Original subtitles

(THUNDER RUMBLING)

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A monsoon storm

on the coast of an island in the Indian Ocean.

But this is not a normal tropical island.

This is Madagascar.

Once joined to Africa,

Madagascar has been isolated for millions of years

and it has evolved a set of wildlife all its own.

More than 80% of it is found nowhere else on Earth.

This strange island

is split in two by a line of mountains running its length.

The eastern slopes are drenched with rain and cloaked in jungle.

But cross these mountains into the western side

and you're in another world.

To live here, you need to cope with a landscape

that is bone-dry for most of the year.

A land where rain is fleeting and quite unpredictable.

And yet, Madagascar's arid lands are full of life.

Everything that lives here

has its own fight for survival and resources,

as the seasons swing by.

In this eccentric land,

some of the strategies wildlife has developed

are quite extraordinary.

Madagascar is a vast island.

A thousand miles from north to south,

it's so big it has the variations in climate of a continent.

The mountainous spine down its length is a barrier to rain.

The land to the west is in a rain shadow

and the further south you go, the drier it gets.

This is a journey through Madagascar's most challenging season,

the great drought

that grips the south and west of the island

for more than nine months of every year.

To survive these months you need to be tough and ingenious

and Madagascar's wildlife is certainly both.

Rising up from the southern flatlands

is a strange Grand Canyon-like landscape,

a great plateau of sandstone

beaten down by millions of years of erosion.

It's August.

Deep in land, far from the sea, it's searingly hot

and it hasn't rained for months.

But it's not entirely dry here.

In deep, dark canyons there are slashes of green.

These lush forests are leafy all year thanks to a constant source of water.

The very depth of the canyon shades it from the sun

and keeps it permanently moist.

It's a rare oasis in an otherwise parched land

and it's a great attraction for wildlife.

A dragonfly patrols a patch of stream.

He's jealously guarding his precious territory,

pushing out male rivals while he waits for the females to visit.

And in this fortunate place, lives a small family of lemurs,

Verreaux's sifakas.

They spent the chilly night in high, rocky caverns

safe from predators.

At dawn, they move down into the canyon,

stopping to warm up in the first rays of the sun.

And there's another member of the family.

A daughter, just a couple of weeks old.

She has been able to grip her mother's fur unaided

since she was born, and just as well.

Because her mother crosses the canyon with vast leaps

as much as nine metres in a single bound.

There's no shortage of food here for these vegetarian lemurs.

But, for now, the baby is totally reliant on milk.

It will be another six months before she's completely independent.

Like all lemurs, sifakas are primates,

and their social bonds are strong.

She will stay with her family in this vast canyon

for the rest of her life.

These lush canyons are a rare, leafy oasis.

The further south you go, the drier it gets.

There are rivers here in the deep south but they are highly seasonal.

As the dry season takes hold,

they run flat and broad, ankle-deep streams on a bed of sand.

But the rivers carry just enough water and nutrients

for ribbons of forest to grow.

And the masters of these river forests are these,

ring-tailed lemurs.

In gangs of 15 strong, they have the run of the place.

And it's the females who are in charge.

With the burden of raising young, they must have access to the best food.

These lemurs are protective of their patch.

Scent marking makes it clear to other gangs where the border lies.

As a group, they need to keep hold of their home territory.

(LEMURS SCREECHING)

Intruders are seen off promptly.

(SCREECHING CONTINUES)

Green as this river forest looks,

at this time of year there's only just enough food to go round

and these females all have babies to feed.

They all gave birth at around the same time.

By the time the rains return, the forest will be full of fruit

and that's just when the babies will be old enough to feed for themselves.

It's a crucial adaptation to suit a place so driven by seasonal change.

Motherhood is taking its toll.

They're thin and their fur is less than sleek.

But the dry season will eventually pass

and at least their forest is green all year.

Further to the west is a swathe of forest that is much more demanding.

It swings dramatically between wetness and desiccation.

For most of the year, it's cracklingly dry.

The most distinctive trees of these western dry forests are the baobabs.

Their trunks are huge and bulbous, the better to store water.

They live for hundreds of years.

A tree like this will have seen many dry seasons pass.

It's now October, the height of the dry season,

and it will be months before any significant rain falls.

For everything that lives here it's a test of endurance.

Water is in short supply,

just a few little, temporary pools dotted between the trees.

Everything must come here to drink.

And that's risky.

Their predators will know where they are.

Brown lemurs creep timidly around the waterhole.

With very little fresh greenery to eat, they must drink every day

or risk death from dehydration.

But every step on the carpet of dry leaves

could reveal their presence.

At this time of year they have babies, too.

They're an easy target.

(GRUNTING)

(SQUEALING)

(SQUAWKING)

But this hawk is only after water,

a drink and a bathe.

(TRILLING)

In such tough times,

there are battles for territory in the most unexpected places.

As night falls in the baobab forest,

an extraordinary crowd emerges.

They are baby flatid bugs.

By day, they are barely visible,

but, at night, they swarm over the trees and start to feed.

They drink sap and each settles itself into a spot on the branch.

But even at this miniature level, there's a battle for resources,

and here and there, fistfights breakout.

This curious spat has never been observed before.

For the most part, however, they feed quietly,

and as they feed they excrete unwanted liquid called honeydew.

It coats the branches and remaining leaves.

And this is very attractive to other insects

that are out and about at night.

And that, in turn, provides a feast for mouse lemurs.

At around 60 grams,

mouse lemurs are the world's smallest primates.

These are all males.

The females are fast asleep in tree holes and have been for months.

They can sleep right through the dry season

and they'll only emerge when the rains come.

It's a way of saving energy.

So, for now, the males are on their own,

feeding on anything that will take them through the lean times

and waiting for the day that the females awake.

But of all Madagascar's southern habitats,

none seems more challenging than this.

This is the far south of the island where there's little standing water.

Rain is rare and some years doesn't fall at all.

The sandy, porous rock drains quickly.

The forest that grows here is one of the strangest on Earth.

It's called the spiny forest for good reason.

There's nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

The plants are viciously spiny.

The spines collecting what little water there is in the air

and draining it back to the tree itself.

These plants are seriously odd.

With twisted, sprawling branches, these are octopus trees.

And euphorbias, looking like strings of sausages.

They barely even bother with leaves.

They photosynthesise through the green of their stems.

These are among the world's toughest plants.

It would seem there is nothing edible here.

What leaves there are, are small, the better to avoid water loss,

and tucked down among the spines.

This place looks totally hostile.

But here, too, live ghostly little lemurs.

Verreaux's sifakas are among the hardiest of all the lemurs.

And they are quite at home here, too.

They are perfectly adapted to this desiccated place

because they can go without drinking at all.

They get all the moisture they need from these unappetizing looking leaves

which they pick from between the spines.

They even relish the euphorbia fruit,

apparently not bothered by the fact that these trees

are dripping with chemicals so strong they'd burn your skin.

And they, too, have babies,

born at what looks like the very worst time of the year.

Life here seems generally much more challenging.

Not only is there little to eat,

these sifakas have to cope with jumping between thorns

that would go through your fingers.

It's hardly surprising that only half of sifaka babies make it to adulthood.

Within just a few months, these babies will have to take the plunge

and learn how to jump all by themselves.

For now, they cling to their mother and discover what's edible.

Back in the central canyon lands, the weeks pass.

It's November and there is still no rain.

There hasn't been for eight months.

The grassy plains are dry

but inside the canyon, thanks to the constantly flowing spring,

it's still almost ludicrously luxuriant and full of life.

Ring-tails, the most adaptable of all lemurs,

have found a home here, too.

They are the most widespread of lemurs

and they live all over the south of the island.

And here they seem to have found a life of ease.

They are able to take advantage of a range of food as it becomes available.

They'll eat leaves, flowers and even insects.

In an unpredictable place like Madagascar,

that has helped them to thrive.

The babies are growing up.

Born at roughly the same time,

every ring-tailed baby in the south is now about two months old.

And this young male

is starting to find his way around this bountiful place.

But it will be a while before he's totally competent as a climber.

(LEMUR SQUEAKING)

He won't even be fully weaned for another three months.

(CONTINUES SQUEAKING)

Although there's moisture in the leaves they eat,

the ring-tails can't go more than a day without drinking.

But finding water is not difficult here.

The stream never runs dry.

Outside the canyon, however, the grass is tinder dry.

Fire has been a factor here for millions of years.

The grass burns rapidly and the fire spreads quickly.

These spots of flame and smoke flush insects from the grass,

so they are a huge attraction for kites and kestrels.

(INSECTS CHIRPING)

Back in the baobab forest in the far west,

it seems as parched as ever.

But now, in late November, there are signs that things are about to change.

The baobab's scrappy branches

suddenly begin to put out a first flush of green leaves.

They're drawing on the precious water they've stored in their fat trunks.

There will soon be rain here

and the baobabs sense that it's coming.

There's a scent of rain in the air.

Other life is beginning to stir.

This little chameleon has not long hatched

but already it's in a race

and it has one of the strangest strategies of all

for dealing with the extreme dryness.

They are Labord's chameleons

and they only live in this part of the island.

This little male already has a voracious appetite.

Although this spider may be beyond him.

These strange little chameleons

have the shortest lifecycle of any land vertebrate in the world.

They spent the last nine months underground inside an egg

and now they have just eight weeks to grow to adult size.

They will have to grow more than a centimetre a week.

There is no time to waste.

Conditions are so tough that living fast is the best strategy.

By the time the rains begin, his life will be almost over.

In fact, the rains have already started.

Only a splash, but a sign of a deluge to come.

For now, it's barely enough to wet the ground

but it's enough to bring the mouse lemur females out of hibernation.

And the males are getting themselves ready for them.

They only have one chance to mate during the entire year.

Tonight's the night and they can hardly wait.

(BOTH SQUEAKING)

It's understandably competitive.

These two males are fighting outside a female's tree.

One of the males tries his luck with her.

(SQUEAKING RAPIDLY)

A swift left hook seems to make her feelings clear.

But he persists.

(SQUEAKING)

And she finally allows him in.

The first splash of rain

seems to trigger a race for everything in the baobab forest.

In this opportunistic place, you have to move fast.

The rain is a cue for another event

that only happens on one night in the year.

(FROGS CROAKING)

The forest floor is alive with little brown frogs.

They've been living quietly in the forest all year.

But when dawn breaks at the waterhole after one rainy night,

an astonishing transformation has happened.

While the females have stayed brown, all the males have turned bright yellow.

The reason is not certain,

but it might be so that the males and females can tell each other apart

in the mass mating frenzy that follows.

(FROGS CROAKING)

They are taking advantage of the fact that the waterhole has filled

just enough to lay their eggs.

But the rain is not yet strong enough to wash the eggs away.

It's a very narrow window of opportunity.

And, after just a few hours, the males will all turn brown again

and they'll all return to the forest.

They won't be back to this waterhole again

until this time next year.

Although a drizzle of rain has prompted the baobab forest to start to green,

the lean times are not over.

Everywhere in the forest,

animals are finding their own particular ways to survive.

Life is so challenging here that one bird has resorted

to an extraordinary subterfuge to see her through.

She is a vasa parrot, another Madagascar speciality.

Inside her nest hole, this odd-looking parrot

is raising a clutch of chicks.

But she's highly promiscuous

and the chicks may have a number of different fathers.

And she uses this fact to her advantage.

Choosing a high perch,

she belts out her song across the baobab forest.

(PARROT SCREECHING)

She looks somewhat scruffy.

Being the breeding season,

her normally glossy, black head feathers fall out

and her head turns orange.

But she can certainly draw in the males.

(PARROT SCREECHING)

None of the males know who is the father of her chicks.

But as she's mated with them all,

they all bring her food in answer to her call.

The feeding sessions are interspersed with gentle, little head sways

that seem to confirm their relationship.

Each male feeds her, each perhaps believing

that he's the father of her offspring.

Finally she returns to feed her chicks,

having gathered food with very little effort on her own part,

an elegant solution to difficult times.

By December in the southern river forest,

the river is at its lowest ebb.

Oddly, it appears to be raining here,

but it's not raining at all.

(SQUIRTING)

The trees are full of large insects, cicadas,

recently hatched and feeding on sap.

As they feed, they squirt out honeydew.

And for the river forest ring-tails,

always on the lookout for something new to eat,

there's a feast to be had.

(SQUIRTING)

But there's a problem.

The cicadas are quite hard to catch.

Cicadas are a valuable source of protein.

But it's a lot of effort.

And there's a much easier way to get hold of them.

A giant wasp the size of a small bird.

She is a specialist in catching cicadas.

She stings one to paralyse it and drags it to her underground cache.

So all the ring-tail has to do is to watch where the wasp leaves one.

The river forest ring-tails are nothing if not opportunistic.

It's an adaptability that sees them through the worst

of the southern dry season.

Eventually, these rivers will fill.

The brief, wet season is on its way.

It's February, the hottest time of the year,

and there's a change coming.

It's the monsoon season in Madagascar

and heavy rainstorms move down the island from the north.

Thunder clouds begin to bubble up.

At last, after 10 months of dryness,

a deluge hits the baobab forest of the west.

(THUNDERCLOUDS RUMBLING)

Trees that looked lifeless are now revived and green.

And there has been another transformation.

The little Labord's chameleons have grown enormously.

This male is now five times bigger and in full breeding colours.

And this female has become a real beauty.

The male touches the branch with his tongue.

He can taste that she's been that way.

But before he can get to her, he has to fight off a rival male.

They're all racing against time.

(HISSING)

Their lives are so brief that they only have one chance to mate.

He approaches her but she seems less than keen.

(HISSING)

It may be that she's already mated and is already pregnant.

He might be too late.

She couldn't afford to waste time.

As soon as she's laid her eggs, she'll die

and all the males will be dead soon after.

Their lives are only lived in the brief, wet season.

The violence of their short lives hastens their end.

Living fast and dying young,

it's a radical strategy for a place

where resources are low for most of the year.

This is the richest time of year in the baobab forest.

In the trees above as night falls, the baobabs bloom,

peculiar giant, scented flowers that open in minutes.

For the adaptable mouse lemurs, the flowers are irresistible.

(FLUTTERING)

The nectar is a treat.

But it also brings in moths, a double feast.

The good times are back.

This is the most dramatic change in all Madagascar's landscapes.

But the rainy season will last only a few more weeks

and desiccation will soon return to these baobab forests.

But in the far south,

the river forest has stayed green all year.

The river has been its lifeblood in an arid landscape.

Fed by fleeting rainfall, it has briefly filled,

and the forest is at its richest.

The ring-tails are well fed and in peak condition.

It's now April and the babies have become independent.

One or two may still try to hang on

but the breeding season has just started again.

It will only last for just a week or two

and each individual female will be fertile for just a few hours.

That means that things are going to get intense.

Border disputes among groups are common.

They're usually settled by a totally unique way of fighting,

with smell.

The males rub the glands of their wrists on their tails

and waft them at rivals.

And that's usually enough to send them off.

But at this time of the year, things get more competitive.

(LEMURS BARKING)

The males also wave their perfume at females,

hoping to persuade them to mate.

The most powerful males will usually be the ones to mate with the females.

But she is totally in charge

and has no hesitation in seeing him off if she's not ready.

If she approves of him,

she retreats little by little into the bushes,

out of the way of other male attention.

By the shifty look of these two,

this female is mating with a male of lesser rank.

The mating season is so short it becomes a bit of a free-for-all.

The cycle is complete.

Further south, by April,

the fleeting rain has finally come to the spiny forest.

The difference is striking.

This strange, tangled forest has turned green.

But it's still as spiny.

The sifaka infants have survived their first dry season.

The little scraps of white fur are seven months old.

And now there is plenty to eat.

But even now the season is turning.

The greenery won't last long,

and the females are already pregnant again.

In four months, new babies will be born.

The youngsters are now independent

and must move around the forest by themselves,

which they do among the vicious spines with wild abandon

and without any apparent difficulties at all.

How they can do this without injuring themselves remains a mystery.

But then, much of Madagascar's wildlife is still not fully understood.

Lemurs leaping through a forest of spines.

Nowhere else outside this one patch in the south of the island

can such a thing be seen.

But then most of Madagascar's wildlife exists nowhere else in the world.

The entire island is a hotspot of biological diversity.

A treasure house of natural riches

that is one of the most significant on Earth.

Each species has adapted in its own way

to the extremes of climate and landscape.

But many of them are under threat

from loss of habitat, from climate change, from hunting.

They are the same perils that face so much of the world's wildlife.

But here, they are especially poignant.

Madagascar is an unrepeatable experiment.

A set of unique animals and plants evolving in isolation

for over 60 million years.

We're still trying to unravel its mysteries.

How tragic it would be

if we lost it before we even understood it.

Of all the strange

and secretive creatures there are in Madagascar,

there is one that was the biggest challenge of all to film.

It lives in the most remote forests.

It's nocturnal and it's very rare.

KEVIN FLAY: There's something there.

ATTENBOROUGH: It's also dangerous.

(CACKLING)

(WAILING)

It's the fossa.

The team travelled to the dry western forest

which is the fossa's stronghold.

Even the people living right at the edge of the forest

won't venture in at night.

(SPEAKING LOCAL LANGUAGE)

The fossa is Madagascar's most fearsome predator.

Even the team's guide Jean isn't too keen.

I'm scared of fossa even though I'm guide here,

since the fossa is very strong and it may attack people.

ATTENBOROUGH: But the team were not to be put off.

They were joined by scientist, Mia-Lana Luehrs.

She has been studying the fossa for three years,

but even she doesn't know a great deal.

They usually have a secretive life and it's difficult to observe them,

especially because they are mostly solitary.

They are always very often together...

ATTENBOROUGH: But Mia has a plan.

She explains to director Emma Napper

that she's already fitted some of the fossa with radio collars.

Although they can't pinpoint an individual fossa,

in the mating season, the collars can reveal where they're gathering,

around big trees where males court females.

Jean goes in search of a likely courtship tree.

To look for the tree where the fossa mate

in this place it's...

It's hard but we work together.

Using Mia's data, the team head for a likely spot.

Jean finds signs that fossa may have been using this tree for courting.

So now the team must go into the forest at night.

They carefully light the courting tree with infrared lights,

visible to a camera but invisible to the naked eye.

It means the team are working in the pitch dark.

At night, the forest comes alive.

For hours, the team listen and wait.

Cameraman Kevin Flay heads deeper into the forest.

FLAY: The thing is it's really, really black.

So you're just relying on your hearing all the time.

It's pretty unnerving 'cause you just don't know where they are.

Just occasionally you might hear a twig break or some rustling leaves.

NAPPER: These people who live in villages,

they don't have torchlight and they...

They just hear this thing coming into their village, it must be...

You know, it must be pretty frightening.

FLAY: I can definitely hear something moving out there.

ATTENBOROUGH: Then Mia hears a distant call.

(FOSSA WAILING)

And then suddenly the lights go out.

Next morning, the team find the cause.

The lighting cable has big teeth marks in it.

We found that the wire was broken,

that was eaten by the fossa, it was amazing.

ATTENBOROUGH: And that's not all.

The fossa tried to steal something from this bag.

See, the fossa, you know. The fossa is really clever.

And see, it eat anything. Even... Even your shoes.

In the dry season with little to eat,

it seems that fossa will have a go at anything.

The following night, it's back into the forest.

For several hours, there's nothing.

But then, those eerie sounds begin again.

And, suddenly, out of the darkness...

(FOSSA CHATTERING)

(FOSSA WAILING)

At last, the team get their first good look

at these extraordinary animals.

Through the camera, they're transformed.

Elegant, relaxed, and totally at home in the pitch black forest.

These are two males, and they seem in no hurry to leave.

And then Jean finds the reason why.

Up in the tree, there's a female.

One of the males climbs the tree to try his luck with her.

Eventually, they start to mate.

And they continue their liaison until dawn.

It's a rare chance for Kevin to capture shots of the fossa by day.

Other males start to gather around the mating tree.

It's an astonishing sight.

Thanks to the night filming,

Mia has learnt a little more about their behaviour.

But she's concerned.

Her data shows that this huge forest may only have 10 females left in it

and that's not nearly enough.

This beautiful and enigmatic creature may be critically endangered

and yet we still know so little about it.

As with so much of Madagascar's wildlife,

the challenge will be to discover more before it's too late.