In the Wild (1992) s01e05 Episode Script

Well, that's the western bearded dragon, a small relative of the Australian bearded dragon.
These island animals are very small.
Very small beard.
Like most of the dragon lizards, which you tell because of their spines and spikes, they change colour with their feelings and with the light and the heat.
Like most lizards, he tends to be a fatalist.
Once he realises he's not gonna be hurt, he just relaxes and enjoys life the way it really is.
Nice fellows, aren't they? When the commercial oil field at Barrow Island was declared in 1966, wildlife lovers all around the world were very upset because Barrow is a tremendously rich storehouse of Australian fauna.
It had developed in total isolation for about 6,000 years or more.
My earliest surveys showed that we had to have very strong protection.
So I made up a program.
The oil company adopted it.
And today's results prove that we've saved the wildlife of Barrow Island.
I've yet to explore many of these caves.
Some of them are very deep, going down hundreds of feet into the ground.
All of them are used for habitat, protection, places of safety, for many of the animal species.
These caves are very hot and humid because of this water.
It's coming down, dripping through the limestone above.
And stalactites and stalagmites have formed.
So we get a bit of extra water.
Not permanent water - once in a while.
These caves are formed by water.
Here are the old water levels from the time when the cave was part of the mainland and it was much wetter.
These formations are the dripstone and the floors.
There's a block that fell off and has been cemented in again later on and the dripstone floor that runs out.
The humidity and moisture is what keeps the animals living here.
They don't waste so much water in their normal living.
One of the problems on Barrow Island is to conserve moisture - it's a desert island.
The animal that people usually associate with caves are bats.
There should be some here.
Ah.
Little bats, Eptesicus pumilus.
Little insectivorous fellows that can fly over from the mainland.
They're much bigger than they look with their wings spread out.
Of course, when they're folded up, they can go into a tiny little crevice.
These are little bats.
Some are even smaller.
These are little, little bats - not fully grown yet, left in the hole by their mothers to go out hunting and then come back and feed them.
Bats are mammals.
They're fed on milk in the same way as goats and sheep and even people.
These are the same sort of animals as us.
These caves are full of life.
Tracks everywhere.
The ground's just a mass of them.
This whole area is a warren for rat-kangaroos or boodies.
Even in the cave, they burrow into their tunnels.
Sometimes they're rather shallow - in the cave, they don't go as deep as they used to.
(HISSES) (LAUGHS) Oooh! He's real mad! That's the rat-kangaroo.
Strong claws in the front, because these are digging animals - these burrows are a fair indication of that - and, of course, these enormous teeth.
See the great chisel.
(HISSES) They're insect-eaters, carrion-eaters.
Very sharp, long front claws for digging out insects and roots which they help to supplement their diet.
And, of course, the typical kangaroo back feet, because this is the rat-kangaroo.
The split toe of the kangaroo and the long central toe which is used for kicking and fighting, which this one's been doing.
A long tail.
Fairly fat.
There's a bite mark on the tail.
Few scratch marks.
This is a young animal.
He's probably been just driven out, thrown from the pouch, and driven out of the burrow - an established burrow - by either the father or the mother.
Obviously he's in the best place on the island, because his tail's nice and fat and plump, and that means he's in good condition.
Even though he's just been thrown out by his parents, he's still been able to manage very, very well indeed in this particular place, which is a very, very good place to live in.
Phew! Dust and dirt, trucks, oilmen.
Just another part of the job.
Some things come in by air, but most things like that - pallets and bags - come in by sea, on landing barges.
On the mainland is where they're liable to get rats and mice.
So inspecting these loads is just part of the problem of keeping Barrow Island a Class-A Reserve untouched by exotic animals.
An exotic animal or plant is one that's alien to the native environment, a thing that comes from somewhere else - a rat or a mouse that doesn't live here naturally.
These are the things that we totally prohibit.
Oh! No, he's come off With this offshore wind, he's come off Barrow.
He's a Barrow Island beast.
That one is not on the mainland opposite here.
He's only found on Barrow.
That's the one that lives on the spinifex.
These winds carry them away, bring them offshore.
Usually they go out and drown in the sea - fish eat them.
This one was lucky - he hit the bulkhead up there.
The birds aren't nearly as scientifically important as the mammals and the reptiles, which are island-bound, because the birds fly - they can island-hop.
There's lots of little islands between Barrow and the mainland.
And we get a lot of land bird visitors.
There's a lot of seabirds, which are found all over the coast, and then, of course, there's the visiting land birds which move with the seasons.
There's only six or seven species resident on Barrow.
There's migratory birds that stop in on the regular route from Japan and Siberia down to the West Australian summerings, and then they fly back again.
Barrow Island's a good motel, as it were, for them.
One reason there are so few resident land birds is the lack of surface water.
As a desert island, Barrow gets less than 8 inches of rain a year.
Oddly enough, this lack of water is what saved the Barrow Island fauna.
No water meant no stock.
But the native animals - the Barrow Island animals - have evolved around it and they can live without surface water.
It's very hard for people to understand that animals get their moisture from food and from dew and they don't drink.
(EXHALES) Boy, it's hot! Just like the animals, when it's hot, I come to the water too.
This is biggada.
That's what the boys call it.
Those animals we've just been looking at are biggadas, or euros - Barrow Island hill kangaroos.
They're the lucky ones.
They have this pool of water and they hang around here all the time.
And so their survival depends on this permanent water.
We've got 100 square miles here and there's one permanent water soak in it - this one.
While there's water, the animals will live because they've got a bit of shelter here.
They don't need a lot, provided they can replenish their body moisture.
Just as I'm losing it now, so are all the animals here.
And they use every trick in the evolutionary book and in the survival technique manual.
They use them all.
They recycle their own sweat.
They recycle their own urine.
They seek shelter in ant hills and caves and under spinifex bushes, and they even use the oil rigs and vehicles, if they can.
They come out at night-time only.
They're mainly nocturnal.
They only come out when the dew is on the spinifex.
They eat the dewy stuff and make up a little bit of moisture that way.
The whole basis of survival here is conserving body moisture.
And in fact, at midday, the only things that move are men.
Nothing else moves.
Not even the lizards move.
Men are the only things, because they haven't learned these survival techniques, because they don't have to.
They can replenish their moisture all the time from the canteen and from cups of tea and things like that - perhaps a bit stronger too! This waterhole has the key to about three miles around.
Animals will travel three miles - like the doves, various birds of that nature that need fresh water.
When the really dry seasons come, all of those animals that are totally water-dependent, like finches and doves, rely on this pool of water, and the whole population of the island contracts down to a little nucleus here.
If we were to wipe out this pool of water, we would totally change the environment of the island, no matter what else we may or may not do.
Water is all important.
You learn to read all sorts of things in the bush.
For the naturalist, the best reading is a sandhill and sand dunes.
Here's a whole bunch of things from last night.
It tells you a whole story, a pattern of living.
Hermit crab's gone across here.
There's a hare-wallaby who's gone through.
There's a big goanna, first thing this morning, who's come out.
These tracks are terribly important.
You have to know what they are and you have to know why they're moving.
A good tracker can look at a track like that and say how old the animal was, how long ago it was, male or female, whether he was hungry or just moving or sunning himself or whatever he was doing.
So it's really just like reading a book.
If you take any one of these tracks, follow it through, you'll find something at the end.
Let's pick an interesting one and track it down.
Here's a good one.
Fresh.
Yes this fella's excreted here.
And then that flat wriggling is where he's wiped his backside.
And then he's gone on, heading for cover.
Hasn't come out of this bush, so he's still in it.
You beauty! Oh, did you guess what it was? Oooh! Interesting.
I think there's another one in here.
There he is.
(CHUCKLES) Well, he's saved from a fate far worse than death.
That's a baby Children's python.
They're both Children's pythons.
But that's not mum looking after junior.
Junior would have been lunch.
In the snake world, you don't look after your kids.
If you happen to run across them, you eat them.
Many people try and put human ideas on Oh, steady on there! they try and put human ideas on animals, and it doesn't work.
Animal behaviour is survival as always.
Just put him back where he belongs.
That flickering tongue - he just testing me out.
Snakes have no ears at all, and that tongue is his way of hearing.
It's a vibration pick-up.
Since I'm not afraid - obviously not afraid, because it's a python, therefore quite harmless, no poison at all It can bite, of course.
There's no fear coming from me.
Fear smell is one of the most tricky things in nature.
Many, many people would love to handle animals but they're frightened of them.
And they walk in, and the moment they go near the animal, the animal senses the fear and strikes at them in the case of a snake, or if it's a dog, they bite.
Look at that colour.
It's like opal.
Slides over.
Isn't it amazing how snakes move? You'd wonder how an animal could move like that.
Beautiful movement.
300 pairs of ribs which actually act like legs.
Each pair of ribs has got a scale between them, and they all move like that.
And 300 pairs of legs, each one moving an eighth of an inch, adds up to an awful lot of movement, plus the fact that the body moves sideways and pushes a little bit at the same time.
It's really something.
He's heading off there, heading off into the bush.
He's one of the main smaller predators on Barrow Island.
That one's fully grown.
And they usually live in the ant hills, and at night-time they come out.
And obviously this one got a little bit side-tracked in his hunting and didn't get back to his ant hill, so into cover - same story.
It must be protection from the sun, because the sun is the killer in the desert.
The most important habitat on the entire island is spinifex, and this is it.
There's four sorts here, two prime ones.
This low stuff is habitat for things like lizards and insects and snakes.
High stuff is the habitat for the mammals - the hare-wallabies and things like that.
Now, there's some tracks there.
A clump that size is almost sure to be the home of something.
There - a hare-wallaby.
This is their normal habitat.
They have no other way of protecting themselves.
There it is.
There's the squat.
Very, very prickly to get into.
Part of the job on the island is finding out why animals live where they do.
That means comparative temperatures.
Air temperature at the moment is 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's called a hare-wallaby because it lives in that sort of squat.
That's H-A-R-E, like an English hare, a rabbit which doesn't dig a burrow but lives in a form.
And this is really the form of a hare-wallaby.
No, 86.
86, that's right.
86 - 20 degrees difference exactly outside/inside.
Just check the outside again.
Outside temperature 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's the ring-tailed dragon.
A male.
He's an insect-eater.
One of the many dragon lizards that loves the sun and soaks it up.
There he goes! They don't wait around very long.
What we started to talk about was this ant hill.
Termite mound, really.
The clays are brought up from the ground.
The workers go out each night or in rainy weather and gather little bits of spinifex which they bring in.
They grow a sort of fungus on the spinifex, or triodia, and when the fungus grows, they eat that, and then they discard all the rest of it in these sort of cells on the outside wall - mix them up with clay and dead bodies and excreta, all the waste from the area.
And that makes an insulation for the whole mound.
Because of the insulation of clay and the vegetation holding the moisture, it's an airconditioned quarters.
Lots of animals make use of it.
They bore in through here, for example or here and get into the 96 degrees Fahrenheit inside which is just right for hatching out lizard's eggs and snake's eggs and all those sort of things.
An oilfield needs gravel for construction.
But a gravel pit means the destruction of critical habitat, critical to the survival of animals.
And so we have a method of treating these areas that gives us full regeneration of that critical habitat.
After about a year, this is what it looks like.
That regrowth is two sorts, and we're aiming at it in our whole pattern here.
Some plants grow from seed, like this one, very fast.
Seed coming very quickly and replenishing the soil.
They're colonising plants.
Others come from root stock.
This is the roots, like this plant, this plant.
When the bulldozers move over, the roots are left in the ground and then sucker up and come up again.
So we've got two sorts of plants - the plants that were here originally and are coming up from the original roots and plants that are growing from seed and are colonising.
And this is really the problem of this sort of regeneration.
Because the plants that are growing on this area are richer in moisture and nitrogen, and animals feeding on them get an enormous amount more food.
Lots of people think that giving animals more food is a good thing.
In a closed environment like Barrow Island, it can be very, very bad indeed, and we have to be very careful that our regeneration program doesn't build up animals into a population explosion, because then we have exactly the same problem as though we were killing them off.
So we've got what we aimed for original condition.
And it's only possible on Barrow Island.
Because it's 100 square miles, because we've got total control of the barge and the aeroplanes coming in, because the people here all work for us, our restoration program is built up to suit these problems in this place - a desert island under these conditions.
If I had the same area on the mainland, I'd have to come up with a totally different sort of answer to the restoration problem.
And we get back this very uninviting landscape, it's quite true.
But it sort of grows on you, and eventually it really gets you, because it's full of the most fascinating wildlife there is, and we're gonna keep it that way.