But now, in the 21st century, animal numbers are at a critical level.
Like it or not, this generation is responsible for handing on the world's wildlife to the next.
Come on That means taking care of the animals and lands where they live, so there is still space for us all to coexist.
Nobody knows what the future has in store for this little calf.
Or, indeed, how the changes that inevitably are going to take place in Africa will affect the rest of the world and this little animal.
But one thing is certain - what happens here is more important than it has ever been, and that the relationship of the rest of the world to this great continent and the creatures that live in it is more important than ever before.
On whichever part of the planet we live, we all have a part to play, in what sort of future this wild continent has.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Africa, the final shoot.
It's one of our most ambitious trips, with lots of locations to visit and many technical hurdles to overcome.
Five, take one.
To the west, a vast rainforest the size of India.
Helicopters enable us to go to extraordinary landscapes.
We're heading off to do the very first piece to camera, the opening of the whole Africa series with David.
Well, how do you like the view from my office? (LAUGHS) ATTENBOROUGH".
And attempt air-to-air filming.
Standby, David, and action! I'm flying over the Great Rift Valley in East Africa.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But perhaps the most ambitious task for this shoot is the filming with black rhinoceros.
They have a reputation for being aggressive and, with poor eyesight, they're likely to charge objects or people they don't recognise.
But the plight of the rhino is such an important story that we want to get as close to them as possible.
We also want to meet the people who are working to protect them.
So our team have come to assess the viability of filming up-close with a rhino called Elvis, who's been reared by humans.
He should be safer than a wild rhino, but there's still a risk he could be unpredictable with strangers.
Wildlife ranger Tonga Casio has bought up Elvis by hand and knows that tickling him gently with a stick keeps him calm.
But if anything were to go seriously wrong, there would be little he could do against the one-tonne Elvis.
And this fact hasn't escaped cameraman Mike Fox.
MIKE: He knows we're here.
We're here on his terms.
If he decided to bat us all into the next world, he would do.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Director Kate Broome checks with Tonga that it's safe for the crew to get closer.
KATE: (WHISPERS) Normally we have to stay in the Land Rovers.
He's saying it's okay to go in.
This is such an extraordinary opportunity, to be this close to a black rhino.
ATFEN BOROUGH: The trial goes well with Elvis.
And the stage is set for future filming.
What I'm saying ATTENBOROUGH".
Several weeks later, the team are back.
And this time I've joined them.
But Elvis's mood has changed.
He seems more wilful.
Now, I've stood by many wild animals in my time, but I'm not as fast on my pins as I used to be.
We don't want to test Elvis's patience, so we get on with filming.
A horn that is worth its weight in gold.
And one way of protecting him would be to cut that horn off the nose.
How is it? Looks great.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The team check that they have what they need, and Elvis lets us know that he's had enough.
KATE: just watch out everybody.
Yeah.
- Okay.
- Right then.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But, actually, it's a positive sign that Elvis is not as friendly this time.
Tonga and his colleagues want Elvis to live more like a wild rhino and develop a wariness of humans.
That may offer him some protection from poachers.
Good luck to you, Elvis.
Whilst filming, we are lucky enough to have a very well-equipped camp.
It's in the bush and there's no escaping the wild animals.
One of the great, wonderful things about camping out in the middle of the open is the animals.
But it could also be one of the dangerous, stroke, annoying things.
Absolutely.
ATTENBOROUGH".
In the annoying category - vervet monkeys.
Vervet monkeys have stolen my Ferrero Rocher, and one of my glow sticks from our medical supplies.
Um, so if we see a luminous-faced monkey in the night, um, I'll identify the naughty one that's been stealing our stuff.
RUDOLPH".
And they leave little, uh, presents for us when they've been in, just as a calling card.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But camp manager Andres finds more worrying animal signs.
Well, the lions were quite close, um, just behind the tents.
And some must have come in, and I don't know, uh (LAUGHS) You can see a few scratches.
I think maybe he was wanting to look at himself in the mirror.
(CHUCKLES) ATTENBOROUGH".
Lions in camp are worrying enough, but there I was reading my book, when - Uh,uh".
- Whoa! A Cape buffalo arrives.
The most grumpy and dangerous of the big five African animals.
KATE: Mike, stay in your tent.
Should we get David to get in the tent? ATTENBOROUGH: Buffalo usually move in herds, so there's something odd about him.
It may be that it was brought up as a calf, and is humanised, or it may be that he's an outcast from the herd, in some way, and that he's rather grumpy and fed up with life.
Uh, but I think it's just hot, and he's just trotting around and wondering where he might get a drink and a decent sandwich.
Because I feel the same way myself actually.
(LAUGHS) ATTENBOROUGH".
The team's filming has coincided with the newest arrival at Lewa.
A baby rhino in need of 24-hour care.
This little chap was born blind and is guided everywhere by his keepers.
They took him away from his mother a few weeks ago because she couldn't protect him any more.
He's very vulnerable, so he would have been killed by predators.
(LAUGHS) It's like filling up a petrol tank.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Every rhino is precious.
And so it seems a fitting end for the final scene of the series.
No one knows what the future holds for this little creature.
Nor, indeed, what changes will take place in the great continent on which he lives.
David, I found that Gosh, there's ants.
They're everywhere, yeah, hang on.
Ant! Ant attack.
I just found that extraordinarily moving, actually.
- What I said was all right? - Yes.
You sure? How you did it I just It made me cry.
I'm afraid so.
David Attenborough has made me cry.
ATFEN BOROUGH: But just as we think we 're finishing, someone won't let us go.
Hello, little friend.
ATTENBOROUGH".
He starts to squeak.
And we're able to have a little chat.
(RHINO SQUEAKING) (MIMICS RHINO) ATTENBOROUGH".
Think about it.
He's got a black world, doesn't he? And, uh, he's got smell.
And he's got sound, so He's more likely to be responding to sound if he hasn't got the vision.
And yet, just inquisitive, I suppose.
You coming back? (CHUCKLES) (SQUEAKS) (MIMICS) ATTENBOROUGH".
There is hope for this little fellow.
He's due to have an operation on his eyes, which may mean that, as an adult, he could be returned to the wild.
just like Elvis.
I do hope he gets a cataract operation.
It'd be marvellous if he did.
Well, what an enchanting creature.
North Africa.
High in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, Barbary macaques shiver in the icy cedars.
(CHATTERS) The ancestors of these monkeys fled here from a disaster that overwhelmed their homeland.
Now, trapped in this isolated corner of Africa, there's no going back to the land farther south.
Even in this snowy refuge, there's a reminder of what drove them here.
The unbridled power of the African sun.
Under its intense gaze, the snow can't last for long.
Meltwater should bring life to the lowlands.
Hundreds of torrents cascade southwards.
But each is flowing towards extinction.
just 200 miles south of the mountains, the rivers are vaporised.
Life has been burnt off the land.
This was the apocalypse from which the Barbary macaques fled, the sudden and unstoppable advance of the greatest desert on the planet.
The Sahara transformed North Africa.
Today, it covers an area the size of the United States, one-third of the entire African continent.
This is one of the hottest places on Earth.
The merciless sun, a colossal 1 S-million-degree nuclear reactor, blasted life from the surface of the land.
It still wreaks havoc.
A faint breath of wind can be the beginning of disaster.
(RUMBLING) Nomads tell of entire villages being engulfed, camel trains disappearing, and people buried alive inside their tents.
(RUMBLING) A sandstorm can be a thousand miles across.
It seems miraculous that anything can survive such devastation.
The Saharan apocalypse wiped out many creatures, but today, some still cling on in the lands around the margins of the great desert.
It's very dry here.
Some years, the rains fail entirely.
A lone Grevy's zebra.
He weighs close to half a tonne, and can go for three days without drinking.
Like the macaques, his forebears were refugees from the advancing Sahara.
(RUMBLING) The land is scrubby and dry.
(GRUNTING) (NEIGHING) But this stallion has claimed it as his own.
He's been waiting months for visitors.
Female visitors.
If they like his territory, they might stay a while.
It's his first chance to mate for a very long time.
(GRUNTING) Hardly a success.
Perhaps his visitors are looking for a more impressive partner.
There's another setback.
The females were being followed.
A posse of young males - every one a rival.
It's time to separate the men from the boys.
(WHINNYING) One by one, the stallion sees them off.
The females had ringside seats.
And his prowess has not gone un-noted.
Machismo gives way to tenderness.
Around here, you have to take every opportunity, be it for food, for water, or for mates.
Female Grevy's are a fickle bunch.
The herd have decided to move on.
All of them.
The stallion may never see them again.
But there's a chance that one is now carrying his foal.
In this harsh land, that must count as a triumph.
The sun's power cannot, however, reach far underground.
Below, in stark contrast, conditions are stable and tolerable.
And home to one of the planet's strangest mammals.
Meet the naked mole rats.
These sabre-toothed sausages wouldn't last a day in the desert.
Special filming tunnels allow us to see how well adapted they are to the subterranean life.
They can run equally well in both directions, so tight space is no problem.
They have lost their fur.
And most bizarrely, they live in social colonies, much like termites or ants.
After time spent digging, the workers come together to relax.
But one here is very different from all the rest.
Their queen, twice as heavy as her subjects, and not afraid to throw her weight around.
She is the mother of every worker in the colony, and exists in a near-continuous state of pregnancy.
Even now, two dozen babies are pulsating within her swollen belly.
just occasionally, one of her brood is raised differently, a daughter becomes a princess.
Until now, this youngster's enjoyed a lazy, privileged life.
But not for much longer.
She has a destiny to fulfil.
The surface is a place where no naked mole rat can survive for long.
But a princess will risk everything to search for a partner.
The quest is urgent.
There's an enticing smell in the air.
A seductive scent draws her downwards, to safety.
She's sniffed out a partner.
He too is alone, and eager to start a new colony in his lonely burrow.
Two months later, the princess has become a queen.
And a new tyranny begins.
Tough though they are, such refugees living on the edges of North Africa cannot survive in the heart of the Sahara.
And yet here, in southern Nigeria, there are creatures preparing to journey right across the centre of that great desert.
Barn swallows.
(CHIRPING) They've spent the winter roosting in a forest of elephant grass.
But now, it is time for them to leave.
All two million of them.
They're tiny, each weighing the same as a couple of one-pound coins, yet the journey to their breeding grounds in Europe is over 5,000 miles long.
Ahead of them lies a vast death trap.
The Sahara is too large to go around.
The swallows have no choice but to meet it head-on.
It will take one of nature's greatest feats of navigation to cross this lifeless wasteland.
A wilderness that stretches not just to the horizon, but almost beyond imagination.
It's an immense blank space on the map.
In spite of the Sahara's reputation, less than one-fifth of it is sand.
The rest is stone and wind-scoured rock.
The sun not only bakes the land, it warps its appearance.
The super-heated air, rising upward from the desert surface, distorts the distant scene.
A reflection of the sky shimmers on the sands, a mirage.
The sun is an illusionist.
To thirsty travellers, a mirage can resemble a lake which agonisingly recedes as it's approached.
And swaying camels coming to the rescue transform into dry, spiny acacia trees.
To cross this confused, shimmering landscape, many swallows will need to find real water amongst the mirages.
Even in the Sahara, rain does sometimes fall and that is sufficient for plants to survive, providing they have the right adaptations.
Rising from the sand, a dried-out ball of twigs.
In strong winds, it can travel.
This plant may have been dead for 100 years.
Yet its name suggests that all is not lost, for this is a resurrection plant.
Around here, rain might only fall once or twice a year.
But if you're searching for decades, that might be enough.
Dead limbs absorb water and unfurl in a matter of minutes.
But the resurrection plant needs one more miracle.
(THUNDER RUMBLES) Rain must fall on its branches before they dry out and close up again.
Within hours, shoots emerge.
In just a few weeks, they flower and develop seeds of their own.
Then, before they can grow any larger, the sun kills them.
But their seeds live on, ready for when the rains return, even if that is a century from now.
North Africa wasn't always so brutal.
Scattered across the Sahara are glimpses of life before the apocalypse swept over the land.
In the north, a petrified forest, trees turned to stone.
Remains from a far distant, wetter past.
White sediments in the heart of the Sahara are the dried-out remains of what was once the world's largest lake.
In the east, ruined cities hark back to a time of plenty.
And here, deep inside Libya, is Messak Settafet.
Carved here are hundreds of images of animals, all drawn from life.
Ghosts from a greener time.
Remarkably, a remnant of this old North Africa survives.
Bou-Hedma in Tunisia is sustained by mountain rains.
It's a relic of the savannah that once carpeted North Africa.
The vast grassland vanished when a shift in the Earth's orbit drove the rains south, and in perhaps only a matter of centuries, the Sahara Desert overwhelmed North Africa.
The evidence suggests this took place around 6, 000 years ago.
In evolutionary terms, that's no time at all.
And life has had little chance to adapt to this new world.
Only a few tough specialists can cope with life amongst the dunes.
Camels are sometimes called ships of the desert.
But, like the swallows, they're really only visitors here.
These ships can certainly cross the Sahara, but even they can't make their home in the harshest places.
Left to wander the desert by themselves, camels would not survive.
They depend on their human navigators to find oases and wells.
Saharan folklore is full of tales of caravans that missed a well by a few hundred metres and disappeared.
This is the White Desert, in Egypt.
The landscape is littered with giant chalk pillars, carved by innumerable sandstorms.
This glaring white oven is lethally hot.
Food here is almost non-existent.
But there's a rare gift from a passing camel.
The smell has lured dung beetles from miles around.
For them, this is manna from heaven.
One dung ball could provide enough food to last this female beetle the rest of her life.
But she has a problem.
To keep it fresh, she must bury it in moist ground.
And that's not easy to find.
The temperature has already risen 10 degrees.
This lizard avoids the roasting sand.
Only 30 centimetres above the surface, it's significantly cooler.
The reverse-pushing technique is certainly the fastest way to keep the ball rolling.
But it does have one drawback.
You can't see where you're going.
Disaster! Stuck between two dunes.
The dung ball is twice her weight, but the urge to keep pushing is inextinguishable.
Now, it's 41 degrees Celsius.
Soon, she'll be baked alive.
Her survival instinct, in the end, overrides her love for dung.
(WINGS FLAPPING) Much of the Sahara is uninhabitable, but there are rare places where there is some possibility of survival.
Places where, by strange chance, there is water.
Waw an-Namus is an extinct volcano.
From space, it's a remote, black scar on the Libyan Sahara.
Yet there are other colours here, colours rarely seen on the desert floor.
Blue and green.
Rain fell thousands of years ago when the Sahara was green and percolated deep into the ground.
And here water from this vast, ancient reservoir rises to the surface.
These pools offer another glimpse of the Sahara's past.
Wherever there's water in North Africa, living relics from this wetter time have a chance to cling on.
This oasis is fed by a hot volcanic spring.
Slightly away from the stream of near-boiling water, it's cooler and fish can live.
These are Tilapia.
Hatchlings stick close to their mother.
There are other dangers here beside the scalding water.
Particularly at night.
The crocodiles are stealthy.
And the Tilapia are almost blind in the darkness.
In panic, they all leap to escape the hunter's approach.
But this female can't abandon her brood.
The crocodiles won't be thwarted.
They, too, can leap.
With first light, the crocodiles lose the element of surprise, and the battle is over for now.
The mother fish has survived, but where are her young? All present and correct.
They spent the whole night sheltering in her mouth.
The contest will be repeated at sunset.
There is nowhere else to go.
Oases are always sought by desert travellers but not all are as they seem.
This is the great Ubari Sand Sea, in the heart of the Sahara.
These swallows have travelled 1,500 miles since they left Nigeria.
Their superb powers of navigation will eventually guide them to Europe, but now they, and other thirsty migrants, need to find a speck of blue amidst this ocean of sand.
(CHIRPING) And here it is, Umm al-Maa.
Here, too, ancient groundwater wells up to the surface.
(CHIRPING) But the birds need to be careful, for the sun has played a terrible trick.
This oasis is poisonous.
Intense evaporation over thousands of years has left the water saltier than the sea.
As if to underline the horror, the place is infested by vast swarms of flies.
(BUZZING) But this plague is the birds' salvation.
The flies are filled with freshwater, filtered from the brine.
So, like a desert wanderer squeezing a drink from a cactus, the birds get all the water they need from the flies' bodies.
More and more migrants join in.
Wagtails.
(SQUAWKING) This is the birds' only stopover.
It gives them enough fuel to escape from the Sahara and Africa.
Away from an oasis, it seems remarkable that anything can live at all.
The temperature of the sands can exceed 70 degrees Celsius.
There's not the slightest trace of water left at the surface.
And when that happens, the Sahara itself cries out.
(CRACKING AND HUMMING) Billions of sliding grains generate a hum that echoes across miles of empty desert.
These are the Sahara's legendary singing dunes.
(HUMMING) Over time, these avalanches add up.
If you watch the dunes for long enough, something remarkable is revealed.
One and a half years flash past in a matter of seconds.
On this timescale, the dunes are like a stormy sea.
An unstoppable tsunami of sand.
In this immense, ever-shifting landscape, it's easy to see how a lost traveller could succumb to what's been called the Sahara's only endemic disease - madness.
Can anything survive the North African desert when the sun is at its fiercest? It's approaching midday.
A fringe-toed lizard is hungry.
He's on a stakeout.
Flashy scales reflect some of the sun's rays.
Nevertheless, the heat is almost unbearable.
His prey hasn't left home all day.
The lizard is the last animal still out on the dunes.
But even he can't take it any more.
To survive longer, you'd need a spacesuit.
And in a way, that's what these insects have.
Silver ants' armoured skin reflects light.
They can tolerate temperatures that would kill any other land animal.
Even so, they can only survive for less than 10 minutes in the midday sun.
Time is precious.
The ants race to find food as soon as their predators go to ground.
They can't afford to waste a second getting lost, so they spin to take a bearing from the sun.
They log every change of direction, every footstep in order to know exactly where they are and where their nest lies.
Only four minutes to spare and they've found a victim of heat stroke.
A meal.
But it's going to take a monumental effort to get it home.
Three minutes to go and they're nearing their maximum temperature, an astounding 55 degrees Celsius.
But there are already casualties.
One minute left, and they're not going to make it.
Something has to change.
The silver ant is the hardiest of all desert inhabitants.
Even so, it can only survive outside in the middle of the day for a matter of minutes.
Now, the desert belongs to the sun alone.
The sun has scorched life from the Sahara.
And yet the vast desert it created is a source of life half a world away.
The advancing Sahara vaporised the world's largest lake, leaving behind the silvery remains of countless microscopic algae.
In winter, the wind carries away 700,000 tonnes of this mineral-rich dust every day.
It blows from here all the way to South America, where, astonishingly, it fertilises the Amazon Rainforest.
A striking demonstration of the reach of this mighty continent.
Throughout its long history, Africa has influenced the entire planet.
It was the cradle of a remarkable array of land animals that spread across the globe.
And, of course, it was the ancestral home of all of us.
ATTENBOROUGH: This is the tale of two of the Africa team 's most challenging desert expeditions.
(ENGINE REVVING) One focused on a minuscule creature with an incredible turn of speed.
The other on a subject so slow, to film it in action would take years.
(CLANGING) In both cases, the Sahara would push crews to the limit in pursuit of the perfect shot.
In Tunisia, the mission is to capture footage of moving sand dunes, something that's never been tried like this before.
WRIGHT: The problem is that because the dunes move so slowly, we're going to have to leave cameras here for about 20 months, and that just means there's a huge potential for things to go wrong.
ATTENBOROUGH".
And with filmmaking, if something can go wrong, it usually will.
Two local shepherds, Amur and Nasser, have volunteered to tend the equipment full-time.
The camera tower will be the tallest structure for as far as the eye can see.
And there are three other cameras at lower angles.
All this toil will yield surprisingly scant results.
WRIGHT: They've programmed the cameras to take one photo every day, that's only 365 photographs a year.
Which, when you run it at normal speed, just over 14 seconds.
I think it's taken longer to explain what's going to happen than the end result will actually be.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The cameras are left to the mercy of the sun, wind and sand.
In the meantime, crews are shooting all across North Africa.
In Egypt, the challenge is to get into the world of the most heat-tolerant desert animal - the silver ant.
They're really small, they're really fast.
Like, you're not too sure if you've seen an ant.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The crew have three weeks to gather the footage they need.
SLOSS: We're going to try a tracking shot on this ant nest.
Moving forward towards it, as the ants pour out of the hole in their millions.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Not only are these insects super-fast, they also keep antisocial hours.
BARTLAM: The thing is, we need to be out here in the middle of the day to film these ants.
They don't do what they do when it's nice and cool at 7:00, 8:00 in the morning.
WRIGHT: I can't remember ever being in a place where the wind was so relentless and the temperatures were so high.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The insufferable heat is not the only problem.
Dangers are everywhere.
(BARTLAM SCREAMING) There's a really fat scorpion, it's really big! One, two, three (MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) This might kill.
- BARTLAM: Yeah? - Yeah.
It's big and they have a lot of poison in his dart thing.
- SLOSS: What, that thing there? -(BOTH SCREAMING) BARTLAM: Oh, my god! HAWASH: Don't touch it! ATFEN BOROUGH: The scorpion will be released far, far away from the camp, in a shady spot.
No such luck for the team.
They're back to work in the midday sun.
This is This is too much.
This is crazy! This is crazy! ATTENBOROUGH: Indeed.
The heat seems to have given Kat and Warwick a touch of Saharan madness.
SLOSS: The plan is to do an experiment, to find out how fast these little ants can run.
BARTLAM: So we're going to lay this along the floor, and hopefully an ant will run alongside it, and we can film it at high speed.
And from that, calculate their their speed, and perhaps try and relate it to how fast that would be for a human.
Like me.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Silver ants are expert navigators, using the angle of the sun to calculate their position.
But for our team, even basic mental tasks are becoming a challenge.
SLOSS: Count a second.
See one running and then count a second, see how far it gets.
It's quite difficult to count a second, isn't it? No, it's "one".
"One".
yeah! BARTLAM: There he goes.
He's gone 10 centimetres in four seconds, but we're running at 500 frames a second, which is 20 times normal time.
So, in fact, he's covered those 10 centimetres in We know that he does half a metre in one second.
Half a metre per second, yep.
-50 centimetres in one second, roughly.
- Yeah, yeah.
So, how many body lengths is that? He's maybe doing five body lengths a second if he's two metres tall, like I am.
BARTLAM: Are you? Yeah.
That's how much more than a normal man I am.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Eventually, the duo decide that if the silver ants were our size, they'd be doing 280 miles an hour.
They're one of the fastest sprinters in the animal kingdom.
No wonder we've been struggling to film them.
It does explain a few things.
Ant-letics! Knowing the exact speed of the ants is all well and good, but there's still a great deal of work to be done before the shoot finishes.
However, in Tunisia, there's no shortage of time, and hopefully no news is good news as far as Amur and Nasser are concerned.
The final week in Egypt, and the crew seem to be adapting to life in the oven.
Practice is making perfect, and the sequence is coming together.
SLOSS: I think we've got some lovely shots.
Every single shot's been really hard-earned.
ATFEN BOROUGH: But getting down in the ants' world is now taking its toll on the kit.
It's running to stand still, the business of blowing dust off these things.
(SPRAYING) BARTLAM: Oh, no! It's got dust in it! (CRUNCHING) Ooh, crunch.
SLOSS: I think these ants are stunning-looking.
Near-impossible to film, I think, because of the speed they had.
But, you know, I've come to love them over the days and weeks.
ATFEN BOROUGH: With the sequence in the bag, Warwick wants the final traditional sunset shot.
It's the best time of day to film sunsets, in the evening.
That's experience that tells me that, I've been doing this for years.
You learn these things.
Thanks to Warwick's experience, including sunsets, he and Kat have captured the extraordinary life of the speedy silver ant.
Over a year later, in Tunisia, it's time to take down the sand dune cameras.
Bonjour! - Nasser.
- Amur.
Hi.
Hello again.
WRIGHT: So how's it been, has it been good? It's okay, but two days ago, we have a little bit, small problem.
After surviving 600 days in the desert, the small problem is that the cameras have been vandalised.
I'm really hot and bothered now, it's 40 degrees, and someone's smashed the cameras.
Not been a good start to the day, to be honest.
ATFEN BOROUGH: There's no doubt the dunes have moved.
But the question is whether the equipment has survived.
That is amazing.
The camera's still here.
I guess maybe it just took them so long to get through the toughened plastic, that they felt they had made so much noise they were worried about the guards coming, because they only sleep a couple of hundred metres away.
After almost two years of waiting, it's the moment of truth.
I'm going to find out, find out whether or not the cameras have actually recorded anything.
It's just hugely stressful because it's never been done before.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The footage is a surreal window into a secret world, the private life of a sand dune.
(IN DISTINCT TALKING) The Africa team struggled under the burning sun and driving winds that are hallmarks of the Sahara.
They went home with an enormous admiration for the creatures that spend their entire lives battling to survive in this brutal desert world.
ATTENBOROUGH: Afr/ca.
In the four years of making this series, we've been to some astonishing places and seen animals behaving in ways that have never been filmed before.
(ELEPHANT TRUMPETING) But Africa has another story to tell.
The wildlife of this continent has seen more changes in the last 50 years than it has in the last two million.
Changing landscapes and changing climate.
Today's animals are facing unprecedented challenges whilst, around them, Africa's human population is growing at nearly double the global rate.
(HIPPOS BRAYING) There is an increasing urgency to understand and, crucially, to conserve the wildlife of this great continent.
(MEN WHISTLING) Today, there is a new generation of naturalists and scientists who're fighting to save the wild places and the animals that live in them.
- One, two, three! -(INDISTINCT CHATTERING) ATTENBOROUGH".
This is the greatest wildlife continent on the planet.
And what happens here is relevant to us all.
So, what is the future of wild Africa? This animal has become the world's number one target for poachers.
Its kind has been hunted almost to the point of extinction.
It's now so rare that this individual is watched over day and night.
This is the black rhinoceros.
And black rhinoceros are notorious for being rather grumpy and suddenly charging.
But he is in great danger because he has, on his nose that horn which is worth its weight in gold.
(RHINO SNORTING) The demand for rhino horn has rocketed.
There has been a 3,000% increase in poaching just in the last five years.
(RHINO SNORTING) Today, powdered rhino horn can fetch up to $65, 000 a kilo.
Rhinos are a lucrative target for organised crime.
In Chinese medicine, it's believed that rhino horn can reduce fever.
And some Vietnamese sell it as a cure for everything, from cancer to hangovers.
It's made of keratin, the same substance as hair and nail and it has no clinically proven medicinal value.
(RHINO SNORTING) But it has made every black rhino in Africa a target.
They've all been killed in Uganda and Rwanda, and there are only around 600 left here, in Kenya.
But these are not poachers.
- These are protectors.
-(COCKING GUN) (SHOT FIRED) (RHINOS GRUNTING) And that protection is overseen by rhino expert Dr Matthew Mutinda, one of the Kenya Wildlife Services' top vets.
D R MUTI N DA: Black rhinos are critically endangered.
And that is what we at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, we're trying to do.
Save the animal, provide a safe and secure sanctuary, where the animal can breed and live freely.
ATTENBOROUGH".
There aren't many true wild rhinos left in Africa.
Most, like these, in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy are under armed guard.
This young female has reached the age when Matthew must do some health checks, including taking blood samples.
This will help deter poachers and traffickers, as DNA in illegally traded rhino horn can be tracked back to its origin.
If you have to do anaesthesia in the wild, you will expect some degree of risk.
ATTENBOROUGH".
This female has reacted badly to the anaesthetic.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) She's not breathing.
It's a rare and extremely serious situation.
He knows that the next few minutes are crucial.
(IN DISTINCT CHATTER) And when an animal is this big, there's only one way to get the heart going again when you're out in the bush.
Thanks to Matthew's quick thinking, they can hear that she's breathing again.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) They've got to get her back on her feet.
(ANXIOUS CHATTER) Not surprisingly, she's disorientated.
(THUDDING) (RHINO SNORTING) Mission accomplished.
It's been an ordeal, but now this rhino can be tracked and protected for the rest of her life.
Within minutes, she's grazing peacefully again, with her mother.
It may seem heartless to treat an animal like that, but we have to keep tabs on them and be able to identify individuals.
They're in great danger.
Even now, on average, one rhino is killed by poachers every day in Africa.
There are so few black rhino left in Kenya that we're getting to know each individual.
But this is still a creature that can surprise us.
Previously, it was widely believed that black rhinos were largely solitary creatures.
Here in the Kalahari, a starlight camera reveals that they may be much more sociable than many thought.
(RHINOS GRUNTING) This waterhole gathering is an enchanting window into the past.
Early explorers reported seeing a rhino behind every bush.
Before the invention of the gun there were probably hundreds of thousands of rhinos across the continent.
The people protecting rhinos in Africa are striving to ensure that we'll still be able to witness wonderful scenes like this in 50 years' time.
Right across Africa, conservationists have realised that if we want to save our big animals, then now is the time.
The human population of the continent has just exceeded one billion, and many wild animals are being hunted commercially for food.
Some legally.
But many illegally.
(WILDEBEEST LOWING) Wildlife meat is often sold as goat or beef.
The amount is astonishing.
Millions of tonnes are eaten across Africa every year.
At this rate, some species are almost certainly heading for extinction.
But commercial hunting is not just affecting the grazers.
As the prey decreases, it's affecting the predators, too.
Fifty years ago, there were about half a million lions in Africa.
Today, there are less than 30,000.
But in one particular part of Africa, things are improving in a quite extraordinary way.
These hunters have become part of a new and unlikely alliance.
In recent years, hungry lions have increasingly been killing livestock.
(MOOING) One group of traditional Maasai have reacted in a very untraditional way.
The Maasai are cattle herders who don't eat wild animals.
But when lions attack their herds, they've always retaliated.
Maasai and lions are ancient adversaries.
A lion hunt is still a rite of passage for young Maasai warriors like Olubi Lairumbe.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR'.
For me and any Maasai, killing a lion is the ultimate fulfillment of a truly accomplished Maasai.
Nothing compares to that.
ATTENBOROUGH".
There is nobody who knows more about living alongside lions than the Maasai themselves.
I met Olubi and some of the other warriors in his village to find out about their relationship with the local pride.
How many lions are there around here? (SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR: Around here, there are about a hundred.
- Oh.
- Yea h, yea h.
So they all have names? TRANSLATOR'.
Every single lion has a name.
A Maasai name.
And when you see a lion, do you know how it's going to behave? TRANSLATOR'.
It depends on the lion.
TRANSLATOR'.
For a Maasai warrior, lions are nothing to be scared of.
If I saw a lion A lion would be likely to attack me.
TRANSLATOR'.
Only if you threaten it.
Hmm, well, I hope the next lion knows that.
(ALL LAUGHING) ATTENBOROUGH".
Olubi killed his first lion when he was just 17, after it attacked his cattle.
Unfortunately, the lion turned out to be pregnant.
And that led to a remarkable turnaround.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) TRANSLATOR'.
The Maasai respect all living things.
And I began to feel guilty about the lion that I had killed.
In the end, I came to admire the lions.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Olubi had a dramatic change of heart.
He turned his back on hundreds of years of Maasai tradition.
Along with some other warriors, Olubi became a lion guardian.
Instead of hunting lions, Olubi would be protecting them.
He teamed up with Stephanie Dolrenry, who helped pioneer the project.
(SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) just by respecting their traditions and also bringing in their ecological knowledge, it's been hugely successful.
They know their areas, they know how to track lions, they've been doing it for generation after generation.
They know how to track them, they know how to hunt them, they know how to find them.
ATFEN BOROUGH: This is only a small-scale project.
But with lion numbers as low as they are, they need all the help they can get.
Olubi is tracking radio-collared lions.
He's able to warn villagers to move their cattle when the pride is in the area.
And so they're avoiding conflict.
No lions have been killed in the immediate area since the project began.
By combining the science, both ancient and contemporary, they're beginning to make a real difference.
ST E P H A N I E: There's so much to be learned.
I feel I bring in modern technology, modern knowledge, and, in return, they teach us about the environment, and how things have changed in their environment.
And it's a really neat exchange You can't say the biologists are the teachers or the guardians are the teachers.
We're both teachers and we're both students.
And I think that's That blend is amazing.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Critically, at the heart of this project is a huge attitude change by these Maasai warriors.
An animal that was once their sworn enemy, they now protect.
And their willingness to share knowledge with other communities means that projects like this could be repeated in other parts of Africa.
Traditionally, when a warrior killed a lion, he took the name of the lion.
Now, it's the other way round.
Now the lion takes the name of the warrior who protects it.
The scheme is a huge success.
There are about 100 lions involved in this scheme in this neighbourhood.
This is 21 st century conservation in action.
Perhaps the biggest threat to wildlife is the competition for space with the rapidly growing human population.
The Virunga volcanoes straddle the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The rich volcanic soils are extremely fertile.
It's one of the most intensively cultivated areas in Africa.
But the farmers also share this region with one of our closest relatives.
This is home to the last 800 or so wild mountain gorillas left on Earth.
We know a great deal about these animals.
They've been closely studied for 50 years.
One strong silverback male keeps everyone in order.
And gorilla family life is mostly peaceful.
(MURMURING) Until a few generations ago, mountain gorillas, hidden in the seclusion of their forests, were seldom seen by human beings.
But their habitat was steadily being carved away.
And now these gorillas are marooned on the volcanic slopes in a sea of farmland.
The fact that gorillas now regularly come into contact with people not only means an increased threat of poaching, but also of disease.
Gorillas have little or no resistance to the bugs that we carry.
(GRUNTS) Numbers here once dropped to around 250.
They were facing extinction.
Action had to be taken.
The boundaries of the national park were strictly enforced, halting the encroachment of farmland.
And it was decided that the only solution was to intensively manage the remaining gorillas.
Teams of scientists constantly monitor them.
Their forests are patrolled to cut poachers' snares.
(GRUNTS) And vets watch their health closely.
This is funded mostly through ecotourism and donations from all over the world.
Mountain gorillas are now back from the brink.
This level of human intervention might not be ideal, but it's working.
Every year there are a few more mountain gorillas and possibly just a little more optimism.
Intensive management within a protected area may represent the only future for many African species.
But for some animals that is simply not possible.
(ELEPHANT TRUMPETING) What happens if the animal you're trying to protect is not suited to park life? Elephants require vast amounts of space to roam.
They have a range of up to 1,300 square miles.
Given the chance, they will even move between countries in search of the best food, particularly if conditions get rough.
This was the scene in Amboseli National Park in 2009.
The park is home to nearly one and a half thousand elephants.
And this was the worst drought for half a century.
60% of zebras and 95% of wildebeest were wiped out.
The seasonal rains had failed for the last two years.
And the elephants that lived here were slowly starving.
The park created to protect them is now surrounded by farmland.
The elephants had little choice of where else to go.
Caught up in this catastrophe were three sisters.
They are the frontline for elephant protection in the park.
And they know these animals better than anyone else.
Nora Njiraini, and Katito and Soila Sayialel.
SOILA: All the elephants have been given names.
They're a family to us.
Hello, Anastasia.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The sisters have been following these elephants for over 25 years.
Trying to ensure their safety, particularly at times when life is tough for these animals.
SOILA: It really was terrible.
There was nothing, actually, to feed on.
We even went and asked the old Maasai men whether they have ever experienced such a drought.
The only time it was close to what was then, was in 1961.
SOILA: In 2009, we lost quite a number of elephants.
I think we lost about 400 elephants.
SOILA: Ana' it started with the young ones.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Elephants usually escape drought by moving into other less affected areas.
But Africa's human population is growing at double the global rate.
And traditional migration routes have been cut by the developments of towns, cities, farmland and roads.
Leaving these elephants stuck.
This young calf is starving, and there is nothing they can do to help.
For the sisters, who know each elephant personally, this is a terrible moment.
SOILA: It is something that we feel in our hearts.
You can imagine the kind of feelings that we get.
You know, knowing those elephants and seeing something like that happen.
It really touches us.
ATTENBOROUGH".
It was a tough year for all the young elephants in the region.
We lost all the calves who were born that year.
All of them.
We lost them.
(GRUNTING) ATTENBOROUGH".
There was nothing the sisters could do to save the baby.
But they were determined to save any elephants they could, especially mothers who could breed again.
(OVERLAPPING CHATTER) They found this female stuck in the mud, exhausted, in a dried-up lakebed.
(BREATHING HEAVILY) (MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) The elephant that got stuck in the mud was Qualida.
Poor thing, you know, she was there for quite a long time.
SOXLA".
The Maasai reported it to us, and we had to compile efforts with the Kenya Wildlife Services people.
(ALL SHOUTING) ATFEN BOROUGH: Weighing about three tonnes, Qualida is just too heavy to shift by hand.
She's weakening fast.
So the next morning, heavy machinery is brought in.
(MAN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) (PEOPLE CHEERING) (MEN SPEAKING IN LOCAL DIALECT) (WHISTLING) After two days stuck in the mud, Qualida is exhausted.
But she is up on her feet again.
(THUNDER RUMBLES) The rains did return to Amboseli, and, thanks in part to the work of those dedicated three women, elephant numbers are now beginning to rise again.
There's no doubt that this was an extremely severe event.
But is it an isolated incident or a developing pattern? SOILA: Especially with global warming, we actually don't know what's going to happen, but we just have to cross fingers and hope for a better future.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Given the opportunity, the numbers of elephants in East Africa will recover.
Especially if they are given the freedom to range widely, and so avoid the harshest conditions.
One solution to help elephants find the space they need is to link parks together and provide safe routes between them.
Elephants are great travellers, and here, in this part of Kenya, they regularly moved from the lowlands up the side of the mountains to feed in the forests up there.
But then, the human population of Kenya grew, and roads like this one were constructed.
Penning the elephants down in the lowlands where they created havoc amongst the farms.
Not only that, there were dangers of collisions on the road.
And then someone suggested building an underpass.
Within 24 hours of it being completed, one elephant had passed through, and now all the elephants use that route to go up the mountain, often at night, to feed.
Simple ideas like this underpass are a lifeline for these elephants.
Especially in times of drought.
Africa's climate is certainly changing.
Some parts of the continent have become three and a half degrees centigrade hotter in the past 20 years.
At the summit of Africa's most famous mountain, Kilimanjaro, 80 percent of its permanent ice fields have disappeared.
Soon, it will be free of ice altogether.
All over Africa the mountainous regions are often the first indicators of climate change.
Here, in the Ethiopian Highlands, live very unusual-looking creatures.
Gelada Baboons.
Climate change refugees.
Although this region of Ethiopia lies in the tropics, up at 4, 888 metres, it doesn't feel like it.
Unlike most African animals, geladas are adapted to life in the cold.
They used to be one of Africa's most successful primates, found all over the continent.
At one stage, there were six different species.
Now there is only one.
With the warming climate, their grazing is becoming more and more scarce, restricted to cooler and higher places.
These geladas are being forced higher into the mountains.
Soon there will be nowhere left to go.
This is a species living on the edge.
Even though they're isolated on the mountain tops, they're not immune to our influence.
As a result of changing climate, these Gelada baboons may soon be gone from our planet.
Africa is the world's hottest continent.
And, there is no doubt, it's getting warmer.
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world.
Very little can survive in these harsh conditions.
Along the desert edge, life clings on in the face of encroaching sands.
But for how long? Alongside the wildlife, 22 million people struggle to make a living on these desert margins.
Can anything be done to stop the sand overwhelming this fragile land? One idea is to build a green wall of trees across 11 countries.
The project has already started, in Senegal, but, like all big ideas, it has big problems.
Getting 11 countries to work together is not easy, and simply irrigating a 5, 000-mile-long belt of trees is an ambitious task.
But, all over Africa, people are recognising how important it is to have trees as part of their local landscape.
This group of volunteers has planted nearly 100 million saplings.
And they're just one of countless similar groups and individuals, taking it upon themselves to reforest their own part of this great continent.
Trees are essential for the future of the continent, and indeed to the rest of the planet.
This is the Congo basin.
It's one of the most biologically important forests on Earth, and it's not just because of the concentration of plants and animals that live here.
It's because it's also one of the powerhouses behind the planet's wind and rain.
Each hectare of trees releases as vapour almost 190,000 liters of water a year.
This water passes into the atmosphere, to be transported around the entire globe.
That means the heart of the world's weather lies in tropical forests.
Unfortunately, there's an almost insatiable demand in Europe and China, for hardwood from these very forests.
And that is having an enormous impact.
As more tropical forest is felled, some scientists are seeing a correlation with changing storm patterns across Europe and America.
And it's likely to become more extreme.
Staggeringly, 50 percent of the Congo basin forest has been allocated for logging.
The future of Africa's forests has never been more critical for us all.
But the consequences of global warming aren't limited to the land.
Africa is almost completely surrounded by oceans.
Here on the east coast, there are animals feeling the change in climate in a most surprising way.
This is a young female green turtle.
During her lifetime, she will travel thousands of miles, through the ocean, looking for food.
Turtles return to the same beach from which they hatched to lay their own eggs.
The eggs are buried in the sand, and the hatchlings will emerge after about two months.
Now, there's a strange thing.
about turtle eggs, and that is the temperature at which the eggs are kept will determine the sex of most of the hatchlings.
If the sand temperature is high, they will be female.
If it's low, they will be male.
So global warming could have a crucial effect on turtle populations.
And this young female may find it very difficult, in years to come, to find a male with which to mate.
But a local conservation group recognised that the odds are stacking up against these little turtles.
There's not much they can do about climate change, but they have got together with the local fishermen to try and improve the turtles' chances of survival.
Every turtle counts.
So each time one is found injured or accidentally caught in the nets, it's brought to Kahindi Changawa and his team.
CHANGAWA: So we began with only 16 fishermen altogether, in 1998.
Now we have hundreds of fishermen working with us.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Grazing by turtles is essential for the health of the beds of seagrass.
And these are the home of shrimps and lobsters, and that, of course, helps fishermen, too.
The project has a turtle rehabilitation centre, and for the last two years, it's become home to Shelia.
CHANGAWA".
She had an accident with a boat, was hit from behind.
She lost three ribs and her spine was, as well, damaged.
It's now in the process of healing back together.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Sheila's injuries have affected her buoyancy.
She's healed well, and to encourage her to exercise her ï¬ippers properly, she has, every day, a little trip to the seaside.
CHANGAWA: So we usually take Sheila for a sea bath on daily basis, and the whole reason why we're doing that, we're trying to give her enough room to get exercises.
And she gets an opportunity to eat her natural food.
We believe that it keeps her fit, and the other thing is she gets to use her rear flippers quite often.
ATTENBOROUGH".
For Kahindi, it's one of the rewards for all his hard work.
CHANGAWA".
It's really, really enjoyable.
Very few people have the privilege, like I do, swimming with the turtles, and having that fun.
I do enjoy what I'm doing.
ATTENBOROUGH: Sheila certainly did get stronger, but the hope that someday she might swim out in the open was not to be fulfilled.
Unaccountably, she became weaker and eventually died.
This kind of work will inevitably have setbacks.
But there are always new turtles to be cared for.
ATTENBOROUGH: Is she healthy? Yeah, this one is healthy.
I mean, she has a few bruises, could be from the fishing gear.
Um, like these ones here.
ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, yeah, but otherwise healthy? CHANGAWA: Otherwise, the turtle is obviously really healthy.
ATTENBOROUGH: Shall we let her go? CHANGAWA".
Since 1998, till now, we've released over 8,200 turtles.
It fills me feel proud and privileged.
We've done lots of work with the community, on changing their attitudes and their behaviours and everything.
So I guess our job as an organisation is really successful.
A young turtle like that could lay 6 or 7,000 eggs in her lifetime.
So the survival of just one could have huge consequences.
Saving just one individual requires huge effort, and of course, saving a species requires even more.
But these heroic efforts are only ever going to be a partial solution.
Every individual animal is part of a much bigger story, part of an interconnected web of plants, animals, and the landscape itself, that make up an entire ecosystem.
Saving ecosystems is the key to Africa's wild future.
Gorongosa in Mozambique, is a modern-day Jurassic Park.
It's ruled by some of the world's biggest crocodiles.
Some of these monsters are six metres long and close to 50 years old.
Somehow, they managed to escape a civil war lasting nearly 20 years, which swept through Gorongosa.
95% of all the other large animals were wiped out.
But 50 years ago the scene was very different.
This was a thriving tourist attraction, a wild paradise.
Visitors flocked from around the world, drawn by the vast range and abundance of the wildlife.
The most popular spot for tourists was an old restaurant, a lookout post for the local lions.
The restaurant has long gone.
Along with the lions.
Gorongosa looked empty and beyond rescue.
But not to everyone.
A brave and ambitious project began to try and restore the park to its former richness and splendour.
The first stage is to find out which animals, as well as crocodiles, are still here.
So the team is mapping and counting all the big animals they see in the park.
(IN DISTINCT) But it soon became clear that these big animals were only part of the story.
Perhaps even more important might be the little ones hidden underfoot.
It's understanding these creatures that is attracting some of the best minds in the scientific world.
ED WILSON: You were gonna show me something? MAN: Yeah, something new.
Professor Ed Wilson is a world expert on biodiversity.
Ana' at a mere 83, he's still pursuing his passion - ants.
You see, there's a big nest of I think they're Myrmicarias.
WILSON: Wow! Let me just get one specimen.
If you look down at your feet, you may see them, walking by here and there, an ant, a little beetle What I like to call the little things that run the earth.
ATTENBOROUGH".
It's the rich diversity of insect life here that gives Gorongosa the prospect of a future.
These creatures form the basis of life in the park.
WILSON: This is so much fun.
These little invertebrate creatures, the creatures that do most of the work, turn most of the energy, save most of the material, and allow us to re-insert big animals with some confidence.
WILSON: Have you got it in the vial yet? MAN: Yeah, I got three of them.
WILSON: Oh, good.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Professor Wilson was one of the first scientists to explore this area, together with local wildlife biologist Tonga Torcheeda.
That's a good one.
If you could gather them all up, all these little invertebrate creatures, and weigh them, they would weigh far more than all of the big animals put together, even in a fully restored park.
ATFEN BOROUGH: It's these little creatures, together with the plants and trees, that still make this place a viable option for re-introducing bigger animals.
I can't be sure that's a new species but, you know, this is the kind of thing that might be.
This park came that close to vanishing.
And I'm happy to report it is coming back.
And this is one of the great stories.
It's inspirational, I think.
And it's a fine shining example of what to do with all our parks, even those that have been damaged by human activity.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But there's another reason why Gorongosa is important for the future of Africa, and perhaps for us all.
WILSON: So it is here, in this park, that people come to see not just the big animals that thrill us, but they will see Earth as it looked and felt before the coming of humanity.
ATFEN BOROUGH: Saving big animals is important, but to do that with any real success, we have to start understanding and preserving the plants and insects that support an ecosystem.
It's this that will allow the large animals to thrive.
Gorongosa is a real success story.
The government and the management team have pledged themselves to a plan to restore the land to what it was.
While it can never be exactly the same as it was before the war, it can still become a rich and thriving ecosystem.
The scale of the challenge across Africa is enormous.
After all, it's a huge continent.
The United Kingdom, China, the United States of America, India, japan and most of the rest of Europe would all fit within its borders.
Africa still retains 45 percent of the Earth's uncultivated land.
It's still the greatest wilderness on Earth.
And that is why it's important.
Human beings have lived alongside wildlife here longer than anywhere else.
But now, in the 21st century, animal numbers are at a critical level.
Like it or not, this generation is responsible for handing on the world's wildlife to the next.
Come on That means taking care of the animals and lands where they live, so there is still space for us all to coexist.
Nobody knows what the future has in store for this little calf.
Or, indeed, how the changes that inevitably are going to take place in Africa will affect the rest of the world and this little animal.
But one thing is certain - what happens here is more important than it has ever been, and that the relationship of the rest of the world to this great continent and the creatures that live in it is more important than ever before.
On whichever part of the planet we live, we all have a part to play, in what sort of future this wild continent has.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Africa, the final shoot.
It's one of our most ambitious trips, with lots of locations to visit and many technical hurdles to overcome.
Five, take one.
To the west, a vast rainforest the size of India.
Helicopters enable us to go to extraordinary landscapes.
We're heading off to do the very first piece to camera, the opening of the whole Africa series with David.
Well, how do you like the view from my office? (LAUGHS) ATTENBOROUGH".
And attempt air-to-air filming.
Standby, David, and action! I'm flying over the Great Rift Valley in East Africa.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But perhaps the most ambitious task for this shoot is the filming with black rhinoceros.
They have a reputation for being aggressive and, with poor eyesight, they're likely to charge objects or people they don't recognise.
But the plight of the rhino is such an important story that we want to get as close to them as possible.
We also want to meet the people who are working to protect them.
So our team have come to assess the viability of filming up-close with a rhino called Elvis, who's been reared by humans.
He should be safer than a wild rhino, but there's still a risk he could be unpredictable with strangers.
Wildlife ranger Tonga Casio has bought up Elvis by hand and knows that tickling him gently with a stick keeps him calm.
But if anything were to go seriously wrong, there would be little he could do against the one-tonne Elvis.
And this fact hasn't escaped cameraman Mike Fox.
MIKE: He knows we're here.
We're here on his terms.
If he decided to bat us all into the next world, he would do.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Director Kate Broome checks with Tonga that it's safe for the crew to get closer.
KATE: (WHISPERS) Normally we have to stay in the Land Rovers.
He's saying it's okay to go in.
This is such an extraordinary opportunity, to be this close to a black rhino.
ATFEN BOROUGH: The trial goes well with Elvis.
And the stage is set for future filming.
What I'm saying ATTENBOROUGH".
Several weeks later, the team are back.
And this time I've joined them.
But Elvis's mood has changed.
He seems more wilful.
Now, I've stood by many wild animals in my time, but I'm not as fast on my pins as I used to be.
We don't want to test Elvis's patience, so we get on with filming.
A horn that is worth its weight in gold.
And one way of protecting him would be to cut that horn off the nose.
How is it? Looks great.
ATTENBOROUGH".
The team check that they have what they need, and Elvis lets us know that he's had enough.
KATE: just watch out everybody.
Yeah.
- Okay.
- Right then.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But, actually, it's a positive sign that Elvis is not as friendly this time.
Tonga and his colleagues want Elvis to live more like a wild rhino and develop a wariness of humans.
That may offer him some protection from poachers.
Good luck to you, Elvis.
Whilst filming, we are lucky enough to have a very well-equipped camp.
It's in the bush and there's no escaping the wild animals.
One of the great, wonderful things about camping out in the middle of the open is the animals.
But it could also be one of the dangerous, stroke, annoying things.
Absolutely.
ATTENBOROUGH".
In the annoying category - vervet monkeys.
Vervet monkeys have stolen my Ferrero Rocher, and one of my glow sticks from our medical supplies.
Um, so if we see a luminous-faced monkey in the night, um, I'll identify the naughty one that's been stealing our stuff.
RUDOLPH".
And they leave little, uh, presents for us when they've been in, just as a calling card.
ATTENBOROUGH".
But camp manager Andres finds more worrying animal signs.
Well, the lions were quite close, um, just behind the tents.
And some must have come in, and I don't know, uh (LAUGHS) You can see a few scratches.
I think maybe he was wanting to look at himself in the mirror.
(CHUCKLES) ATTENBOROUGH".
Lions in camp are worrying enough, but there I was reading my book, when - Uh,uh".
- Whoa! A Cape buffalo arrives.
The most grumpy and dangerous of the big five African animals.
KATE: Mike, stay in your tent.
Should we get David to get in the tent? ATTENBOROUGH: Buffalo usually move in herds, so there's something odd about him.
It may be that it was brought up as a calf, and is humanised, or it may be that he's an outcast from the herd, in some way, and that he's rather grumpy and fed up with life.
Uh, but I think it's just hot, and he's just trotting around and wondering where he might get a drink and a decent sandwich.
Because I feel the same way myself actually.
(LAUGHS) ATTENBOROUGH".
The team's filming has coincided with the newest arrival at Lewa.
A baby rhino in need of 24-hour care.
This little chap was born blind and is guided everywhere by his keepers.
They took him away from his mother a few weeks ago because she couldn't protect him any more.
He's very vulnerable, so he would have been killed by predators.
(LAUGHS) It's like filling up a petrol tank.
ATTENBOROUGH".
Every rhino is precious.
And so it seems a fitting end for the final scene of the series.
No one knows what the future holds for this little creature.
Nor, indeed, what changes will take place in the great continent on which he lives.
David, I found that Gosh, there's ants.
They're everywhere, yeah, hang on.
Ant! Ant attack.
I just found that extraordinarily moving, actually.
- What I said was all right? - Yes.
You sure? How you did it I just It made me cry.
I'm afraid so.
David Attenborough has made me cry.
ATFEN BOROUGH: But just as we think we 're finishing, someone won't let us go.
Hello, little friend.
ATTENBOROUGH".
He starts to squeak.
And we're able to have a little chat.
(RHINO SQUEAKING) (MIMICS RHINO) ATTENBOROUGH".
Think about it.
He's got a black world, doesn't he? And, uh, he's got smell.
And he's got sound, so He's more likely to be responding to sound if he hasn't got the vision.
And yet, just inquisitive, I suppose.
You coming back? (CHUCKLES) (SQUEAKS) (MIMICS) ATTENBOROUGH".
There is hope for this little fellow.
He's due to have an operation on his eyes, which may mean that, as an adult, he could be returned to the wild.
just like Elvis.
I do hope he gets a cataract operation.
It'd be marvellous if he did.
Well, what an enchanting creature.