The Hunt (2015) s01e07 Episode Script

Predators give us a dramatic health check on our planet's wild places.
They are the top of the food chain and need an abundance of prey and vast territories for hunting.
But as the human population grows, the conflict between people and wildlife is on the rise.
Over 75 percent of the world's top predators are now declining.
Humans have created this crisis, but we also have the power to resolve it.
We meet the pioneers at the front line, searching for bold solutions.
The question is whether we are prepared to allow room for the natural world's greatest hunters.
The world's forests cover a third of it's land surface, and contain over 50 percent of our wildlife.
In the jungles of India, the top predator is the tiger.
Once on the point of extinction, its numbers are now steadily rising here for the first time in over 50 years.
India is also home to 1.
2 billion people and the fastest-growing economy on the planet.
So, how is the tiger making a comeback? Tigers are the largest of all big cats.
They need a territory of up to 60 square miles and must make a kill every week to survive.
He's so perfectly camouflaged.
A deer could just come close to him without knowing the tiger's there and he'd just go for it.
Dr.
Ullas Karanth from the Wildlife Conservation Society is the world's leading expert on tigers.
Watching a tiger hunt is a dream, it's just spectacular.
You realize what a perfectly-designed killing machine this animal is.
500 years ago, there were over 300,000 tigers in India.
But in the last century, their numbers fell to just 2,000, due to a combination of poaching and the loss of half of their forest.
In the late 1970s, tigers were almost on the verge of extinction in India.
But strong measures by the Indian government to create protected areas and a strong law enforcement effort led to a major recovery better than anything else the world has seen.
As a result, tigers have come back big time in many places.
There are now around 2,500 tigers in India and their numbers are steadily rising.
The problem now is not so much a shortage of tigers, it's a lack of space for them.
India's human population has doubled in the last 30 years.
With so many people living in national parks, conflict is inevitable.
These enclaves make a living out of raising crops, raising livestock and they're competing for space and food with tigers directly.
So, this forces a conflict on them and eventually the tigers lose out and people lose out.
The government has come up with a radical solution paying villagers to move out of their homes, to make way for tigers.
Relocating local people out of the forest is a highly emotive issue.
India has been strongly criticized in the past for carrying out forced mass evictions.
It is extremely controversial, because in some places, it's been done badly, where people who have moved out were forcibly moved out.
But in many other places, it's been done right.
Ullas' daughter Krithi also works for the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Her job is to manage their village relocations and make sure they're done responsibly.
Mani and his wife Jyothi have volunteered to leave the forest in return for compensation.
They feel very strong ties to this place, even though they have a very difficult life here.
And constantly living in fear of elephants, leopards and tigers.
When you have little children, those challenges are even greater.
Mani and Jyothi are leaving their old way of life behind.
India is changing very rapidly and you have to sometimes make really hard choices and sometimes that involves moving people.
And I'm very proud of the way we've done it right, helping them through every step of the way.
But not everyone is happy about being moved out.
It's the fear of the outside and unknown that is keeping them here.
Once that fear is broken and they know they are better off, everybody wants out.
Mani and Jyothi are the latest of 631 families to leave Nagarhole National Park.
In total, almost 30,000 people across India have been relocated.
As humans move out of the forest, tigers move in.
A very strong proof that relocation works is to look at some of the tiger reserves where it's been done well.
People have moved out, prey numbers have multiplied and in many cases, the tiger numbers have doubled or tripled.
There are many, many such cases in India.
Mani and Jyothi are coming to live in a newly-built relocation center.
Here, they will have to find jobs and fend for themselves.
Each adult receives the equivalent of 10,000 pounds, a huge sum in India.
This is paid part cash and part in the form of a new house and three acres of land.
There is a widespread view that forest-dwelling people should live in remote locations, cut-off from all signs of civilization, eating fruits and nuts, and that's far removed from reality.
What these people want is good education, modern amenities and health.
And all of that is not available in the remote jungle.
People want to live in cities and you're going to see this huge transition, where India is going from 70 percent of the country being rural to 50 percent of the country being urban in the next 20 years and this is going to open up land.
And once you move people out, the vegetation comes back, the prey numbers rebound and then tiger numbers come back.
So, ecological recovery takes time, but I think nature knows how to heal itself.
Relocation may be an extreme solution, but India's tigers are proof that given enough space, predators can bounce back.
The greatest tropical forest on Earth is the Amazon.
It covers almost half of South America and is home to more species than anywhere else on the planet.
In the jungles of Venezuela, the canopy's deadliest hunter, the harpy eagle.
This is the most powerful bird of prey in the world.
It has a two-metre wing-span, and it hunts silently, on the lookout for monkeys and sloths.
The harpy eagle's territory stretches over 30 square miles.
At the heart of it, the nest, with a very hungry chick.
At two months old, the chick is vulnerable and is fiercely guarded by her mother.
Down below on the forest floor, others are also keeping a close watch.
Dr.
Alexander Blanco monitors 20 different pairs of harpy eagles, trying to police this area of forest and keep the nest sites safe from human encroachment.
Throughout the harpy eagle's range, across Central and South America, an area of forest the size of Switzerland is being cut down every year.
Alexander is studying the impacts of this loss on the harpy eagle, and to do that, he must first get himself 35 meters up to the nest in the canopy.
When the chick reaches six months old, before she fledges, Alexander must climb up and bring her down.
He'll then fit a small radio transmitter on the chick, so he can keep track of her after she's left the nest.
The mother eagle could attack, so Alexander is wearing a stab proof vest.
It's dangerous work, but it's driven by a lifelong passion for the harpy eagle.
As soon as he reaches the nest, Alexander must secure the harpy eagle's deadliest weapons, it's talons.
Today, the female is keeping her distance, but Alexander has been attacked several times.
Okay.
But as Alexander starts his descent, he realizes there's a problem with his ropes.
Amazingly, both Alexander and the eagle survive the fall.
But Alexander breaks both his wrist and his leg.
Alexander's assistant Don Blas brings the young eagle back to camp, to keep an eye on her.
Don Blas attaches the radio as planned.
Very little is known about these eagles, so this transmitter will help the scientists understand how they survive in a disappearing forest.
Finally, the team return the young eagle to its nest, under the watchful eye of her anxious parents.
The adult eagles waste no time bringing in more prey and life at the nest returns to normal.
The harpy eagle is now 18 months old.
Alexander is returning to study her progress for the first time since his fall.
The transmitter on the eagle sends out a radio signal and the scientists can now track her through the forest as she learns to hunt.
She can now recognize her prey, but she's doesn't expect it to fight back.
But Alexander's studies show the monkeys and sloths that form the eagle's main prey are disappearing as the forest is cleared.
In the face of this crisis, the harpy eagle has proved to be remarkably resourceful.
The eagles are starting to hunt ground-dwelling prey in more broken areas.
There are now less than 50,000 harpy eagles left.
At the current rate of deforestation, their numbers will drop by a third in the next 50 years.
The only hope is that Alexander's data will persuade governments to protect their habitat, even if he has to risk his life in the process.
Nearly half of the world's land surface is covered by grasslands and deserts and none are richer than the plains of Africa.
This vast savanna is home to some of the most celebrated predators on the planet.
And the most celebrated of them all is the lion.
The Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania has the highest density of lions on Earth.
There are four prides of lions here and they're engaged in a constant war with their human neighbors, the Maasai people.
The Maasai rely on their cattle for survival.
When the lions attack their livestock, the Maasai retaliate by killing them.
This is an ancient conflict between warrior and predator that's been played out for millennia.
The human population here has nearly tripled in the last 20 years and the conflict has now reached crisis point.
Craig Packer is the world's top lion expert.
He and assistant Ingela Jansson are trying to stop the Maasai from killing lions and allow them to breed in peace.
Those animals have to run the gauntlet of Maasai with spears.
And so, with that kind of armed guard all the way round the crater, it's very difficult for the males to be able to come into the crater from somewhere else to rejuvenate this population.
Time is running out for the lions of Ngorongoro.
Craig has roughly 100 of them and the Maasai are killing an average of ten a year.
The one with the scar, MG103 she had cubs in May and two of hers were lost and I didn't even see what sex they were.
Whenever one of our study lions is speared, it's like right, that's just one more nail in the coffin.
It's like one more example of why something must be done to address this problem.
The only way to solve the conflict here is by brokering peace between these two ancient enemies.
Ingela and Craig have employed a team of Maasai scouts from within the community.
Their job is to document lion attacks and try and stop people from retaliating.
So, I'm asking them "Do you like lions?" And yeah, there was some murmuring "yes" but then she said, "No, I don't like lions", because a lion attacked her son last year.
Oh, he's like 22 years old.
He went then to defend their livestock and then he got into a close fight with a lion.
After four years of Ingela's incredible dedication to slowly, gradually build trust with people, people are very much are more likely to tell her what's happened.
They might even have speared a lion in retaliation.
So, she can get a better picture of what really happens here.
And therefore, how best to improve circumstances.
Craig, Ingela and their scouts have their work cut out.
The war between people and lions has been waged here for over two million years.
And there is one deadly tradition that's still widely practiced today, the ritual killing of lions.
The team are traveling to a remote settlement on the edge of the Serengeti.
This is the front line in the conflict with lions.
We've come out here today to attend a Maasai wedding in an area that's had a lot of ritual lion killing over the last decade.
One of the things that Ingela has learned in her research is that these hunting parties often assemble at an event like this.
So, as you can see, everybody's getting worked up and that level of excitement.
It's like they've got all this energy and all that testosterone ready to go and one of the things they really get excited about doing is going to hunt a lion.
Ingela is hoping that the presence of her scouts may be enough to deter the warriors from hunting lions.
They know these guys, they're friends, they're relatives and everyone knows here that they work for Lion Conservation, so they kind of know that they can't go hunting if that person is present.
Ingela's head scout, Roimen, comes from this area.
He killed two lions by himself in ritual hunts when he was younger, and has the respect of his fellow warriors.
Today, no-one is going hunting and the lions in this area are safe.
But it may take decades to solve the conflict, and in the mean time, the lion is slowly disappearing in the grass lands of Africa.
There is one hunter that's the most endangered of all the predators on the plains.
The African wild dog.
Wild dogs are highly social animals.
Before hunting, they carry out a greeting ritual, reinforcing bonds within the pack.
They also care for their old and injured, making sure no dog goes hungry or gets left behind.
But these greetings are becoming a rarity.
Wild dogs have lost over 90 percent of their former range and there are now just 6,000 remaining in the whole of Africa.
Mike-Bravo, go ahead.
Yeah, we have the hot springs pack just upstream.
Copy that, going there right now.
It's five o'clock in the morning and a team from the Zambian Carnivore Programme are tracking a pack of wild dogs.
Their study animals are getting caught in the crossfire of a war with illegal poaching and Thandi and Henry are trying to keep watch over them.
It's a huge area and to look for animals like that is like looking for a needle in a haystack and worse still, these dogs are moving at really high speeds.
They're heading out hunting, huh? They're joined on their search by air support.
Team leader Dr.
Matt Becker is spotting from above, trying to work out which direction the dogs are heading.
Tango-Mike-Tango- Mike-Mike-Bravo.
Mike Bravo, go ahead.
Yeah, we have the hot springs pack, got a visual, all 15 of them, just upstream from the Kalousie.
Copy that, we'll head there right now and try to keep up as best as we can.
Okay, sounds good.
Wild dog territories stretch over 600 square miles.
They're constantly on the move, so the scientists track them using radio collars.
If you don't follow them on the ground for a couple of days, you often have no idea where they may be.
So the quickest, easiest thing to do is get up in the air and pick up the signal from a long ways away, and then, we'll radio those locations to our ground teams, who will come in with their Land Rovers and follow the dogs on the ground and collect all sorts of critical information on them.
- Mike Bravo, I copy that.
Do you have the location right now? Yeah, I've got them.
11 o'clock, moving in now.
Oh, that's great.
The team observe the pack hunting almost every day.
Once they've selected their target, it's all about teamwork.
When they actually encounter wildebeest or other prey, you'll see them reacting to where the other dogs are running as well.
They are very aware of what's going on and what their other pack members are doing.
You know, they take down wildebeest that one dog can't possibly do by itself, so through working together and helping each other out, they're able to take down big animals like that.
No matter how many times I see a wild dog hunt, it's always amazing.
The grace and speed of the dogs in a hunt is something that you can't get with any other species.
There's nothing like wild dogs and if we lose them, there will never be anything like them again.
The greatest threat to wild dogs comes from humans.
The dogs are getting caught in snares intended for other animals.
Zambia's growing population is creating a huge and increasing demand for commercial bushmeat, with poachers targeting species like gazelles.
But snares are indiscriminate and thousands of other animals are caught by accident.
With the dogs in constant danger, the team keeps an eye on them, in case they get caught in snares.
To follow the dogs, they need to collar only one animal, as they normally stick together as a pack.
Once the dog is safely down, the team can slowly move in.
A lot of them are getting snared.
And so, these radio collars enable us to get an animal, find it and de-snare it.
So, this collar may save this dog's life, it may save its brothers and sisters and other pack members.
So, once the pack member is down, the other dogs will stay in the area.
As you can see, some in the background so that makes it easier for the immobilized dog to join the group after the drugs wear off.
When he comes round, the young male is unsteady on his feet, but he soon catches up with the rest of the pack.
I think the best sight of the whole darting is when the dog gets up and rejoins the pack.
It doesn't get any better than that.
The team are searching for a pair of females that they're worried about.
It's not unusual for females to leave the pack to look for new males, but these two sisters have run into trouble.
A few weeks ago, we de-snared one of the females, she had a snare around her waist and was actually one of the worst we've ever seen.
If you look very closely, you can also see just where the wire was.
Her sister's also got an injured back leg.
We can't see any open wounds at the moment, but she's clearly not putting any weight on it at all.
And that does not bode well for them, when it comes to hunting, looking for food.
Looks like they have not eaten for a while, now.
They look very thin.
I don't think they have a good chance of survival.
We will keep monitoring them and see how it goes.
It's going to be difficult.
We might just end up picking up two empty collars in the next few weeks.
Sadly, the snared female doesn't make it and is found dead a month later, but her sister manages to join another pack.
Matt's team works closely with anti-poaching patrols from the South Luangwa Conservation Society and the Zambian Wildlife Authority, looking for snares and searching vehicles for bushmeat and guns.
But as always, the greatest weapon in the war against poaching is the next generation.
This is conservation club.
Every week, Thandi and Henry take children on safari, so they can appreciate wildlife and the opportunities it brings.
How many people have seen wild dogs before? They hunt in packs of course, and they prefer to chase the animal down.
Probably the most important aspect of our work is ensuring that the people that are most responsible for conservation of wild dogs and wild life in general are the Zambians themselves.
Henry and Thandi are fantastic and are continuing to help kids get engaged in wildlife conservation.
For those of you that have never seen a snare before, this is what it looks like.
The mechanism is so that it should tighten as the animal struggles to get away.
The best thing that can come out of this is a generation of people that are interested in wildlife.
Regardless of what field they join later on, they could be teachers, or bankers, or whatever, but just environmentally-minded people.
The animals are important, because they are the sources of income that can develop our Zambia, our nation.
When I grow up, I just want to teach people about wildlife.
Just like Mr.
Henry do.
Oceans cover over 70 percent of the planet.
This immense blue wilderness is home to the largest predator that's ever lived The blue whale.
Up to 30 meters long and weighing 200 tonnes.
Since commercial whaling was banned 30 years ago, off the coast of California, its numbers have almost fully recovered.
But they face a new problem.
Here, blue whales are feeding on krill, in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
Container ships plough through these waters 24 hours a day, heading in and out of Los Angeles.
When the bow strikes a whale, it's usually fatal.
Some scientists have suggested that this could be one reason why the blue whale population here is not increasing.
But proving it requires very challenging research.
So, we'll go through the area where we've had the sightings and it looks like both those whales moved last night to the shipping lanes, right in that zone On the MS Shearwater in LA harbor, a team of marine biologists are heading out to hunt for blue whales.
Their mission is to investigate the impacts of ship strike.
I think we'll have a chance at this angle, it looks like he's back into a little bit more of a traveling mode.
John Calambokidis from Cascadia Research is the world's top expert on blue whales and has been studying them for 29 years.
I first became aware of the ship strike issue in 2007, when we had at least four blue whales that were struck and killed by ships just in Southern California in a few months' period.
The port of Los Angeles Long Beach is the largest shipping complex in the United States.
Container traffic here has increased ten-fold in the last 30 years.
This spot right here probably has some of the densest concentration of ships that will funnel through here, coming into Los Angeles Long Beach.
This also, right here, is a canyon that has quite a bit of krill for blue whales to feed on.
And we've often got concentrations of blue whales right in this same area.
John is tagging a number of whales to see how they respond to the ships.
Right now, we have a whale that's in the shipping lane, so we're going to try to take this opportunity to put a tag on this whale, monitor both what it's doing and get the reaction of the whale.
Deploying a suction cup tag requires precision timing.
This first critical point, till you figure out what a whale's doing, it's very easy to lose it.
Right now, there's a little bit of pressure.
He may come up again here.
Yep, here he comes.
All right! Let's go.
Coming up.
Okay, nice job there.
So, that's attached with a suction cup.
We hope it will stay on for something of the order of a few hours.
These modern day whalers with hi-tech harpoons are hunting for new information about the whales' behavior and why they don't simply swim out of harm's way.
Blue whales don't seem to respond very strongly to the ship presence.
You think about a long ship, the engine of that ship that's generating the noise and the propeller are all the way at the far end.
What might be of danger to the blue whale might be 300 meters in front of that.
The tags reveal how much time the whales spend in the shipping lanes, especially at night.
The first thing that's rather surprising is that the whale crosses the shipping lanes twice.
And we see that the blue whales are spending about twice as much of their time at night near the surface, where they will be vulnerable to being struck by a ship, compared to the day time.
John is now working with the authorities to try to divert the shipping lanes and slow the vessels down.
All sides are keen to find a solution and allow the whales to feed in peace.
The polar regions are the least-inhabited and the most remote wildernesses on Earth.
Here in the Arctic, the top predator is the polar bear.
Over almost half a million years, these bears have adapted to the Arctic's dramatic annual changes of season.
They're the only predators to hunt on sea ice and they rely on it for almost all of their prey.
But due to changes in the global climate, the ice is getting thinner.
And their season for hunting is getting shorter.
To prove this is happening, you need hard evidence.
And there's one team of scientists who've been collecting that evidence for the last 30 years.
What is that? It might be a swan.
-Oh, just this side of the ridge? -Yeah.
In West Hudson Bay in Northern Canada, Government biologists are carrying out the world's longest study on polar bears.
Oh, there's a bear, right below me, holy smokes.
I think if I was going to do this guy, I'd try to get on his left and just push up onto this ridge here.
If we get him on this ridge, I think we're laughing.
The scientists are like health visitors for bears, checking the pulse of the local population.
For Dr.
Evan Richardson, summer is the perfect time to call.
As the bears are resting on land right now, living off their stored fat reserves, waiting for the sea ice to come back in the fall, in November and December, it really gives us a good opportunity to come and study this particular population of bears.
The bears need to be immobilized before the biologists can get to work.
I'll just keep pushing him in the direction he's headed now, okay? Dr.
Nick Lunn's team has darted over 5,000 bears since the project first started.
That bear's going into the water.
It's a place they consider safe, they head out to sea.
And we don't want to be darting him in the water, so we need to move him back out where we can get a safe shot and have him go down on the land.
Though it's stressful for the individuals in the short-term, this research could help save the entire species in the long-term.
Once the dart is in, the crew wait at a safe distance until the bear is down.
They must be extremely cautious when leaving the helicopter.
Working around polar bear country, one always has to be vigilant and aware that there are other bears around, they're curious, they're going to come in.
We have firearms, as a protective measure, just in case of an incident.
Let's see if we can reposition him, which might be easier said than done.
The team have to work fast.
Once the anesthetic wears off, this bear will quickly become very dangerous.
This bear was first caught back in 2003 and he's got about another ten capture histories.
We collect hair samples, we'll take fat samples, we'll take a few standard measurements.
Head length 343.
So now, we're going to get a straight line body length of this bear.
His canines are one.
Tooth wear is one.
By updating their health records each year, the team can keep an eye on this bear's condition.
The number is 016.
Typically, male bears would be 10 percent larger than this particular individual, so the bears are actually shorter, smaller than they used to be in the 1980s and 1990s.
We believe it's probably related to nutritional stress and the population and reduced access to food.
The bears are going hungry because the winters here have become warmer and shorter and the summers longer and hotter.
The bears need to see ice as a platform to hunt their prey, to travel, they mate out on the sea ice, but we see sea ice breaking up around two and a half to three weeks earlier and forming around two and a half to three weeks later, so the bears have less time to feed.
They're thinner, they don't have the same amount of fat on their bodies.
We're seeing fewer cubs being produced, declines in cubs' survival, bears coming ashore in poor condition, weighing a lot less now than they did 30 years ago.
The scientists can now prove that these bears are, on average, 20 percent smaller than when their study first started.
If the loss of ice continues, the polar bear will gradually become extinct.
Climate change is happening fairly rapidly, so even though these bears are really good at fasting and living off their body reserves and going long periods without food, what we're seeing is, we're starting to push these bears to their physiological limits, and as they're pushed to the limits of their body reserves, obviously, that has implications for their survival.
More than any other predator, the polar bear has evolved to cope with dramatic changes in the Arctic seasons.
But with the current pace of climate change, the bears simply cannot adapt fast enough.
If polar bears are to survive, we will all have to play our part.
If people do smart things, like different ways of producing energy, I think we will have room for large predators as well as people living really well.
If humans are going to survive on this Earth and do so in harmony with other species, we're going to have to find a more sustainable way to live than we do, and a lot of that is going to have to involve lower levels of consumption.
We have to accept the fact that we can't just blindly go on the trajectory we're currently on and expect things to work out well.
We've got to make changes.
We need to start thinking about the ways the whole world can contribute.
These precious animals belong to all of us.
These are a world resource and the world as a whole should guard these animals against poachers, habitat loss and protect them into the future.
If we can't save the planet's most charismatic predators, what hope is there for the rest of the natural world? Wildlife has the power to recover and people have the power to change.
What happens next depends on us.