In the Wild (1992) s01e01 Episode Script

(CAR DOOR OPENS) (CAR DOOR CLOSES) That's Lake Argyle.
Used to be the Ord River.
Before this dam was built.
It used to look like this.
A narrow herring-gutted river that during the wet season had its water and in the dry was just a chain of pools.
The cattle on this country caused erosion to take place so much that all of this, the plains and the rich country, washed out to sea every year in silt and mud.
And so the government had this dam built, for economic reasons.
But with a tremendous amount of foresight, I think, they made the whole area a reserve for wildlife.
Some of the wildlife we planted on these islands, that were formed by the lake.
Others are just the escapees from the flood.
Within the five years, it's had a chance to stabilise and sort out some of the problems.
What is happening to the wildlife? That's what I'm looking at.
With the bitter lessons of the Aswan Dam in Egypt as a guide, many scientists and ecologists had expressed grave fear for the future of this area.
Because results of massive interference by man are never predictable.
The development of this land for man and his stock destroyed its delicate balance.
As the waters began to rise, the West Australian Wildlife Authority asked me to join Ord Noah, their last-minute program to save the wildlife.
Surveys had shown there weren't many left.
The cattle had eaten out the grasses, the wind had blown away the fresh topsoil, and when the rains came, the whole countryside eroded and washed away down the river.
Waterholes silted up, and the wildlife vanished, excepting a few species that were favoured by these new conditions.
The Ord Noah team rescued these survivors and placed them in selected areas safe from the floods.
(CHUCKLES) Some weren't particularly grateful.
Today, Australia has an enormous man-made sweep of water added to the north-west corner.
(ENGINE BUZZES) This is below the main dam.
It's upstream from us.
Behind that, 800 square miles of Lake Argyle, all banked up.
These trees are the riverine habitat, five years old, just growing.
One time, we thought that the whole of the Ord would happen like that and that the whole bank of the Ord would be a thicket of these trees.
It hasn't happened - not yet anyway.
We're not sure why, but probably because on the Ord, the water goes up and down as it's used.
Here, there's a constant flow, and the silts coming out are dumped on the bank, and there's a soil depth for the plants to take root in.
Even here, where the rocks come right down the water's edge, no riverine habitat.
And in time to come, for the naturalist and environmentalist, it may well be that on one side of the Ord Dam we have one race of birds, or animals, as the case may be, and on the other side, we've got a totally different race, and they won't even interbreed, because there's going to be that gap of the dam in between.
It's just another one of those fascinating studies that you get here.
Wherever you turn, there's something different, something peculiar and unusual, where this great drowned area of land that man has made.
Wow! Look at that.
A nursery.
Nice safe mud bank.
Mum and Dad are out there somewhere, 6-, 7-foot long, waiting for lunch.
(CROCODILE CALLS OUT) Tough little babies.
Ooh, that's nasty.
They're only little, but they've got some mighty sharp teeth.
(CROCODILE SQUAWKS) That's a crocodile crying.
You ever hear that before? He must have got damaged in the bite, I think.
Yes, he's got a bad chop from his brother.
We'll take him back to camp and see if we can fix that up, I think.
You wicked lad.
There you go.
There 'tis.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Shoonk! (MOTOR STARTS) (MOTOR REVS) Hmm.
These little fellows are much more fragile than they look.
People think of crocodiles as being big, strong prehistoric beasts, whereas, in fact, they're delicate and soft and cuddly.
When they get giant-size, I guess they're not that cuddly, but in that little scrap, this fellow has broken his main catching tooth.
This row of teeth, specially designed for catching and holding fish, and this big tooth here is the important one.
It locks into a groove in the bottom jaw.
And in the scrap, and he's bitten and rolled, he's broken the tooth on the other side.
Now, he'll grow it again.
What I'll do is pull it out, swab it with antiseptic, and then we can let him go.
Some beautiful design for living in a crocodile.
His ears - very good hearing.
Just down here is a slit, and it runs right the way back.
It's a flap.
There it is.
That's all ear.
Picks up the entire range of hearing, underwater and above water.
His nostrils - little bump right on top of his head.
When he goes underwater, they close.
His eyes.
He's got 'em closed at the moment.
Obviously wondering what on earth's going on.
Three eyelids.
One transparent one that comes back across.
He's got a built-in face mask, as it were.
Even his throat, this efficient biting mechanism, the tongue, or what should be a tongue, is a block, a valve that closes the throat right off, so he can swim through the water with his mouth open and not fill his belly up with water.
And look at the way his legs fold back in.
When he swims, he just tucks them away like that and swims with this magnificent tail.
Of course, like most animals, he likes having his tummy tickled.
Oh, that's a nice feeling.
Mag, you got the antiseptic? WOMAN: Oh, yes.
We'll put this tooth out before we let him go.
Thanks, love.
This might hurt a little bit, fella.
(CROCODILE CRIES OUT) There.
Alright.
About as much as we can do for you, sport.
Stay out of fights in future.
Oh, you're ready to go, are you? These are one of the fellows who's really advantaged by the flooding of the lake at the moment.
While all this grass and stuff is growing on the edge, there are hundreds of frogs and little fish, plenty of food for all these animals.
That doesn't mean they're gonna stay like that.
Once these animals build up in numbers, something that eats them is gonna start building up in numbers.
It might be goannas, it might be hawks, it might be pythons that eat crocodiles, will start to build up in numbers, because nature is never static.
It's always on the move.
This is what you're waiting for, fellow.
There you go.
He's not swimming now.
He's just walking along the bottom.
Not sure what's going on.
Now he's coming up for a breath.
Now the tail comes into action.
Away to live out his part in this changing pattern of life on Lake Argyle.
Even before the dam was built, cyclones would cause huge logjams in the gap where the dam now is built.
An enormous flood would follow, sometimes as high as this water is today.
Replenished fertility, recycled nutrients.
Of course, some animals would be drowned, but most would survive by clinging to the tops of trees.
Let's have a look at these.
Oh, boy.
Golden orb-weavers.
Nephila is their scientific name.
Big ones are females.
The little ones are males, waiting hopefully around for anything that the female may leave.
Great big clusters of the eggs.
Eggs have just hatched out, and around each egg there are thousands of young ones.
They're about to take wing.
Each young one will climb right up the top of the branch, stand up on its back legs and throw out a long plume of silk.
When the wind catches, it'll blow away.
Maybe land on a tree trunk like this, out in the lake, maybe reach the mainland.
They go up to 10,000 feet on the winds and spread all over the world.
There, of course, are the queen mothers themselves.
Great big fellows.
Very strong webs.
Strong enough to catch and hold a small bird, like a finch.
Can see why they're called golden orb-weavers.
That silk is quite golden.
Very, very strong indeed.
Their tree will eventually rot away, but by that time, the next generations will be miles away from here.
He got me.
It's the brown tree snake, or Territory tiger.
He's one of the ones that's been bettered by the dam, 'cause he can swim and hunt in trees, and everything's been forced up trees in the floods, and so there's been lots of food for him.
This bloke hasn't had things all his own way.
He's lost the last eight inches of himself.
Maybe a crocodile, maybe a goanna snapped it off.
Just healed over.
Doesn't grow a new tail.
A back-fanged snake.
He tried to bite me when I got him.
Couldn't reach me, though.
His fangs are in the back of his mouth.
He likes to live in those rock crevices because there's bats and mice, lizards, insects, frogs, all those sort of things, that they're feeding.
And he feeds on them.
So he needn't move out of one small area.
He can survive on an island or a single rock crevice for a whole lifetime and rely on the food that moves in.
If he really gets stuck, he'd use spiders or he'll just go without.
I know these fellows can go for up to 18 months without a meal.
You can see the big eyes, the long slit pupil like a cat.
That's for night-time hunting.
They normally hunt in the night.
A long, slender snake.
Well, I think we'll let him swim for it.
It's not far to go.
There you go, little man.
All animals swim, but snakes are among the most graceful.
Look at that.
Head high.
Beautiful thing.
(ENGINE REVS) The creation of Lake Argyle is the most recent major change in this area, which existed long before this fellow's ancestors roamed the earth.
It's one of the most ancient exposed areas of land on Earth.
It was here before even the simplest form of life was in existence.
There were no animals, no plants.
And man's beginning was still in the future.
About 300 million years ago, in the Mesozoic era, reptiles were the dominant life on Earth.
Australia, because of its age and isolation, has lizards representing all known groups, except one, and all are perfectly adapted to their particular environment.
Hoo! Boy, can these fellows swim.
He's a water goanna, another one of the racehorse goanna group.
And this one's totally adapted for the water life.
In fact, most people who see 'em think they're crocodiles.
They've got all the characteristics of a crocodile.
Look.
Not only are those nostrils on top of his head, but like a crocodile's, they close when he goes underwater.
Look at this.
Closed.
Open.
Closed.
Open.
At the same time, that third eyelid comes across and closes, so It's like he's wearing a mask underwater.
He can see through it.
So it doesn't worry him in the least.
We've got the remnants of that third eyelid in the corner of our eye - that little fleshy piece is all that's left in our case.
We got this beautifully flattened body and tail.
Of course, when he swims, he doesn't use his feet.
He just wags that tail backwards and forwards like that and moves through the water.
(CHUCKLES) Well Well, he moves through the water.
That's about true.
He's a fish-eater mostly, but he'll eat birds and lizards, anything else that comes along.
It's quite a common sight to see two or three of these and half-a-dozen crocodiles, sunning together on a bank.
He's still got those tremendous claws for climbing trees, and if anything goes up a tree, like a bird's nest, out over the water, he can reach it.
But, of course, this is one of the animals that this man-made lake has made a tremendous amount of difference to.
Ah! There he is.
This is one of the islands that we set up in Ord Noah - about 40 acres of rock and spinifex and the original vegetation.
We set it up as a seed island.
That is, we took some of the euros - a balanced colony with two males and seven females - and we put them on this island.
As far as we know, euros need about 20 acres each.
And the question is, what happens when you overstock an island with an animal like a euro? Native animals don't deplete their environment.
They don't wreck it.
So they either die or they get out.
It'll be interesting to see.
It's five years ago and nobody has been back since.
First time that someone's come back to have a look.
What I want to do here is find out how many animals have survived on the island, what sort of grazing have they been carrying out and what erosion, if any, has taken place due to the grazing.
This island's overstocked by all standards, and the old argument between pastoralists and conservationalists is that it's the roos and the euros that do the damage to the country, 'cause they come in such big numbers.
And it's, we say, not so.
This one's deliberately overstocked.
Here's our evidence.
This is our living laboratory.
There's a place.
That's dead through overgrazing.
Last year, in the dry, these animals, the euros, ate right down to the base and killed the plant.
Up there, though, they've done more - you can see dead patches - but there's a whole lot of new plants coming through.
Some of them haven't been touched.
Reason's obvious.
That one's hairy and inedible.
That one's poisonous to eat.
And the trees have got a toxic taste, or not toxic so much as unpleasant taste.
What we've really got here is a natural selection taking place.
The overstocked euros are grazing out the things that they like, and plants they don't like are proliferating.
So now animals that CAN eat those plants, like that caterpillar, will build up in numbers, and then something that eats them, like birds, will come in, and a whole new ecology will build up on this island.
That's how evolution works.
That's how ecosystems work.
So it looks as though this sort of population is much too heavy for this.
Another year will tell the story.
Also, what condition the animals are in.
We don't know how many are left yet.
Might be the original nine.
They might have bred.
There might be 20 here now.
In five years, there could well be.
That's the next thing to find out.
'Euro' is an Aboriginal name for 'wallaroo' or 'hill kangaroo'.
We don't know very much about Australian wildlife, but the euro is one that we do know about, 'cause way back in 1955, the CSIRO and the Agricultural Department of Western Australia set up some trial experiments in the Pilbara, because the graziers claimed that the euros were destroying them.
Sheep were brought to the Pilbara in about 1880.
And the fox built up into enormous numbers.
By selectively eating out the grass and not eating the spinifex, it ended up with the spinifex taking over, and this was added to by the fact that the pastoralists burnt the spinifex to get regrowth in the summertime.
The euros, however, ate the spinifex, so they were advantaged by this, and, of course, they had the extra water put in for the sheep.
What we learnt out of that 20-year study gives us some hope that we can reclaim the original grassland/spinifex balance.
On this island, we set up a controlled experiment - so many euros, no competition from sheep.
So will they destroy themselves, or will they strike a balance? (SIGHS) Well, that's the whole island gridded.
Results? 14 euros.
An increase.
Of those, one definitely one of the original population.
Big old man with a broken ear.
Couldn't mistake him.
Two this year's babies, two last year's babies.
Bit of erosion taking place, and some very heavy grazing taking place, selectively.
Probably this year is the critical year.
The population explosion has sort of reached its peak.
Now, one of two things has to happen.
Either they have to learn to eat the food they're not eating now, and a new form of eating will develop, or some of the animals are going to have to die to let the others survive.
This is how evolution takes place.
Animals under stress develop new techniques for living.
Of course, there is a third alternative, I suppose.
They can swim across, through to the mainland over there.
It's a fairly long swim.
And although they can swim, they don't like it very much.
Gonna be very interesting to come back in another two years and see just what's happened to this island with this sort of population pressure on it.
But before white man came to change the environment, Aboriginal man already existed here as part of the environment.
(DIDGERIDOOS PLAY) (CLAPPING STICKS PLAY) Boys would be brought here after a 24-hour fast.
No food, just water, and perhaps some narcotic - a pituri or something like that, a drug.
When they were doped, they were blindfolded and brought around this path, led by the hand.
You can hear the birds calling in the background, welcoming a new day.
You're terrified.
You know, the biggest thing in your life is going to happen, and you're standing blind, and suddenly the hands leave you, and you're standing all alone.
And you open your eyes.
Spiritual men, the keepers of the country, the soul and being of the whole Aboriginal people.
The Father of AII, with his spear-thrower and his stone axe and his wives.
And all the good things they guard and keep and replenish for the people.
The wild turkeys, dingos, snakes, kangaroos - everything - all portrayed in this gallery.
And this is your introduction to manhood, and more important, this is where you learn your place and pattern in the whole ecology of this environment.
The Aboriginals believed that everything had a place and a purpose.
And they built their life, their entire life, around changing themselves to meet their environment.
The white man changes the environment to meet himself.
When the Ord was built, 800 square miles of land was covered with water.
The environment was adjusted to our needs.
The people who made this are gone.
Their culture is gone too.
But the land, the animals, the plants are still here.
Their lesson is for us to learn from so for all time, we have all the riches of this heritage.