Original subtitles

It's September - early spring in the southern hemisphere.

The Antarctic continent is encircled by sea ice

that extends for hundreds of miles northwards around its coasts

and encloses all but a few islands.

But these ice-free islands, like South Georgia, are very precious,

for here the sea never freezes

and any sea animal that needs to can always get ashore.

First to return each spring are the bull elephant seals.

They are about to land on a breeding beach,

and each one knows that when he does he will have to face rivals.

A full-grown male weighs over three tonnes.

Half the world's population will come to this one island,

8,000 to this beach alone.

(LOUD BELLOWING)

This immense gathering of elephant seals

extends for some two miles up this beach.

It might seem to be totally disorganised,

but there is a pattern to it.

All these are females.

They came ashore about a month ago to pup

and now are ready to breed again.

And they all belong to this one male.

(THROATY BARKING)

This is a beachmaster

and there are a dozen or so like him spaced out along this beach.

Each one of them has his own harem.

I estimate this one has about a hundred females.

His sole object in life at the moment

is to make quite sure that he and he alone

mates with every one of them.

And for that he must fight...

(AGGRESSIVE ROARING)

He's won,

but he'll have to battle many times every day if he is to keep control.

The females gave birth soon after they arrived.

They now have three weeks in which to feed their pups

before they themselves have to go back to sea to feed.

In that short time,

they have to transform a near empty bag of skin

into a full bag of blubber.

As they come to the end of suckling,

the females become sexually receptive again.

That is the moment the beachmaster has been waiting for.

But while he is busy,

a rival is also busy

on the edge of the harem.

That can't be tolerated.

(ANGRY ROARING)

(DEEP ROAR)

A roar is enough -

the interloper retreats.

But many conflicts will only be settled by violence.

Males get ripped -

and those in the way of the fighters may get crushed.

(YELPING)

Every now and then, the beachmaster proclaims his dominance with a roar.

The bigger the bull, the louder and deeper his voice.

A rival can judge from it

whether or not he has a chance in a straight battle.

(THROATY ROAR)

If he is going to persevere with his challenge, he must now fight.

The pair rear up to over eight feet.

Their only weapons are their teeth,

but they can do a lot of damage with them.

The hide on the neck is particularly thick

and prevents serious injury.

A bout can go on for a quarter of an hour.

Eventually the battle is brought to an end

by exhaustion as much as anything else.

On the grassy slopes above the battleground,

the scene is more peaceful.

Black-browed albatross are returning from the sea.

Grey-headed albatross are here too,

hanging on the updraughts

caused when the ever-continuing wind

is deflected upwards by the cliff face.

Throughout the past winter,

these birds have been flying alone over the vast ocean,

searching for food.

Now they are returning to breed

and are assembling in colonies

several thousand strong.

(CAWING)

Breeding pairs from previous seasons are reunited -

and each uses exactly the same nest mound they used before.

But it does need a little renovation.

Mutual grooming renews the bond between them.

Both grey-headed and black-browed albatross

are faithful for life, twenty years or so,

and long-established pairs

only need a brief repetition of their courtship ritual before they mate.

Two weeks later, the female lays a single egg,

and for the next seventy days,

the two take turns to incubate it.

While one keeps the egg warm,

the other flies off to feed

and may have to travel thousands of miles before it gets what it needs.

Most kinds of albatross nest in colonies.

One special one, however, prefers a more solitary life.

Light-mantled sooty albatross are the last to return to the island.

The males come first.

One that is still unpaired settles on a ledge

and calls to passing females.

Having listened to many, she eventually selects one.

The next stage in courtship

involves a certain amount of nodding and dancing.

And then there follows a most beautiful perfectly synchronised display flight.

During the day, the skies belong to the albatross,

but as darkness comes,

other more nervous and more numerous birds come to the island.

Thousands of small petrels and prions

fly agitatedly around the cliffs in the darkness.

22 million nest amongst the tussac grass

on South Georgia alone.

Being so small, the prions are vulnerable to attack by skuas,

and for the safety of their defenceless chicks during the day,

they make their nests in burrows.

Outside, the white-chinned petrels assemble.

(CONSTANT CHIRPING)

Duetting pairs defend the territories around their burrows,

that can extend two metres beneath the tussac grass.

The chick stays safely inside the burrow for two months.

Every other day, one of the adults comes to feed it

with a mixture of squid and krill.

Before dawn, and danger,

all the adults will have disappeared from the island

and returned to the open ocean.

This hillside is jam-packed with Macaroni penguins

and virtually nothing else.

There are some 80,000 of them here,

but even this vast assemblage

is only a tiny proportion of the total population of South Georgia,

which is estimated to be more than 10,000,000.

It's an astonishing demonstration of the fact

that although the Antarctic is virtually lifeless over vast areas,

there are one or two small oases that teem with life.

After spending the winter

wandering around the northern fringes of the southern ocean,

the Macaronis return with remarkable punctuality.

In just ten days, the terraces of this empty stadium become packed tight.

The males come first, the females a week later.

The Macaroni is very much THE penguin

of the northern rim of the Antarctic.

Very few of them venture farther south

than the sub-Antarctic islands.

But here they constitute over fifty per cent

of all sea birds.

At the moment, at the beginning of the breeding season,

they are squabbling noisily,

as each pair fights to hold its own tiny nest site.

Each new arrival has to make its way

through a barrage of pecks from outraged nest owners.

Macaronis must be the noisiest

and most bad-tempered of all penguins,

and sometimes the fights can be really vicious.

(AGGRESSIVE SCREECHING)

Eventually, a female finds her male

and is rewarded with a greeting display...

...and a comforting preen.

Ten days later, she's produced two eggs.

But, remarkably, one of them -

the darker, smaller one -

is nearly always abandoned.

Why is not certain.

It may be insurance against the loss of the bigger one.

But the colony is not littered with abandoned eggs.

It has its own squad of refuse collectors - sheathbills.

During the summer, they normally eat penguin droppings.

An abandoned if addled egg must make a nice change.

Sheathbills are one of the few birds here

that do not rely on the ocean for food, at least directly.

They are totally land-based.

All the wildlife here in South Georgia -

the Macaroni penguins, the albatrosses, the elephant seals,

even the tussac grass -

is virtually restricted to the outer rim of Antarctica.

Farther south, it's a harsher world.

There, ice dominates.

But with the arrival of spring, that world is warming just slightly.

The sea ice is retreating and animals are returning -

animals that are specially adapted to life in the frozen south.

Most of Antarctica is still locked in by sea ice,

but as the days lengthen, so that slowly retreats.

First to be freed is the Antarctic peninsula,

a long arm of the continent that reaches up northwards.

For a few months, it's possible to reach its coast by sea.

Antarctica is nowhere lovelier.

But even at the height of the summer,

only 2% of the continent is free from ice,

and most of that is here.

But no sea animal will reach those distant rock slopes

until the sea ice breaks up.

Gentoo penguins are among the first to make it.

They need bare rock for their nests,

but even now that's so scarce they may have a hard climb to reach it.

These are on their way to relieve their mates

who, for the past three days, have been looking after the eggs.

Their eggs were laid in November,

almost a month after the Gentoos up in South Georgia.

There's no soil here with which to make a nest

and precious little vegetation, just a few small stones.

And even the stones are in short supply

and may have to be "borrowed" from a neighbour.

(ANNOYED SQUAWKING)

Nobody likes to see their nest disappearing from beneath their feet.

But when thieves come from all sides,

there's not much you can do.

After five weeks of incubation, the chicks start to hatch.

(FEEBLE SQUAWK)

Unlike the Macaronis,

both the Gentoos' eggs hatch.

For three weeks, the adults care for the chicks,

protecting them from the cold.

They take turns to bring meals of small fish and krill.

But the labour of doing so is enormous,

for there's that snow slope to be traversed every time

and penguins were not designed for skiing.

As spring advances,

more and more of the peninsula becomes ice-free,

and humpback whales appear along the coast, seeking krill.

The sea ice, as it disintegrates,

forms a sort of soup of loose blocks.

This is the pack ice.

The whales will go no further.

(WHO0SH OF EXPELLED AIR)

At its outer edges,

the pack is easy to get through.

But further south, the floes become bigger and more closely packed.

Only the most powerful ice-breaking ships can force a passage

through the vast band of broken ice that rings the continent.

In places, it's 200 miles across.

This, however, surprisingly,

is home of the most numerous large mammal in the world apart from man -

crabeater seals.

Up to 30 million live around the continent

in this in-between world of ice and water.

Here they rest and pup.

They never come to land.

Despite their name, they live on krill.

They sieve sea water through their interlocking teeth

and consume 20 kilos of it every day.

Even further south, beyond the pack ice,

there still remains mile after mile of winter ice

that has not yet broken up.

Very few creatures can get across this to the land beyond.

But one does...

...the Adelie penguin.

They breed further south than any other penguin.

They can't wait for the ice to break and have to walk.

In some years, they will march for over 60 miles

to reach their traditional breeding grounds.

The Antarctic summer is short indeed.

They must hurry.

Their journey is remarkable enough

but, incredibly, one creature makes an even longer one.

Snow petrels are smaller than pigeons,

yet they fly across ice that never melts

and climb to altitudes of 3,000 metres

right up and onto the vast Antarctic ice cap.

Here, over an area larger than Australia,

the ice is several miles thick.

It blankets whole mountain ranges.

Only the summits of the tallest project through it,

as "nunataks".

These few tiny patches of rock isolated in a sea of ice

are as precious as an oasis in a desert.

Only 2% of the continent is ice-free,

and nearly all of that is near the coast.

But snow petrels can't lay their eggs on ice

and are prepared to fly a very long way to find bare rock.

One of their nests was found on a nunatak like this, 144 miles from the coast.

Snow petrels bring life to this,

the most life-less part of our planet.

They breed further south than any other bird.

They have to wait

for their nesting ledges to be cleared from the thick snow.

Even at the height of summer, temperatures don't rise above minus 30.

There is no unfrozen water,

and to keep clean they have to bathe in snow.

As soon as the winds have swept the bulk of the snow

from the higher rock slopes,

the snow petrels take possession of them.

But there is still much to do.

They may have to excavate a metre of snow

to get into a crevice and find a nest site that suits them.

In the coming season,

they will have to make the journey of over 200 miles back to open water

again and again to collect food for their chicks.

But with their arrival,

spring has, at last, come to the deep south.

Next week, with the ice retreating to its minimum extent,

we will watch the race to breed

as the wildlife takes advantage of the brief Antarctic summer.

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