Madagascar
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YEAR: 2011 | LENGTH: 3 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
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Over 80 per cent of Madagascar’s animals and plants are found nowhere else on Earth. Discover what made Madagascar so different from the rest of the world, and how evolution ran wild here.
episodes:
01. Island of Marvels
Madagascar, the world’s oldest island, broke off from Africa and India and has been on its own for more than 70 million years. In splendid isolation, it has evolved its very own wildlife – more than 80 per cent of it is found nowhere else. And that wildlife is quite extraordinary. In this episode, we reveal the island’s most bizarre and dramatic places, and the unique wildlife that has made its home in each, thanks to the geology and isolation of this Alice-in-Wonderland world.
The stars are the lemurs, Madagascar’s own primates. A family of indris leaps like gymnasts among rainforest trees; and crowned lemurs scamper around Madagascar’s weirdest landscape, the razor-sharp limestone tsingy, which looks like something from another planet. And sifakas, ghostly white lemurs, move like ballerinas across the forest floor.
Madagascar’s wildlife is famously strange. Bright red giraffe-necked weevils use their necks to build leaf nests with the complexity of origami. Chameleons stalk the forests, none more intriguing than the pygmy chameleon, the world’s smallest reptile, delicately courting a female in its giant world. The fearsome fossa, Madagascar’s only big mammal predator, looks for a mate – 15 metres up a tree. And in the southern ‘spiny desert’, a spider hauls an empty snail shell, 30 times its own weight, up into a bush as a shelter; something never before filmed, and possibly never observed in the wild before.
At the end of the episode, we go ‘behind the camera’, to reveal the challenges of capturing the behaviour of the little-known wildlife of this island. How do you go about filming a rare, secretive lemur that lives in the middle of Madagascar’s biggest lake?
02. Lost Worlds
David Attenborough tells the story of one of the most intriguing wild places on earth: Madagascar, the huge island of dramatic landscapes where the wildlife is strange and unique, some of it having been filmed for the very first time.
In this episode we travel deep into Madagascar’s most luxuriant landscape; the rainforests that cloak the island’s eastern mountains. Remote and mysterious, this little-known region of towering peaks and precipitous escarpments is home to over half of all Madagascar’s unique species.
Narrated by David Attenborough, this second episode showcases an amazing collection of wildlife, many of which have never before been filmed. Cyanide-eating lemurs, cannibalistic frogs, meat-eating plants, cryptic leaf-tailed geckos, tadpole-eating wasps, tunnel-digging chameleons and house-proud flycatchers are just some of the weird and wonderful wildlife featured in this programme.
Along this coast, every cliff and valley is like a lost world where nature has run riot. Amongst the boulders of the Andringitra Highlands, a few hardy troops of ringtailed lemurs make their home. More at home in the hot southern forests, these eke out a living at the top of the coldest mountain on the island. To fight the sub-zero cold, they have developed thick coats and can only survive the freezing nights by huddling together in rocky crevices. In this high ‘desert’, they must eat cacti for moisture.
Descend just a few hundred metres and it’s a very different world, where dense forests are permanently shrouded in clouds. The Marojejy Massif is the last sanctuary of one of Madagascar’s rarest lemurs, the elusive, ghostly white silky sifaka. There are thought to be only two hundred of these playful and endearing creatures left on earth
03. Land of Heat and Dust
Madagascar is an island of extremes. While the east is cloaked in soaking rainforest, the west and south is almost a desert. This is a scorching landscape where it might not rain for nine months of the year, and some years not at all. To live here, you have to be a specialist. The animals and plants of the dry southern lands are stranger and more mysterious than on any other part of the island, and their strategies for surviving the dryness are extraordinary.
Verreaux’s sifaka, a kind of lemur, lives in Madagascar’s ‘spiny forest’ where trees have savage spikes, and some drip toxic chemicals. Amongst the bulbous trees of the baobab forests, huge-eyed mouse lemurs, the world’s smallest primates, emerge at night to feed on the sugary droppings of bizarre fluffy bugs.
When at last the rains come, everything changes. Labord’s chameleon is the shortest-lived land vertebrate in the world. This striking animal lives just 12 weeks from hatching to adulthood. It spent nine months in an egg and has only three months to pack in the rest of its life.
These animals are all unique to Madagascar, and exquisitely adapted to the island’s seasonal changes. But this is not their only challenge. Much of Madagascar’s extraordinary wildlife is under threat, from hunting and loss of habitat, and none more so than in the south of the island.
At the end of the episode, the filming team’s biggest challenge is revealed – how to find and film one of Madagascar’s most elusive animals, the rare and cat-like fossa. It lives in remote forests and is active mostly at night – and it has a fearsome reputation.
04. Attenborough and the Giant Egg
David Attenborough returns to the island of Madagascar on a very personal quest.
In 1960 he visited the island to film one of his first ever wildlife series, Zoo Quest. Whilst he was there, he acquired a giant egg. It was the egg of an extinct bird known as the ‘elephant bird’ – the largest bird that ever lived. It has been one of his most treasured possessions ever since.
Fifty years older, he now returns to the island to find out more about this amazing creature and to see how the island has changed. Could the elephant bird’s fate provide lessons that may help protect Madagascar’s remaining wildlife?
Using Zoo Quest archive and specially shot location footage, this film follows David as he revisits scenes from his youth and meets people at the front line of wildlife protection. On his return, scientists at Oxford University are able to reveal for the first time how old David’s egg actually is – and what that might tell us about the legendary elephant bird.
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YEAR: 2006 | LENGTH: 11 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBCdescription:
An exploration of the wild and beautiful parts of our planet. Documentary series which celebrates our planet in all its glory, both its spectacular scenery and its captivating natural history.episodes:
01. From Pole to Pole
This episode looks at the influence of the sun and reveals how its seasonal journey affects the lives of all creatures. As spring arrives in the Arctic, a mother polar bear emerges from her den with two tiny cubs. At the other end of the planet, winter arrives and emperor penguins are plunged into darkness for four months.
02. Mountains
This edition focuses on mountains, beginning with the birth of a mountain at one of the lowest places on Earth, and ending at the summit of Everest. There is also a look at an avalanche in the Rockies, where grizzlies survive the harsh winters deep inside the dangerous slopes. Finally, the programme follows the demoiselle cranes as they attempt to cross the Himalayas.
03. Freshwater
This edition takes an epic journey following the descent of the planet’s mightiest rivers from their mountain sources to the sea. Breathtaking river scenery is revealed by a revolutionary helicopter camera mount – from the world’s highest and broadest waterfalls to the awe-inspiring spectacle of the 10,000-strong flocks of greater snow geese in flight.
We witness underwater swimming monkeys; giant salamanders, at two metres the world’s largest amphibian, on the hunt in a remote mountain river of Japan; and river dolphins in the Amazon, showing off lumps of rocks to win over a mate.
New underwater worlds are discovered – we break the ice of the world’s deepest lake, Baikal in Siberia, home to the only freshwater seal and bizarre giant amphipods. We dive into the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland patrolled by caiman and piranhas.
We also encounter dramatic showdowns between gangs of Indian otters and mugger crocodiles; while in Africa the lightning ambushes of Nile crocodiles on wildebeest are filmed for the first time at ultra-high speed.
04. Caves
The Cave of Swallows in Mexico is a 400-metre vertical shaft. It’s deep enough to engulf the Empire State Building, yet few people even know of its existence. Caves are earth’s final frontier and this programme goes where few have been before.
Deer Cave in Borneo is a daytime retreat for five million bats; their droppings support an entire community of creatures. Shine a light on one massive pile of droppings and the whole place shimmers with millions of dung-eating insects.
Caves also harbour some of the most remarkable and bizarre animals on earth; from cave swiftlets who build nests out of just saliva to the troglodytic animals that never see daylight or ever set foot on the surface. Troglodytes like the Texas cave salamander and Thailand’s cave angel have neither eyes nor pigment, and the entire populations of both are found in just a couple of caves.
From Lechuguilla Cave’s astonishing six-metre-long crystals to the extraordinary snottites of Villa Luz, this documentary provides unprecedented access to the hidden world of caves.
05. Deserts
David Attenborough takes a look at deserts, which cover a third of the Earth’s land surface. From space they appear lifeless but a closer look reveals a different picture.
Deserts, in fact, are surprisingly varied; from Mongolia’s Gobi desert where wild Bactrian camels have to eat snow in lieu of water, to the Atacama in Chile where guanacos survive by licking the dew off cactus spines.
Changes are rare in deserts but they play a crucial part in their story; from Saharan sandstorms nearly a mile high to desert rivers that run for a single day; from the brief blooming of Death Valley in the USA, to a plague of desert locusts 40 miles wide and 100 miles long – two events that might occur once in 30 years.
The highlight of the programme is a unique aerial voyage over the dunes and rocky escarpments of a Namibian desert. From this lofty viewpoint, we follow elephants on a desperate trek for food and – most amazingly of all – desert lions searching the wilderness for wandering bands of oryx.
The programme unravels the secrets behind desert survival – and reveals the ephemeral nature of this stunning environment.
06. Ice Worlds
Although the frozen worlds of the Arctic and Antarctic experience the greatest seasonal extremes, it is the advance and retreat of the ice that is the real challenge to life. As the sea freezes, Antarctica doubles in size and all animals except for the emperor penguin flee.
In the Arctic, the polar bear’s ice world literally melts beneath its feet, forcing it to swim vast distances and take on one of the deadliest adversaries on the planet.
07. Great Plains
The great plains are the vast open spaces of our planet. These immense wilderness areas are seemingly empty. But any feeling of emptiness is an illusion – the plains of our planet support the greatest gatherings of wildlife on earth: two million gazelles on the Mongolian steppes, three million caribou in North America and one and a half million wildebeest in East Africa. Close on their heels come an array of plains predators including eagles, wolves and lions.
At the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing – grass. Flooded, burnt, baked and frozen – grass is almost indestructibe, able to survive from the baking savannahs of Africa to the frozen tundra of the Arctic, from the floodplains of India to the high altitude steppes of the Tibetan plateau. Together, these hugely productive grassland plains encompass a quarter of the land on earth and bear witness to some of the most dramatic wildlife stories on our planet.
08. Jungles
Tropical rainforests cover just three per cent of our planet, yet are home to a staggering 50 per cent of the world’s species. They are the richest environments on earth but also the most competitive. Travelling through this enchanted world, we uncover the amazing strategies its inhabitants adopt in order to survive. Look out for the flying frog mating orgy and the sinister bodysnatching Cordyceps fungi that eat their victims alive.
10. Seasonal Forests
The Taiga forest is a silent world of stunted conifers cloaked in snow and ice. The trees form a belt that circles the globe, broken only by ocean, and contains a third of all trees on Earth. Here, animals are scarce, with just a few charismatic loners like the wolverine and lynx.
By contrast, the broadleaf forests of North America and Europe bustle with life. The most startling illustration happens just once every seventeen years, when the nymphs of the periodical cicada burst from the soil in the biggest insect emergence on the planet.
In California, witness the cameras fly up the tallest trees on Earth: giant redwoods over 100 metres high. See General Sherman, a giant sequoia, ten times the size of a blue whale, and the largest living thing on the planet. Close by are bristlecone pines, so old they pre-date the pyramids and were already 2,500 years old when Jesus Christ was born.
The baobab forests of Madagascar are the strangest of all. The bizarre upside-down trees store water in their swollen trunks and harbour strange wildlife, such as the tiny mouse lemur, the world’s smallest primate.
11. Ocean Deep
David Attenborough narrates the final episode in the documentary series that shows our planet in all its glory.
In this part, a look at life deep undersea. A 30-tonne whale shark gorges on a school of fish and a unique overhead camera reveals common dolphins rocketing at speed. Descending into the abyss, deep sea octopus fly with wings and vampire squid use bioluminescence to create a colour display. Time-lapse footage taken from 2,000m down captures eels, crabs and giant isopods eating.SIMILAR TITLES:
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#nature #planetEarth
BBC Two - Madagascar
Discover what makes Madagascar's wildlife so different from the rest of the world.BBC
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
