Original subtitles

BBC Four Collections -

specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

For this Collection, Sir David Attenborough

has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

MALAGASY VALIHA MUSIC

Madagascar was once covered by forest.

But during the course of centuries, the Malagasy,

the local people, have cut down much of those forests

with the results that a place for animals to live is much reduced.

But there still remain patches of forest here and there.

And up here in the northwest, there is a particularly big patch

and, what is more, a large lake.

'We pitched camp by the lake shore.

'With us we had as guide and interpreter George,

'a scientific assistant from the Research Institute of Madagascar.

'The lake was a magnificent sight.' RAUCOUS BIRD CALLS

Every morning, these enormous flocks of flamingos arrived,

turning the waters of the lake rosy pink with their reflections.

There were two species of flamingo here.

The greater flamingo,

stalking haughtily in the middle of the picture,

and the smaller lesser flamingo, in the foreground.

The two birds differ not only in size but in their feeding habits.

The greater flamingo

dredging through the mud in search of tiny animals.

The lesser flamingo, which has a heavier bill,

feeding on microscopic plants,

algae, which float in the top two inches of water.

The two species, therefore,

when living together on the same lake,

are not competing for the same food.

However, both use roughly the same method of feeding.

Their beaks contain rows of plates

and by a pumping action in their throat,

they suck a continuous stream of water through these plates

which sieve out the particles of food

and then they expel the water through the sides of the beak.

The lake is very salty and brackish

and quite unfit for us to use as drinking water

but for the flamingos it was perfect.

Rich in tiny shrimps and algae, shallow and, what is more,

mirror smooth, which is important for if the water's choppy,

waves splash the birds' faces and nostrils

and they can't feed properly.

Both these species of flamingo

are also found in the great lakes of the East African Rift Valley.

But it's only in the last few years that their African breeding grounds

were discovered on the baking salt flats of one or two

remote lakes in Northern Tanganyika.

But where do these flocks come from?

Had they migrated from East Africa 250 miles away -

for flamingos are known to undertake long migratory flights -

or are they a special separate population

which spend all their lives in Madagascar?

If that's the case, where do they nest? No-one could tell us.

We had arrived at the season when most birds were nesting

and in the next few months, whenever we were anywhere near a lake,

we went out of our way to visit it in the hope of finding flamingo nests

or at least hearing reports of them.

We never found the answer to any of our questions.

Perhaps the birds didn't nest at all that year.

Apparently, flamingos in the tropics

don't necessarily always breed every 12 months.

But the sight of this magnificent flock was one I shall never forget.

There were many other birds, both on the lake

'and in the woodland around its shores,

'and the large tree beneath which we had camped'

proved to be the home of a pair of hoopoe.

The male spent his morning hunting industriously for small insects.

For, like the hornbill to which he is related,

he feeds the female as she sits brooding on the eggs.

PIPING, CHIRRUPING BIRDSONG

The nest was hidden in the bottom of this hole in the tree,

but I'm afraid the presence of our camp made him very nervous

and he seemed to find it difficult to make up his mind

whether or not to go down to his mate.

Even now, he lost his courage halfway

and popped out of a hole on the other side,

still holding the insects in his beak

to make quite sure that all was well.

But this time his mate did get her food.

Both flamingos and hoopoes are relatively familiar birds.

But this odd creature was quite new to me.

It was hopping across the marshy ground close to the lake shore.

And to begin with, I couldn't make out what it was doing.

When it closed its wings,

it was easy to see that it was a species of black heron.

But why should it behave in this curious fashion?

Was it perhaps some form of display?

Then I realised what it was doing.

It was fishing.

In order to see if there were any fish in the water close by,

it was shading its eyes with its wings,

exactly as we sometimes do with our hands in order to look into a pool

and cut out the reflections from the surface of the water.

Birds were obviously abundant, the air was full of their calls,

but on a smaller scale,

there was a vast population of insects of one sort and another,

constantly and ceaselessly active.

The dusty earth,

immediately outside the disused hut we eventually took over,

was studded with these small pits.

They're traps laid by a savage little creature called an antlion.

He himself lies buried out of sight at the bottom of the pit

but when he senses some activity,

an ant, perhaps, crawling around the sides of the pit,

he starts snapping back his head,

shooting up grains of sand to try and knock down

the unwary intruder, rather like an anti-aircraft gun shooting at planes.

His aim's not very accurate but his missiles of sand grains

usually provoke miniature landslides

in the loose dust of the sides of the pit.

As a result, the ant loses its footing

and tumbles down to the bottom.

Just as this one is doing.

The antlion concealed beneath the sand is waiting for it

with his jaws agape.

Once he's got it, there's no escape for the ant

and it's dragged below the sand and, there, sucked dry.

But, so far, I hadn't seen this cunning monster.

Here he is. In fact, he's only a larva.

Soon he will change into his adult shape, rather like a dragonfly,

and will fly away to find a mate.

But the antlion was only one insect with which we shared our hut.

On the wall above me, mud wasps were busy building their cells.

BUZZING

Every three or four minutes,

the female wasp arrived with a ball of mud

which she had gathered from a puddle by the lakeside.

Mixed with her spittle, the mud makes a first-rate building material

which she kneads carefully into shape, using her antennae

to help in checking on the thickness of the wall.

The cells she was making was not a home

but a chamber which will serve both as a cradle and as a tomb.

When the walls are almost complete, she will catch a small spider,

paralyse it with her sting, and carry it to this nest.

Then she will lay her egg on the still living but inert spider,

and, with more mud, seal up the hole in the chamber.

In a short time, the young wasp grub will hatch and find fresh meat,

indeed, living meat, close at hand.

It will feed on the helpless spider's body until it's full-grown.

Then it'll change into a wasp, bite a hole in the mud wall of its cradle,

and fly off to begin the cycle all over again.

The female completed a cell like this in a mere two or three hours.

And she made at least one new one every day.

But of all the insects in Madagascar, the most gorgeous

and the most famous are its moths,

some of which fly during the daytime

and are as resplendently beautiful

as the most brilliant butterflies in the world.

This is the silver, almost metallic-looking cocoon,

of one of the most handsome of them, the comet moth.

EERIE MUSIC

The strange, wet, wormlike creature struggling out into the world

bears little resemblance to the magnificent insect into which

it will turn within the short space of half an hour.

Its wings are no more than limp, yellowish flaps,

and, as it hangs from the cocoon, it's whole body throbs and pulsates.

It gulps in air.

And slowly its body swells.

At this moment, its wings are hollow sacks.

But now, as its body fills with air,

its blood is being forced down the veins of

the crumpled wings so that slowly, as we watched,

they began to expand and to change,

losing their bag-like shape

and stretching so that the upper and lower surfaces

come closer and closer together.

First, the handsome sulphur-yellow forewings begin to grow.

The brown blotches on them swelling into handsome circles.

But both wings are not growing at an equal rate.

Watch the wing on the right,

as it imperceptibly increases

in size and length,

expanding downwards.

A quarter of an hour has passed.

And the forewings are almost fully developed,

though still wet and comparatively limp.

Now the pennant tails of the hind wings begin slowly to lengthen.

At the end of an hour,

the moth has completed its miraculous transformation

and hangs in all its glory,

the membranes of its wings slowly hardening,

its wingspan a full seven inches.

This is a male, with the long pennant tails to its hind wings,

and the female hangs on the right, with smaller, stouter pennants.

Two of the most beautiful moths in the world.

But our main quarry were the lemurs and here in the northwest,

we were in the territory where brown lemurs live.

They're becoming increasingly rare and the Madagascan government

has passed laws making it illegal for them to be caught.

But in the middle of the forest, we came across this trap.

The poachers had made the clearing and stretched these poles across it.

They knew that the lemurs hate coming down to the ground

and will certainly prefer to cross the clearing

by running along the poles.

When they do, they will enter this noose

and there hang until they're slaughtered and eaten.

LEMURS HOWL AND GRUNT

There they were.

BIRDS CHIRP

LEMURS GRUNT

LEMURS GRUNT AND BARK

LEMURS HOWL

They were the size of small cats, with dark brown faces

and lighter brown fur.

And they showed their anxiety with their strange, gruff cries.

Though they have hands and feet, like those of a monkey,

the way they ran through the trees reminded me not of a monkey at all

but of some quite different creature, like, perhaps, a marten.

Their tails are not prehensile

but they seem to use them as a help in keeping their balance.

And they also wagged them when they were annoyed or excited.

LEMURS CONTINUE TO GRUNT AND HOWL

LEMURS HOWL AND CHIRRUP

And here is a female with a young baby clinging to her back

and having a pretty rough ride.

Brown lemurs nearly always produce only a single baby,

very rarely twins and never three or more, and you can quite see why.

There just wouldn't be room.

There was a whole troop of them

crossing through the trees above our heads.

We followed them and soon discovered where they were going -

to a mango tree for their afternoon feed.

But in that position,

I didn't see how the baby would get anything to eat at all.

Although most of them were feasting on the yellow, juicy mangoes,

some were eating other things as well.

This one was stripping bark from a young branch.

LEMURS CHIRRUP

And this one had found the nest of wild bees

and was stealing the honey.

When their meal was over, they retired to another tree

and there they began carefully to clean themselves.

LEMURS GRUNT, BARK AND HOWL

Their name, lemurs, is not a local Madagascan name,

but is taken straight from the Latin word "lemures", which means "ghosts".

No-one knows who gave it to them or even exactly why it was given.

Perhaps because some of them are nocturnal,

perhaps because some of them make the most weird howling cries,

or even more likely because some of the local tribes believe them

to be the incarnations of spirits of the dead.

Unfortunately, this belief isn't held by the people in this area

and, as we'd seen, they still trapped them for food.

The meal and their toilet finished, they made off.

The really small babies legitimately travel on the backs of their mothers.

But one of the half-grown ones seemed to reckon that

he was still young enough to be entitled to a ride.

Mother clearly didn't agree.

But I think the youngster won in the end.

But all lemurs are not brown.

And this is the most handsome and strikingly coloured species of all -

the magnificent ruffed lemur, nearly four feet long,

now, sadly, increasingly rare.

I know of no certain explanation for this startling

black-and-white colouring, so like that of a giant panda.

However, whereas the drab brown lemur is active during the day,

this ruffed lemur is mostly nocturnal.

And many animals that only come out at night are coloured

black and white, like the badger, or the skunk.

Perhaps so that they can readily see and recognise one another

when it's dark.

Actually, the colouring of this creature is very variable.

The markings are not always the same shape and sometimes the patches

that are white in this one are, in others, a handsome reddish gold.

The lemurs, with their fox-like faces

and their human-like hands and feet,

belong to the group of primates,

the group which contains monkeys, apes and man himself.

But the lemurs are more primitive than any of these other families

and appeared much earlier in geological history.

In fact, millions of years ago, there were many more types of lemur

than there are found today, including a monster that was almost

the size of the donkey,

which, since it presumably had a long, furry tail,

must have been a really strange beast.

But of all the surviving species, this is, I think, the most handsome.

This is the third type of lemur, the ring-tailed lemur.

Come on.

The other name for the ring-tailed lemur,

this beautiful silver and grey animal, is the cat lemur.

And when I first heard the cat lemur as a name,

I couldn't see why it should be applied to this particular animal.

After all, although they are the size of cats,

they don't really look like cats.

But as soon as I started to keep them as pets,

I soon discovered why they should be called cat lemurs.

Apart from this passion which they have for licking -

they never stop licking...

either me, or themselves, or one another...

Apart from this passion for licking, they have...

Whoops. ..they have several other really very cat-like features.

They purr.

And although it's not a loud purr, it's a very distinctive purr

and you couldn't call it anything else but a purr.

And that in itself would be...

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. What?

And that... And that in itself

is sufficiently cat-like because they meow...

Where are you going? But their diet is not at all cat-like.

In fact, they're vegetarians. See what you think of this, boys.

Mm?

Grapes. Now, watch how he eats, holding his mouth up

so that he doesn't miss a single drop of the juice.

In the wild, they eat the fleshy cactus-like plants which grow

in the southwest of Madagascar.

What about this? Would you like some of this?

But they are very, very...

easy to feed because they will accept... That's my finger!

They will accept a wide variety of different sorts of food.

Would you like that?

All right, well, I've got some more grapes. Hang on.

Uh... No, look, here.

And I've fed mine on boiled potatoes, which they love,

and cabbage,

and grapes. And when I can't get grapes,

sultanas, and dried prunes, and lettuce, and carrots.

Here, come on. They are not really tree creatures.

They...they live in the southwest, and they live mostly on the ground

amongst the wild, rocky desert that there is down there.

Even so, they've got these grasping hands,

which are so typical of all lemurs,

and they've got these forward-pointing eyes,

which give them an almost human expression.

And, for me, they are some of the loveliest of all animals.

If these, in fact, are the equivalent of cats,

then you might also say that there are monkey lemurs,

like, for example, the brown lemurs,

and there are also squirrel lemurs,

and...

mouse lemurs. Indeed, there are 20 different sorts of lemurs,

and, extraordinarily enough, they are all restricted to Madagascar.

Only some very remote relatives,

the bushbaby and the potto in Africa,

and the loris in Asia, those are the only other close relatives

which they have in the world.

This, of course, is a very extraordinary distribution.

And the reason is that Madagascar for the lemurs

is what Australia is to the pouched animals, to the marsupials.

In past geological time,

there was a period when the higher animals had not yet developed.

Uh... But the lemurs were there.

And they spread over many parts of the Earth.

And fossil lemurs are found in Europe...

Here.

Fossil lemurs are found in Europe and, indeed, in North Africa.

But then more modern and more efficient types of animals developed.

The true rats, the true mice, the true squirrels,

the true monkeys, and they were more efficient than the lemurs.

And, as a result, the lemurs died out over much of the world.

But before those new types of animals developed,

the island of Madagascar

had got split off from the main continent of Africa.

So...the lemurs...

It's difficult to talk about serious natural history

with this on your shoulder.

So the lemurs...

Oi, have this.

Have that.

As I was saying...

You don't want any more.

As I was saying, the lemurs remained safe in Madagascar

because the island got split off from the rest of the continent

and the more modern animals never reached there.

But I, for one, am delighted that they managed to survive in Madagascar

because they are really the most charming animal, aren't you?

But there is one lemur I haven't yet mentioned.

That's the sort of lemur attempt at an ape.

It's the biggest of all the lemurs. It's one of the least known.

It's very rare. And its name... Excuse me.

Its name is the indris.

It lives only in the tropical rainforests

which extend for a small strip down the east coast.

Wonderful places with these great tree ferns, but not the best place

to go looking for animals because the vegetation is so very thick.

But how we got on in our search for the indris

I'll tell you about next time.

MALAGASY VALIHA MUSIC