Original subtitles

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, for the naturalist, is, above all, the land of the lemur -

those strange ancestors and relations of the monkeys.

They come in many different sorts.

The smallest of them are these - the mouse lemurs.

They live in holes in trees, and we caught quite a number of them.

And as you may judge from their big, staring eyes,

they're mainly nocturnal animals

and so they're not very lively with these lights on them.

But they're very beautiful creatures and really quite like

their distant relatives, the bushbabies of Africa.

And indeed, they're not only the smallest of the lemurs,

they're the smallest of the whole of the group of primates -

the group which contains not only the lemurs, but apes and monkeys,

and, indeed, man himself.

They look very cuddly and they have very soft fur,

but, in fact, they're quite fierce, as I know, when we caught them.

Once they bite you, they are very reluctant to let go.

And they've got very sharp little teeth.

So I'm not going to touch them.

Being nocturnal animals, they use their ears

to collect every tiny sound that's going on around them.

And they can adjust their ears just like the bushbabies can.

And their tails are very fat.

They store fat for hibernation there.

I'm happy to say that two of the females are looking very fat,

and we are hoping that they may produce babies.

If they do, well, it looks as though we have a chance

of establishing little colonies of mouse lemurs in London,

which, as far as I know, will be the first

anywhere in the world outside Madagascar.

These, then, are the smallest of the lemurs.

But the biggest of the lemurs is a very different creature.

It's a creature the size of a young chimpanzee,

black and white in fur.

And a most impressive thing -

it doesn't even have a tail, unlike the rest of the lemurs.

And it's the only one not to have a tail,

at least, not a tail to speak of - it's got a small tail.

Many people consider that this strange creature

is the origin of the legend of a dog-headed man.

Marco Polo wrote about the dog-headed man,

and this is an illustration from a natural history book

published some 300 years ago.

And really it's not a bad likeness of the big lemur.

Its legs are proportioned like a human being,

which is like the big lemur.

Like the big lemur, it's got a furry coat

and it's also got these tremendous long hands,

which is very characteristic of the big lemur,

and it's got a dog's head.

Perhaps the big lemur has a bit more snub nose,

but it's quite like this big lemur.

The first man to see this big lemur was a Frenchman called Flacourt

who was travelling in Madagascar in the middle of the 17th century.

And he was going through one of the forests

and suddenly his guide pointed up into the trees and said, "Indris!"

And Flacourt saw a creature as I have described.

So he immediately wrote in his notebook, "the big lemur, indris".

But unfortunately, "indris" wasn't the name of the lemur at all.

It was simply a Madagascan word which means, "Look at that!".

The true name...the Madagascan name of the big lemur

is, in fact, "babakoto".

But anyway, the name "indris" has stuck,

and as far as the world of science is concerned,

the big lemur is called the indris.

Well, obviously we wanted to film this,

and before we went to Madagascar,

I visited a very distinguished British naturalist

who'd spent seven years there and asked him about the indris.

He told me that as far as he knew

it had never been photographed or filmed alive.

It has never been kept in captivity for any length of time,

because it has a very specialised diet of leaves and flower petals,

and, what is more, it's extremely difficult to find, so he said.

He said that in his seven years there,

he had only once managed to get a fleeting glimpse of it,

high up in the trees. Well, this obviously was a challenge,

and we decided we would have a try.

So we went down to the thick tropical rainforests

on the eastern coast of Madagascar to look for the indris.

The forest is pierced by a number of tracks

which have been cut through it so that loggers

can begin working the rich and valuable timber,

and it was along one of these that we turned.

The going wasn't easy, for the track had been cut several months before,

but no work had gone on since,

so it was already beginning to get overgrown.

In fact, our car was the first to travel down it for some time.

Well, we had arrived. But now we were here, I wasn't sure what to do next.

Certainly the indris was supposed to live somewhere in these forests,

but where, exactly?

And how do you start to find them?

There seemed nothing else to do

except to get out and simply start looking.

And as far as I could tell, this place was as good as any other.

This was virgin forest,

almost the only patch left in the whole of Madagascar.

And it was easily the thickest that we'd come across

in the whole of our time in the island.

Except for the loggers' tracks, there were no paths whatever through it.

It was very hot and moist and filled with sound.

BIRDSONG

The indris, if they were here,

were presumably somewhere high up in the trees.

But it's not a good thing to walk through a forest like this

without watching carefully where you put your feet.

And anyway, there are lots of interesting things

to be discovered in thick vegetation like this.

Under this bush,

I found an enormous number

of beautiful, shiny, olive-green objects.

This is a pill millipede.

Although it looks like a giant version of the little woodlouse

we find under stones in our gardens at home,

it's not, in fact, a close relative.

Of course, it's not poisonous, and indeed it hasn't got

sufficiently powerful mouth parts to bite you, even if it wanted to.

It feeds on rotting vegetation,

but why there should be several hundred of them

gathered together in this one spot, I had no idea.

As a piece of functional design, it's almost perfect -

rolling up into a ball, with no cracks whatever in its armour.

Interesting though they were, they were not what I was looking for.

My mind was set on the indris.

We searched day after day, but still found no sign of them.

However, the forest was full of a variety of birds, many of them

especially interesting because they are found only in Madagascar.

A recording of some of their songs would be worthwhile having.

And I could at least do that.

So one morning I set out with a tape recorder.

BIRDSONG

I also used a parabolic reflector,

which acts as a kind of searchlight,

concentrating the microphone sensitivity into a narrow beam

so that you can record a bird singing a considerable distance away.

The first bird to perform for us was a little paradise flycatcher

dancing its courtship display in the trees not far away.

BIRD SINGS

HOWLING

But this noise was no bird call.

I had never heard anything like it before.

It must be the voice of the indris.

The song was so loud that it seemed impossible

that the animals could be more than 20 or 30 yards away.

But where were they?

HOWLING

Infuriatingly, the bush was so thick

that I could see no sign of them whatever.

It was maddening to have been so close to this rare animal

and yet not have been able to see it.

But at least we now had proof that the indris were here - somewhere.

If only we had enough patience,

surely we should in the end catch sight of them.

We spent most of the following days walking as quietly as we could

through the forest, hoping that if we moved slowly and silently

we would come across an indris sitting quietly in the trees above,

munching leaves, perhaps in a more open part of the forest

where we might get a clear enough view of them

to be able to get film shots.

We searched day after day,

but although we sometimes heard their weird singing in the distance,

we never caught even the briefest glimpse of the animals themselves.

I began to despair of ever seeing them.

Then I decided it was foolish to concentrate entirely on the indris,

for there were, after all, many other fascinating creatures

which were supposed to occur in this forest somewhere.

There was one I particularly wanted to see - the frilled gecko,

a type of lizard occurring only in Madagascar,

which is one of the most remarkable examples of camouflage

to be found in the animal world.

It clings to the trunks of trees, and is said to be

so well disguised that it's almost impossible to see it.

I came to the conclusion that my only chance of finding one

would be to thump the tree trunk

in the hope of making it move and so drawing attention to itself.

But the geckos seemed to be just as elusive as the indris.

There might well be one in the picture now, but if there is,

I certainly didn't see it.

Then we did have a bit of luck.

There's one here...

hanging upside-down in profile on the right.

Its feet, with their adhesive pads on the end of the toes,

were flattened so much

that they seemed to melt into the bark

and the whole animal pressed itself so closely to the tree

that it was almost indistinguishable from it.

Even the outline of its eye was broken up with a fringe.

This little creature terrifies most Madagascans.

They believe it to be extremely dangerous,

for they say it has such a powerful evil spirit

that if you merely brush up against one accidentally

the only way you can rid yourself of its taint

and prevent the dreadful consequences of touching it

is to cut the part of your body which it has contaminated

and so wash away the evil with blood.

I suppose the very perfection of its camouflage, making it

well-nigh invisible, is partly responsible for its eerie reputation.

It achieves this invisibility by using the same device

as was used during the war to camouflage gun sights and bomb dumps.

You can paint a building the colour of its surroundings,

but it will still be obvious, for it casts a telltale shadow.

The way to obliterate the shadow is to put a drape round the sides,

and this is just what the gecko does.

Not only does it have an irregular frill round its chin,

but there are flaps of skin down its flanks, and even its tail

has fleshy growths on the side of it which prevent it casting any shadows.

Weird? Perhaps.

Rare, certainly, for it lives nowhere else in the world,

and, equally certainly, a fascinating creature.

But, of course, the indris remained our main objective.

And I racked my brains for some better way of finding them

than simply wandering aimlessly through the same parts of the bush

day after day.

Perhaps we should pack up and drive off to some other area,

and start all over again.

But that seemed foolish.

For at least we had heard them, so we knew they were here, somewhere.

I was fairly sure that the trouble was simply

that our eyes were not sharp enough.

The animals were there, but we couldn't see them.

Then I had an idea. We had got its recorded voice.

Perhaps if we played the recording in various parts of the forest,

we might persuade the indris, sitting concealed in the trees,

to sing in answer to the recording, and so reveal its presence.

I wasn't very convinced that it would work,

but we had tried everything else and failed, so we might as well try this.

HOWLING ON RECORDING

INDRIS CALLS

This was different, yet it must be the voice of the indris.

It could be nothing else.

They were replying to their recorded song with alarm calls.

But where were they?

INDRIS CALLS

There!

40 yards away - farther than I'd guessed

judging from the loudness of their calls, and 30 feet up in the tree.

How close would they let me approach?

INDRIS CALLS

They were big creatures, even larger than I had imagined -

at least three feet tall.

And the tinny voice of the recorder seemed to hold them fascinated.

HOWLING ON RECORDING

INDRIS CALLS

RECORDING CONTINUES TO PLAY

INDRIS CALLS

INDRIS CALLS

INDRIS CALLS

The proportions of their body, with their very long legs,

were strangely human.

And I remembered once again Marco Polo's dog-headed men.

INDRIS CALLS

But then either the strange quality of their recorded singing

or else my presence became too much for them

and they were off, jumping magnificently

with their bodies upright, in a manner quite unlike that of monkeys.

It was impossible to chase them through the forest.

They could go much faster than we could.

But it would have been valueless anyway

because they were thoroughly alarmed

and not likely to allow us to creep up and film them at close quarters.

But the next day, I went back to exactly the same place,

at the same time, without a recorder,

and as quietly as possible,

in the hope of finding them undisturbed.

To my joy, they were there again.

In the weeks that followed, we got to know this family very well indeed.

There were four of them.

The most skittish and lively, and therefore the easiest to find,

were these two - a young pair.

There was also an old male, the father of the family,

whose favourite position was to sit on a branch chewing leaves,

with one of his enormous legs dangling down like a giant calliper.

His mate, the old female, was very shy,

and we only got short glimpses of her before she leapt away.

The young couple were very affectionate

and spent hours and hours every day

sitting on a bough caressing one another.

They seemed to be nervous and excitable,

and were obviously disturbed not only by us,

if we made an incautious movement,

but also, surprisingly, by other inhabitants of the forest,

particularly if they had loud, gruff calls -

like this handsome bird, a coua.

COUA CALLS

COUA CALLS

They really seemed quite upset by the bird coming so close to them.

Of course, it took a great deal to put the old man off HIS food.

But even HE stopped to look at the bird when it got too close.

COUA CALLS

The young ones, however, had been quite upset,

and didn't seem to be able to settle down again to their endearments.

We discovered that our indris family were very much creatures of habit.

They slept in the same tree every night, and every morning

they set off along the same route through the forest.

They sang regularly at the same time, six o'clock

and 11 o'clock in the morning, and four o'clock in the afternoon.

And they would visit the same trees for feeding.

As a result, by the time we had watched them for a week or so,

we could predict almost exactly where they would be

at any particular time of the day.

But we seldom saw the old female.

She sat in the thickest part of the trees.

But from the few glimpses I had had of her,

I suspected that she was nursing a baby.

Before we left, I wanted, above all, to observe her closely,

and because we knew their daily routine so precisely,

it was possible for us to conceal ourselves in one position

and then wait for her to arrive.

There she is.

And this is the shot which showed us

that she did indeed have a young fifth member of the family

clinging to her back.

She displayed touching affection towards her baby,

licking it and caressing it.

Her mate, the old male,

often clambered up to sit by her side as she rested in the thick leaves.

Of all the creatures we saw in Madagascar,

this, the largest of the lemurs, was the rarest, the most interesting,

the least-known scientifically and the most enchanting.

These forests are their last home in the world,

and their numbers now must be very restricted.

They do no harm to anyone or anything.

They feed on the young shoots of trees and on flower petals.

They have no natural enemies except, possibly, man.

Fortunately, most of the people living in the forest

regard the indris with an awe amounting to reverence.

For these beautiful creatures, they say,

are a gentle branch of the human race

who have taken refuge in the trees to live inoffensively in peace.

MALAGASY VALIHA MUSIC