Natural World (1983) s23e05 Episode Script

The Andes, the longest chain of mountains on the planet and still growing It lies along the edge of south America like an immense dragon On its back, savage spines At its head, fire it is forged by pieces of the earth's crust crashing together, opening volcanos, pushing up and creating different and unexpected worlds The mountains hide extraordinary life Unique and surprising It is life thriving at the extreme hidden among the spines of the dragon's back If the Andes is like a dragon this is the tip of the dragon's tail 5000 miles from its head At south America's southernmost point the mountains seem to fall into the Antarctic Ocean Snow becomes glaciers which break off as icebergs Cape Horn and the world's roughest stretch of sea For the animals that live here this is just the way the world is they cope In fact, they thrive When penguins seek shelter and some peace there're hundreds of islands here with glassy fjords and deep channels Above them, the Andes Starting from the tip of Chile and going up the coast there are 1000 miles of almost vertical forest It's untouched the least explored place on earth The penguins explore a bit though They land where the mountains meet the water and start climbing They are not mountaineering for the challenge of it They are looking for a safe place to nest All penguins have to lay eggs on solid ground It's just that the only land for these Magellenic penguins Once a year, they return home to the Andes The penguins who mate for life find a safe shelter or dig a burrow The female lays and the two of them take turns sitting and fishing It's an arduous life hunting in storms and climbing mountains but it's undisturbed There's nobody here for hundreds of square miles These forests are barely known to science only sketchily studied It's a strange assortment, with everything seeming slightly askew This, for instance, might look like a rat but it's an opossum a marsupial with a baby-carrying pouch It's hardly changed since south America was a flat island and the mainland animals were dinosaurs Opossums are far older than the Andes themselves This might look like somebody's tabby cat it's not It's half the size It's a kodkod, the smallest wildcat No one knows much about it, except that like a bird, it builds its nest high in the trees that its kittens live up there as if they were birds Nobody even knew it existed until scientists came here It's the most secret animal found yet in a land full of secrets What's weird here is the scale of things This is the world's smallest deer emerging from under a rhubarb leaf It's a pudu, 12 inches tall at the shoulder A land of little animals outsized plants and right through the middle of it all a monstrous glacier grinding through the forest On the glacier's edges, wild fuschia is visited by fire-crowned hummingbirds Nowhere else in the world are hummingbirds and glaciers next to each other or hummingbirds and penguins for that matter This is a good day for fishing Usually there's high wind and pouring rain In fact, southern Chile gets 15 feet of rain a year 3 times more than Scotland But stormy weather isn't a penguin's biggest problem out there are sea lions which thrive on penguins These southern seas are rich with fish and fish eaters and the eaters of fish eaters It's this braying that gave the Magellanic penguin its more descriptive name the jackass penguin Killer whales or not, the penguins have to fish Once underwater, they can suddenly fly It's very cold water In fact, everything at this southern end of the Andes is cold It's used to puzzle early explorers After all, the same latitude in the northern hemisphere would be Venice or the south of France But here, there's a glacier the San Rafael It moves several hundred yards a year grinding the mountainsides making the peaks ever steeper and sharper It wasn't until 1962, that the source of this and other glaciers was discovered A solid sheet of ice, the size of Wales cooling the whole region There was a time - the last Ice Age, when these peaks were under the ice cap the glaciers carved them into spines Today the ice has receded and the still growing mountains are pushing higher The peaks reach above the clouds Every day, the warm wet wind off the Pacific hits the mountains is forced up becomes cold and delivers rain or snow As it dries, it heads east to the Patagonian Desert Sheltered by the peaks of Torres del Paine and watered by the melting snow is a sanctuary for wildlife Its guard is the guanaco the New World camel and wild relative of the domesticated llama and alpaca This is a male stationed on a hillock protecting his females from other males and from predators not that a fox would threaten this guanaco No, the killer he's watching for is this one, a puma The animals that puma stalk may differ throughout their huge range, Canada to Chile But the hunting technique whenever there's a heard of anything, is pretty much the same Circle the animals and try to spot the old, the young, the weak Then charge in at 40 miles an hour When this puma catches her breath, she'll eat as much as she can Even with the help of cubs, it's not possible to eat the whole thing in one go Almost anywhere else the puma would drag its leftovers to a hiding place but out here, there isn't one The best the mother can do is to cover the food with grass and twigs It's summer and the cubs are about 3 months old Their eyes are still baby blue but by next spring, they will turn as tawny as their mother's That's if the cubs survive that long which isn't a certainty Carcasses are few and far between so condors soar hundreds of miles to spot a meal With its 9-foot wingspan, it's the biggest flying bird in the world the size of a small car As with vultures anywhere, it only takes one to find the food then the rest gather For other animals a congregation of condors could also mean a meal or a meal lost A fox is no match for a condor It doesn't have to be, only quick and ready to take advantage of the squabbles that break out among the condors themselves They need to feed is more urgent because summer is short here and almost all the animals have young This fox, by the way, is a zorro In Spanish, zorro means fox but this is different, found only in south America Zorros resemble coyotes as much as they do other foxes Zorros and pumas are the two main carnivores here But zorros live shorter lives, with many cubs dying from cold or being snatched by eagles Pumas take zorro cubs too Zorros move house a lot It's a way of outfoxing pumas that might have spotted the den It's also a w