Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild (2012) s01e03 Episode Script

1
For me, as for countless others,
the natural world
is the greatest of all treasures.
And yet, in my lifetime
we have damaged it more severely
than in the whole of
the rest of human history.
Indeed, significant parts of it now
are in danger of total destruction.
When I first came to Borneo in 1956,
the rainforest stretched unbroken
on either side of the river
for hundreds of miles.
Today, it's very different.
Just beyond the trees lining
the riverbank
there is nothing
but oil palm plantations.
And the forest and all the rich
variety of animals and plants
that it had once contained
has been destroyed.
And yet, as we have transformed
the natural world,
so our attitudes towards it
have changed fundamentally.
Again and again, I have seen
the impoverishment and desolation
caused by the way we have ruthlessly
taken what we want from the land,
no matter what the cost.
But I have also seen how
the natural world,
given just the slightest chance,
can manage to survive.
And I have met the far-sighted
and dedicated conservationists
who've laboured to protect it.
People who by their own example
have shown that there is something
that can be done about it.
I was born in 1926, at the end of the
age of the great naturalist collectors.
It was a time
when it was perfectly acceptable
to go out and collect creatures
from the wild.
If the London Zoo wanted
a new animal or a replacement,
they simply commissioned
a collector to go out and get it.
And in the 1950s,
as a young television producer
obsessed with the natural world,
I was delighted when we got permission
to go along with an expedition
from the London Zoo.
It was going to go to West Africa
and be headed by one of the zoo's
animal-collecting experts, Jack Lester.
I thought it would be a good idea
if we called the series
Quest For something or other,
so I asked Jack Lester whether
in fact there was an animal there
that we could have a quest for
that no one had seen before.
And he said, "Oh, yes, and it's called
Picathartes gymnocephalus."
So I said, "Well, that's not really
a very catchy,
Quest for Picathartes gymnocephalus.
Isn't there another name?"
And Jack said, "Yes, it's also called
the bald-headed rock fowl."
And I said, "Well, even
Quest for a Bald-Headed Rock Fowl
isn't likely to grab people, you know."
So in the end we just called it
Zoo Quest.
We spent weeks travelling around
the country,
collecting all kinds of
mammals, reptiles and birds.
Everywhere we went, we showed people
a picture of Picathartes
and finally found a village chief
who said the birds nested nearby.
And so they did.
In the finished programmes, of course,
we didn't reveal this immediately.
Instead we ended each by saying,
"So we went on to look for Picathartes."
Nonetheless, we were a bit concerned
as to whether anyone
would really care about Picathartes.
But I was reassured
when I was travelling down
Oxford Street in an open car
and a bus driver leant
out of his cab and he said,
"Hello, Dave. Well, are we or are we not
going to find Pica-bloody-thartes?"
So I knew that actually we had
made an impact with somebody.
And the bus driver got his answer
in the last episode.
We took our places behind the hide.
And now came the most tense moment
of the expedition,
the moment for which
we'd all waited so long.
Would we see the adult birds?
And then suddenly we saw one,
a few yards away in the twilight
of the bush, preening itself.
This was enormous excitement.
Then up it fluttered onto the nest.
And as it did so,
the other parent flew across
and drove the first one away.
This was a great thrill for us,
for as this happened,
we became the first Europeans
ever to see the white-necked Picathartes
on its nest.
Having filmed Picathartes,
we managed to collect a young nestling
and brought it back, together
with sun birds and emerald starlings,
to live here in the bird house
in the London Zoo.
It had been my first opportunity
to film animals in the wild
and this happy collaboration
with the London Zoo
resulted in a whole succession
of Zoo Quest series.
Sadly, after the first,
Jack became seriously ill.
So I took over
and tried to give the impression
that I knew what I was doing.
It's important to grab his tail
as soon as you grab his head.
Otherwise, he'll wrap
his great coils round you
and give you a very nasty squeeze.
I was more than happy
that we'd been able to take it away
without it harming us.
First I grabbed the tail
with my left hand
and then tickled his tummy with
my right, so that he doubled up,
lost his grip and out he came.
Of course, I wouldn't
behave like that today.
Things have changed.
Thanks to their breeding programmes,
zoos can get most of what they want
without going to catch them in the wild.
But that was then.
Caring for the creatures we collected
took so much time,
it eventually became part of
the programme's story.
Once the animals we had collected
had settled in at the zoo,
we got permission to take
some of the more interesting ones
to the studios to show them off
on live television.
And here he is, twice as large,
I should say, but still just as hungry,
and still making this
extraordinary little noise
which he used to make
out there in Borneo.
And here he is in the studio.
He can bite, he's got
quite powerful fangs.
Um, I have been bitten by a python,
it doesn't hurt much.
Well, helping me Helping me
control this python
is Mr Lan warn from the reptile house
in the London Zoo,
who in fact has it in his care now.
But he's quite a
quite a handful now isn't he?
These You could quite imagine
how these powerful coils
- Oh, yes.
- could really give you quite a crush.
Our attitudes to wildlife
were so very different in the '50s.
But then they were
about to undergo a transformation.
Ducks and geese are
decreasing in the world rather rapidly,
it would be a great pity, I think,
if they were allowed
to disappear altogether
or even to become extremely rare.
In the marshy field
we've built special paddocks
and in them we've established
this collection
of ducks and geese and swans.
As a student, there was one person
perhaps more than anyone else
who fuelled my excitement
about the natural world.
He was the most celebrated
broadcaster of his time on radio.
Of course, there was no television.
Little did I think
that within a few years,
he and I were to become friends.
That man was Peter Scott,
who founded The Wildfowl
and Wetlands Trust
and created its first reserve
around his home here at Slimbridge.
Peter Scott made me realise
for the first time
that there were species of
animal around the world
that were in danger
of becoming extinct.
It was a radical idea at the time.
Well, if we decide that we have got
a responsibility to prevent animals
from becoming extinct,
what can we do about it?
Well, in extreme cases,
we can, and I think we should,
take into captivity a proportion
of the population
into some zoo or park or reserve
and try and breed them there
and build up the stock.
Now, here at the Wildfowl Trust,
we have done that with the Nene,
or Hawaiian goose.
The Nene evolved
on the island of Hawaii,
but in the 19th century,
colonial settlers brought
dogs, pigs, rats and mongooses, all of
which preyed heavily on the Nene.
By the late 1940s, there were
only 30 individual birds left.
Peter Scott, as a young man,
had been a passionate hunter
of wildfowl.
Now he became their saviour.
In 1950 he arranged
for a few of them to be brought
halfway around the world to Slimbridge,
so that he could try to breed
them in captivity.
And he succeeded, because
these are some of their descendents.
Wonderfully tame, and now
they have been introduced
not only to other wildlife sanctuaries,
but back to Hawaii.
Until I'd met Peter here at Slimbridge
and seen these Nene,
it had never occurred to me
that a species could become
totally extinct in my lifetime.
But Peter and the Nene
changed all that,
and I began to wonder seriously
about what I myself could do to become
involved in the protection of wildlife.
Come on.
In those days,
I was rather more interested
in mammals than I was in birds,
but nonetheless Peter and I
regularly compared notes.
One day, I ran into him
at the Natural History Museum.
"Where are you off to next?" he said
I said, "We're going to Madagascar."
"Madagascar?" he said
"The Madagascar pochard
is one of the rarest ducks
in the world, the only one
that we haven't got
in the collection at Slimbridge."
And I said, "Peter, if you want
Madagascar pochard, leave it to me,
I'll bring you back a pair."
And off we went to Madagascar.
Well, of course, actually
I was in Madagascar looking for lemurs
and we got the first film
ever of the Indri, who were the biggest
of the living lemurs,
and other things, too.
And the series was going down quite well
when I happened to meet Peter again.
And as I met him,
I suddenly thought
"I forgot all about
the Madagascar pochard."
So I went over and I said,
"Peter, I'm terribly sorry.
We did look very hard but we never
found your Madagascar pochard."
"Didn't you?" he said "Oh
I was looking at the show last night
and there were about a thousand of them
behind you
as you were talking to camera."
Clearly, both my memory and my
ornithology needed a bit of improvement.
By now, Peter had his own
natural history series on television.
It was called Look.
At the same time, he and others
were devising a strategy
for protecting wildlife worldwide.
A World Wildlife Charter,
to meet what amounts to
a state of emergency for wildlife.
And now we've got a World Wildlife Fund,
which is being launched
to give it teeth.
In 1961, Peter became
one of the founding members
of the World Wildlife Fund,
as it then was.
One of the most charismatic
and endangered animals of the time
was a Chinese creature, the giant panda.
Its simple black and white form
made it an excellent subject
for a logo and Peter designed it.
This is his original,
and to my mind, much the best version.
The Fund was
the first international body
to spend money on conservation projects
around the world,
and one of its first projects was
to help the endangered and rare animals
on the Galapagos Islands.
And these extraordinary islands
still remain wonderlands today.
This is the giant Galapagos tortoise.
They live longer than any other animal
on Earth, well over 150 years.
They weigh up to a quarter of a tonne
and have shells over a metre across.
They really are giants.
Some 15 subspecies of these reptiles
evolved on the Galapagos,
but in the 17th century,
human beings discovered the islands.
The tortoises were a valuable
source of fresh meat,
and visiting sailors
took them away by the thousand.
By the middle of the 20th century,
one third of the original subspecies
had been totally exterminated
and only 3,000 of the remainder
still survived.
In the early 1960s,
the World Wildlife Fund
got involved
with trying to halt the decline.
They put money into the
Charles Darwin Research Centre
on the Galapagos, which collected
tortoise eggs from the wild
and carefully raised them
away from predators.
By the 1970s, when I first
visited the Galapagos,
the first captive-bred tortoises
were ready to be released.
And a dramatic discovery
had been made on Pinta island.
The subspecies that evolved there
had long been thought extinct,
but in 1971 a single male tortoise
was discovered there.
He was brought back
to the Charles Darwin Research Station,
where he quickly became a celebrity
in his own right.
This is the rarest living animal
in all the world.
There is none rarer.
This is Lonesome George.
It was hoped that a female
Pinta tortoise might be found
with which he could breed,
but it was not to be.
Lonesome George, it seems, is doomed
to be the last of his kind.
Sadly, he died in June 2012.
But other surviving Galapagos tortoises
have had to deal with
a different threat.
Goats.
They were brought to the island
long ago by both sailors and settlers
and have now gone wild.
They crop the vegetation so severely
that there's little or nothing
left for the tortoises.
So the island's conservation authorities
decided to eradicate feral goats
on several of the islands
so that the vegetation could recover,
and the tortoises get
their natural food back.
Now on Isabella Island,
as I saw for myself in 2008,
the plants have returned
to their former lushness,
and the tortoises' future
has been secured.
Saving large, dramatic species
was one of conservationists' first aims.
But soon we realised
that true conservation means
protecting the entire habitat,
of which this spectacular
species is just one element.
And one way of doing
that is to establish
nature reserves or national parks.
The first national park in Africa was
created in 1925 around the volcanoes
that lie in the heart of the continent.
Its aim was to protect
the rare mountain gorillas
which were being killed by
trophy hunters and poachers.
But what has happened there since
has made it quite clear
that effective conservation isn't just
a question of governments
drawing lines on a map.
Very often it requires
the passion and determination
of one highly motivated individual,
as I saw myself in Rwanda.
An American woman, Dian Fossey,
had been studying the mountain gorillas
in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park
since 1967.
By patiently sitting near
to them year after year,
she had eventually won their complete
trust to a quite astonishing degree.
In 1978, she agreed that we might come
with cameras to film them.
She introduced us to the gorillas,
in the sense that they saw that
we were with Dian.
So I suspect that that may well have
been that they therefore thought
we were okay.
But without Dian, that sequence
could never have happened.
There is more meaning
and mutual understanding
in exchanging a glance with a gorilla
than any other animal I know.
We're so similar.
Their sight, their hearing,
their sense of smell
are so similar to ours
that we see the world
in the same way as they do.
They live in the same
sort of social groups,
making permanent family relationships.
They walk around on the ground
as we do, though they're
immensely more powerful than we are.
And so if ever there was a possibility
of escaping the human condition
and living imaginatively, hmm,
in another creature's world,
it must be with a gorilla.
And this is how they spend
most of their time,
lounging on the ground,
grooming one another.
Sometimes they even allow
others to join in.
What that sequence didn't show,
but which the
still pictures I took at the time did,
was the way the gorillas were
fascinated by our equipment.
One of them was very interested in
the long sort of sausage-shape housing
that holds the microphone,
and you can see this
young male just feeling it,
seeing what it is.
And also, they were fascinated
by the camera,
and they came to Martin Saunders,
who was the cameraman,
and were peering
inside the camera to see
if they could see another
animal inside it.
And finally, the adult male,
the big silverback appeared.
Dian's name for him was Beethoven,
and Beethoven was
a huge, powerful animal
and really quite alarming because
if he'd lost his temper with you,
he could simply smash
your skull with one blow of his fist.
The thing you don't do is to pick up
your camera and look directly at him,
that's a challenging thing to do.
So I have quite a lot of
pictures of Beethoven
gazing to the right or to the left,
or even looking away from me.
Yeah. So he is.
But behind this extraordinary encounter
lay a tragic and shocking reality.
We had arrived in Dian Fossey's camp
in January 1978,
just days after
Dian's favourite gorilla, a young male,
name was Digit, had been savagely
and brutally killed by poachers.
Dian was grief-stricken, it was
as though she had lost a child,
and on top of that, she was in
extremely poor health, spitting blood.
We became witness
to a slow-motion tragedy.
Gorillas had been illegally killed
in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park
throughout the '60s and '70s.
When Dian had arrived,
there were about 500 left.
But there were only
about half that number
at the time of our visit
and Dian had taken it upon herself
to organise anti-poaching patrols.
Never before had it been so clear to me
that a species was heading for disaster.
It was just Dian Fossey
who was standing between
the mountain gorillas and extinction.
On our last evening at her camp,
Dian called me to her sickbed
and made me promise to do something
to help save the gorillas.
And when I got back to Britain,
I kept that promise
and got together
with other conservationists,
and jointly we created
the Mountain Gorilla Fund.
The sequence with the gorillas caused
something of a sensation
and helped people realise
that these relatives of ours
were not only endangered
but had to be helped.
Once Dian's health had improved,
she resumed her efforts to protect
the gorillas and their habitat.
She fought as hard as she could
to prevent great areas of the forest
from being cut down
and turned into farmland.
And she continued
her battles with the poachers,
destroying their snares
and arresting them
when her patrols captured
them red-handed.
Although there's no doubt that
Dian Fossey's anti-poaching methods
were controversial and certainly
antagonised many of the local people,
nonetheless it succeeded in saving
much of the forest.
And today, in spite of the dreadful
civil wars
that have since devastated Rwanda,
there are twice as many gorillas
as there were when we were there.
But they are still threatened
because of the great speed
at which the human population
of the region is increasing.
And that danger is in fact a global one.
You and I belong to the most widespread
and dominant species of animal on Earth.
We live on the icecaps at the Pole and
in the tropical jungles at the Equator.
We have climbed the highest mountain
and dived deep into the seas,
we've even left the Earth
and set foot on the Moon.
And we're certainly
the most numerous large animal.
There are something
like four thousand million of us today.
And we've reached this position
with meteoric speed.
It's all happened within the last
2,000 years or so,
we seem to have
broken loose from the restrictions
that have governed the activities
and numbers of other animals.
That was St Peter's Square
in Rome in 1978.
I said then that there were
four thousand million,
that is four billion of us
on this planet,
twice as many as when I was born.
Today, that has nearly doubled
yet again.
There are now over seven billion of us,
and by some estimates,
there may be nine billion in 2050.
That growth is largely attributable
to medical advances
and to the highly efficient ways
we have found to grow our food.
In just a few thousand years,
the revolution of agriculture
has spread to virtually
all human societies.
Today, over a third of the surface
of the land
is devoted to producing food
for human beings.
And that has changed some landscapes
in the most dramatic way.
Our scientific
and technological ingenuity
has enormously increased
agricultural productivity
in the last 60 years.
World grain production
has more than tripled.
But even that has not been able
to keep pace with the needs
of the world's growing human population.
In some parts of the world,
the natural forest was cleared
for agriculture many centuries ago.
But elsewhere, that transformation
has happened in my lifetime.
When I first came to Borneo in 1956,
all this was rainforest.
Now all those trees have gone.
The logging industry took out the wood.
The palm oil industry cleared
what remained of the forest
and replaced it
with its own uniform plantations.
All those extra human mouths
have to be fed,
and the country needs the cash.
But the effect on the natural world
has been catastrophic.
Few have suffered more
than the orang-utans.
Many adults were killed
as the forest was cleared.
If their babies didn't die with them,
then they were usually taken
and sold as pets.
A few fortunate ones
ended up in sanctuaries,
like this one at Sepilok.
These baby orangs are orphans,
mostly rescued from the pet trade.
It's easy to see why they make
such engaging pets when they're young.
Indeed, when I was here 50 years ago,
I had one as a pet
which I became very fond of.
His mother had been killed by a villager
as she raided his banana plantation.
London Zoo, I knew, wanted to establish
an orang breeding colony,
so he joined our floating menagerie.
But it wasn't long before Charlie,
as we had christened him,
began to calm down.
Slowly we managed to win his confidence.
And then, for the first time,
four days after we had had him,
we encouraged him
to come right outside his cage.
And here is Charlie,
safe and sound back in London.
Hey Charlie Charlie?
Whoa, dear. That's it. And with him
is Mr Smith,
the Head Keeper of the Monkey House.
And how is he Mr Smith?
Very much recovered from his long
and arduous journey here, David,
and he's going to settle down
and I think he's going to be with us
for a very long time.
Good.
And that he was.
And a few years after
his arrival at the zoo, he took a shine
to a young female who was already there.
Back in 1961, I went into the Ape House
in London Zoo
to see Charlie, as I often did,
and the Head Keeper came over
and he said, "I've got good news."
He said, "You are about
to become a grandfather."
"Really?" I said "Yes " he said
"your young Charlie has fathered a baby
and it should be born
in a few months' time."
"And as grandfather," he said,
"you have the privilege
of christening it."
So, eventually I decided
it should be called Bulu,
which in Malay means "little hairy one".
Bulu Can we have Bulu?
Now, this is Charlie's daughter.
All right, dear. All right, all right.
Bulu was
the first orang-utan born in Britain
and she was just as endearing
as Charlie had been.
I look back on those days
when I had Charlie the baby orang
with mixed feelings,
because the fact of the matter
is that these are not pets,
these are wild animals
and they should be in the wild.
The problem is that although
many people in Borneo
support the rehabilitation
of orang-utan,
their rainforest home
continues to be destroyed
as the rest of the world increases
its demand for palm oil.
So, the question that hangs over
these orangs' future
is whether there will be enough
forest left
for them to return to
when they've grown up.
Strong measures will have to be taken
if that is to be so.
There is one place where our destructive
impact on the planet
is less immediately obvious.
The oceans.
I can see its tail
just under my boat here
and it's coming up,
it's coming up, there!
The blue whale is 100 feet long,
30 metres, nothing like that
can grow on land,
because no bone is strong enough
to support such bulk.
Only in the sea can you get
such huge size
as that magnificent creature.
I had to wait until I was 76 years old
to see my first blue whale.
Part of what made the encounter
so special
was that for much of my lifetime,
blue whales were being killed
at such a rate
that it seemed quite possible
that they would become extinct
before I ever saw one.
The fact that they've survived
is a conservation triumph.
And that only happened because
there was a fundamental change worldwide
in people's attitudes to whales.
Men had hunted whales for centuries,
primarily for the sake of the oil
in their blubber.
And the skeletons of just a few of them
ended up here
in the Natural History Museum.
When I was growing up, whale products
were used mostly in food.
I must have unconsciously
eaten a fair amount of blubber,
because it was an ingredient
of margarine.
And during the war, when meat
was really scarce, I certainly ate
what was euphemistically
called Arctic steak, whale meat.
But it never occurred to me
that whales could actually
be endangered.
But improved methods of tracking
and killing whales
was reducing their numbers alarmingly.
Six hundred yards of rope are drawn out
in the wounded giant's death struggle.
By the 1960s,
there were fewer than
2,000 blue whales surviving,
just 1% of their probable
original population.
The species seemed headed
towards extinction,
until whaling nations finally banned
the hunting of blue whales.
What changed the fortunes
of the other great whales
were anti-whaling campaigners,
who turned whole nations
against the industry.
And once again,
Peter Scott helped show the way.
It was Peter Scott who first made me
and many, many others
aware of the plight of the great whales.
By the 1970s, he and other activists
like Greenpeace
were at the forefront of the campaigns
to prevent their slaughter.
It was an issue that I could not avoid.
This beautiful, intelligent,
astounding creature is a killer whale.
There are about 80 different kinds
of whales in the world.
Whales, of course, are warm-blooded,
like ourselves,
and as we are belatedly beginning
to discover, are extremely intelligent.
Surely they are among the most
fascinating creatures in the world.
The film that follows is made by a group
of people who passionately believe
that the whales should be protected.
They call themselves Greenpeace.
Hello, Vostok, we are Canadian.
We are asking you
from your position of strength and power
to grant us the following request.
Please stop killing the whales.
We are men and women
and we speak for children
and we're all saying,
"Please stop killing the whales."
It would take nearly another
decade of activism by Greenpeace
and patient negotiation
by Peter Scott and others
before a total ban on commercial
whaling came into force.
Since 1986, whales have only been
legally killed
by indigenous communities
or for scientific purposes.
I remember very vividly
Peter saying to me once,
"I will die a happy man if I can think
that we have saved the great whales."
Well, as far as the blue whale
is concerned, we have gone a long way
to achieving that ambition.
Today the world's blue whale population
appears to be recovering slowly.
It has doubled in the last 50 years
to perhaps as many as 4,500.
Of course, it's not just the big,
charismatic species
that we are exterminating.
Life on Earth is a complex web
and we ignore the millions
of tiny creatures in it at our peril.
One kind of animal is right now in the
grip of the greatest extinction event
since the disappearance
of the dinosaurs,
animals like this, amphibians.
Globally the numbers of amphibians
are declining at an alarming rate.
One third of all species
are now critically endangered.
In the rainforest of Costa Rica
in the late '70s,
we filmed the Montverde Toad.
Ten years later, inexplicably,
it had become extinct.
It was only in the last few years that
the mystery of what killed the toad
was finally solved, and that was not
before many other species of amphibians
had also died out.
In fact, while we were
filming Life In Cold Blood in 2007,
I actually witnessed
the extinction in the wild
of the Panamanian golden frog,
which fell victim to the same
insidious killer.
Individual males set up their
territories beside the river
and then wait for females to turn up.
And since good positions
for the territory are not common,
they may have to hold them
against intruders.
And here one comes.
Just in case his call is inaudible,
he makes his message clear with a wave.
And his rival waves back.
He repeats his message
so there's no misunderstanding.
Sadly, there are no longer
any Panamanian golden frogs
waving in the wild,
and the disease that killed them
is now sweeping round the world,
exterminating hundreds
of different species of amphibians.
The killer is a fungus.
It's highly infectious and believed to
have originated in South Africa,
from where it was transported by the
international trade in captive animals.
It was spreading across Panama
while we were filming
and when we had finished, scientists
collected the last few survivors
and took them into a specially
quarantined building
where other endangered amphibians
were being kept.
Here they may breed,
and then, if a cure
for the fungus is found,
or it runs its course in the wild,
the frogs may be returned
to their former home.
In the last 60 years,
I've come face to face with many species
that we've put at risk.
Sea otters.
Chimpanzee.
Manatee.
Sadly, this magnificent animal
is getting rarer and rarer.
How many of these wonderful things
will still be around
in another 60 years?
What an extraordinary creature!
Although the threat to the natural world
from humanity
has never been greater than it is today,
there are nonetheless
causes for hope here and there.
In recent decades,
when people have become involved
with the local population of animals,
they have started to take part
in the conservation process.
And that's certainly the case
here in Borneo,
in the caves at Gomantong.
The only visitors here
when we first came in 1972
were the local people,
and the people came to the cave
for one particular
and extraordinary purpose.
They collect what is surely
one of the strangest commodities
to be found in any cuisine.
It's so valuable that
they risk their lives to get it.
They are harvesting the nests
that swiftlets construct
using their own glutinous spittle.
And this is the end product
of all this labour
and sweat and danger and sheer courage.
One can't help wondering who it was
who first looked
at these extraordinary objects and said,
"That'd be great for making
soup out of."
But whoever he was,
he lived over a thousand years ago,
because there are Chinese records
in the 9th and 10th centuries
which speak of the wonderful delicacy,
birds' nests,
that you can get from Borneo.
I wanted to see what all the fuss
was about,
so I went into a local restaurant
in Sandakan to see what bird's nest soup
actually tastes like.
The consistency perhaps is a little odd,
it's a little sort of gelatinous.
But for the rest of it, well, I'm afraid
there is one great secret
about birds' nests.
The fact of the matter is
that pure birds' nests
taste of nothing whatsoever,
provided, that is,
it's been well cleaned.
Even in the '70s,
the birds' nests were so valuable
that there was an obvious risk
that the cave would be over-exploited,
but today that risk is even greater.
A nest like this is worth
as much as £100.
If you take too many of them,
then the birds will have
nowhere to raise their young
and the colony is doomed.
But a total ban would deprive
the local people
of a very important part
of their income.
So a plan was agreed.
Some caves
should be regularly harvested,
others should be protected
from any human interference,
and one should be open for the public
to visit and wonder.
It's an almost ideal situation.
The local economy benefits,
the wildlife benefits and an ancient
tradition, with luck,
is kept alive for many years to come.
Other creatures in Borneo
are now also being protected
by people who once put them in danger.
This is Selingaan Island off the
northern coast of Borneo,
and turtles come up here
onto beaches like this at night
in order to lay their eggs.
And back in the 1950s,
local people would come to such places
in order to dig up those eggs
and eat them.
And I have to admit,
they weren't the only people to do that.
If turtles use this beach,
it occurred to me
that there might be a chance
that we could find a turtle's nest,
with eggs,
which would be a very welcome addition
to the rice, bananas and bully beef
on which we'd been living almost
entirely for the past week.
And here, buried three feet deep,
were the eggs.
There were 88 eggs in that nest,
enough to provide us
with breakfast for many days to come.
And they were all produced
by one female turtle.
Looking back,
it all seems rather shocking
and I hadn't got a clue
how to cook them.
We had cheerfully
added as much salt
as if we were dealing
with chickens' eggs.
The result, though no doubt
very nourishing,
wasn't, I'm afraid,
particularly delicious.
Turtle eggs may not
have been to my taste
but the local people loved them,
and they were an important source
not only of nutriment, but income.
The trouble was that the human
population was growing so fast
that the turtle eggs
were being collected in huge numbers
and turtles worldwide were in decline.
In the decades that followed,
the Malaysian government stepped in
to save their turtles.
Harvesting the eggs was banned
and a hatchery established
on Selingaan Island, which people
visit to see what's going on.
During the breeding season,
the eggs are collected
from the beach and reburied in
the hatchery,
each clutch being kept together
inside its own little fence.
But it's only after dark that
the adult turtles reveal themselves,
crawling out of the sea
and laying their eggs,
to the delight of the onlookers.
There may be another location.
Anybody else? You can take picture.
Come more forward.
The visitors pay good money
for the privilege of watching
the turtles at close quarters
and that gives an income
to the local people.
That's about the age
Once the eggs hatch,
the youngsters are collected
and taken down to the shore.
Off you go.
Off you go.
Millions of baby turtles
have now been released
under this conservation programme,
and as a consequence,
the population of adult green turtles
here is now increasing.
But the survival of green turtles
needs more than their protection
by local people
at their nesting beaches.
Turtles migrate.
They swim across national borders
into unprotected foreign waters.
And that can be a problem.
It's now clear that
many conservation projects
will only succeed in the long term
if they transcend national boundaries
and allow wildlife
to cross frontiers without hindrance.
And that's exactly what's happening here
in the rainforest
in the island of Borneo.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei signed
the Heart of Borneo agreement in 2007,
declaring that the rainforest
will be protected
while allowing sustainable use
and access by local people.
This sort of international
cross-border cooperation
is vital if we are to
safeguard an area of wildlife
and ultimately the health of the planet.
And thinking about the health
of the planet as a whole
was not something many people did
until one truly extraordinary
and historic event.
The engines are armed.
Four, three, two, one, zero.
We have commit,
we have We have lift-off.
Lift-off at 7:51 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
Pictures of the launch of Apollo 8
arrived in Britain back in 1968
by way of the BBC's central control room
here in the Television Centre in London,
where I had a job
as a network controller.
Looking
at the top is the North Pole,
in the centre, just forward
to the centre is South America,
all the way down to Cape Horn.
Those images were instrumental
in changing the way
that many of us viewed the planet.
We began to think globally.
Looking at the Earth from outer space
made us realise just how small
our world is
and how finite its resources.
It also helped us understand
that we have to cherish
not just individual species nor even
individual patches of wilderness
but the whole planet
as a single integrated ecosystem.
But back in 1968,
few people could imagine
that the activities of just one species,
our own,
could interfere with the way
that the planet worked,
that we could actually change
the climate of the Earth.
It was in the oceans that this threat
first became apparent.
I'll never forget the first time I put
my head beneath the surface of the sea
and saw all around me
a coral reef in all its complexity
and richness
and almost unbelievable beauty.
I've been enthralled
by coral reefs ever since.
If the jungle is the place on land
where there are the greatest number
and the greatest variety of life,
then this, the coral reef,
is surely the jungle of the sea.
Although coral reefs occupy
just 1% of the oceans,
they support
a quarter of all their fish.
The fragility of these
complex ecosystems
suddenly became alarmingly
clear in 1998.
Almost overnight, in oceans
all around the globe,
coral turned white.
The temperature of the sea had risen
and it had devastated 16%
of the world's coral reefs.
Even the rise
of a single degree centigrade
can be enough to kill the organisms
that build the coral,
leaving their limestone skeletons
a naked white.
If the rise is brief,
then the coral can recover,
but if it is sustained,
then the coral may die completely.
And this coral bleaching hints
at an even bigger problem.
The average temperature of our planet
has increased by 0.7 degrees
centigrade over the last century,
and it seems likely
to rise still further.
And that could lead to changes
in sea level.
Even a very small rise
in sea temperature
could have a devastating effect.
Small islands like the one behind me
could be totally submerged.
Major cities could be at risk.
And the reason for that lies
far away from here,
where the change is already
beginning to be seen,
at the Poles.
I am at the very centre of the great
white continent, Antarctica.
The South Pole
is about half a mile away.
For 1,000 miles in all directions,
there is nothing but ice.
This white wilderness, this emptiness,
is the North Pole.
I'm standing in the middle
of a frozen ocean.
I have been lucky enough to travel
in the polar region several times
in the last 30 years, making films
about their rich wildlife.
His sole object in life at the moment
is to make quite sure
that he and he alone
mates with every single one of them.
And for that he must fight.
It's heavier even
than heavier than the adult.
These parent birds reunite
once they come back here
onto their own patch of,
patch of shingle.
And although the Antarctic is virtually
lifeless over vast areas,
there are one or two small oases
that teem with life.
Slowly I began to realise that things
were changing
in ways that will affect the wildlife,
and eventually ourselves,
no matter how far away from the Poles
we might be.
This is the ice that covered
the Arctic Ocean in September 1980.
Since then, there has been
a 30% reduction
in the area covered by ice.
And not only that, what ice remains
is only half as thick as it was.
If the sea ice continues to melt
at this rate,
there will be open ocean in the summer
at the North Pole within decades.
The very whiteness of the snow and ice
contributes to the pace of change.
Light bouncing off it takes 90%
of the sun's energy back into space,
and this has helped
to keep the planet cool.
But when the sea-ice melts,
it exposes the dark sea water.
That doesn't reflect the sun's heat,
it absorbs it,
so the temperature of the sea rises.
Here in the Arctic,
the climate is warming twice as fast
as the rest of the Earth,
and that could have global consequences,
including rises in sea level
around the world.
Climate change is already
affecting the lives
of not only wild animals
but ourselves, all over the globe.
I've spent my life
filming the natural world
and I've travelled to some
pretty remote and exciting places
in order to do so.
I've enjoyed every minute of it.
But every journey seems to have got
quicker and shorter.
It's as though the world has shrunk.
But then, sadly,
so have the wild places.
The increasing size
of the human population
is having a devastating
effect on the natural world.
But fortunately,
people are becoming aware of that
and doing something about it
and I'd like to think
that natural history films
have helped in that process.
And there are some signs of hope.
Animals that I thought might become
extinct in my lifetime
are still with us
and growing in numbers.
We now have a better understanding
of the natural world than ever.
We know how best to protect it
for future generations.
I can only hope that we will.