Old-school David Attenborough | A Look Through The Archives | BBC Earth

after now I found on the forest floor the rinds and cores of durian fruit which I knew was the favorite food of the orangutan I showed it to the diet could come with me and he confirmed what I had hoped the way in which it had been chewed showed that it had been eaten by an orangutan one must have been here earlier this morning we looked up to see where the food had come from and there 50 feet above us we saw a nest did one sleep there I asked yes he said one was there last night so the trail mu

st still be warm and the ape was probably quite close a few minutes later we heard a crashing in the branches ahead and there only a few yards away we spotted a great Furby red form swaying in the trees [Applause] uh smile far from being frightened of our presence he showed little intonation to dash away through the trees but just hung there screaming and breaking off branches to throw down at us all right being newly caught the ape crowds in the corner of his cage and very understandably trying

to bite anyone who went to touch him and I decided that we'd better leave him for a little while to let him settle down in any case by now we've got together such a large collection of animals parrots squirrels and many other creatures good feeding and cleaning them was more than a full-time job but it wasn't long before Charlie as we'd christened him began to calm down slowly we managed to win his confidence and soon every time I pass his cage he stretched out his hand to attract my attention

in the hope that he'd get some more food foreign when I put my hand in his cage on the third day he no longer snarled and scratched so with some condensed milk on the handle of a spoon I decided to try and lure him a little way out of his cage to begin with he was a bit irritated and not being given his food directly [Music] then I decided to trust him sufficiently to put my finger right in his mouth [Music] [Applause] huh [Music] I couldn't let him have the tin in case he might cut himself on t

he sharp edges and then for the first time four days after we'd had him we encouraged him to come right outside his cage [Music] to begin with I was a bit nervous because we were traveling down river and I wasn't sure what sort of chaos he was going to create among all the equipment and cages of animals that was on the ship's deck [Music] within a few days he was so tame that he allowed me to put ointment on the bad graze which he had on his wrist [Music] in the early evening without warning two

men walked down the gallery and began to beat on the huge drums [Music] thank you soon a dancer wearing a headdress of hornbill feathers emerged from beneath the Longhouse and began to prance and posture to the music of the drums and gongs which came echoing from the long house [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] came out to join him [Music] [Music] and then watched by the entire Village from the gallery of the Longhouse a whole troop of men came out to dance around a newly erected totem po

le foreign [Music] I started the nightly tour of feeding and cleaning our collection of animals when a dayak called me from the bank hey tuani said I've got a baroma are you interested well I didn't know what a barua was but I said we were very interested and I asked him to come on board to show it to me turned out to be the melee word for a bear the diag said that early that morning he had found this youngster deserted in the forest and he had heard that we had wanted animals so he had brought

it into us I offered to trade him for a cakes of salt which up here in extremely short supply and very valuable he asked for 15 and I suggested 10 and we agreed on that the Little Cub was obviously very young I reckoned about two weeks old he seemed to be in good condition but he hadn't got any teeth and obviously was still feeding on milk we had got a baby's bottle on board ready for such a case as this but I wondered whether he was yet old enough for us to be able to rear him first however he

had to be put in a box and covered up so that he kept warm as soon as the sun went down it gets quite cold on that River and we didn't want to risk our new pet catching a chill and then I had to set about the Urgent job of making a bottle of dilute condensed milk urgent because the Little Cub was already calling very loudly indeed for his food the milk seemed to be about the right temperature and to my relief the young Cub was soon guzzling away contentedly if you sit down keep quiet and are pat

ient then animals will soon appear these are among the loveliest and are certainly the most agile of all the forest animals the acrobatic Gibbons it was early in the morning just after Dawn and the Gibbons were out looking for breakfast some fruit flowers or maybe a few Birds eggs we kept absolutely quiet and they didn't notice us but hung a few yards away eating in the Treetops but soon One spotted us and he erased the alarm [Applause] [Applause] and then with amazing Speed and Agility the whol

e troop leapt away through the branches these are mccake monkeys the kind that in Sumatra and Java are sometimes trained to Canberra palm trees and gather coconuts to their masters these Balinese ones however seem to regard things the other way around it's us who have to provide food for them [Music] when they are grooming one another they're not simply looking for fleas but asserting one another's skin for tasty little grains of salt foreign [Music] s look charming and sweet scamping over the t

emple carvings they're really quite a Savage lot ruled over very harshly by one old male there was no sharing of the grains of maize I offered them and often they would fight and squabble over them as a result the older and bigger ones got far more than their fair share I tried hard to give these little babies some food but always the adults snatched it from my hand and once a baby did manage to grab a grain its mother wrenched open its jaws extracted the Maze and ate it herself I discovered tha

t the temple was sacred to the Cave's inhabitants during the day they blanketed the roof of their cave walking and squabbling but at nightfall they will all fly out to walk through the air in the dusk in search of insects [Music] machines the shrines beneath them were heavily encrusted with batdoppings and the ground of the cave was crawling with cockroaches inside it was hot with the warmth of the bat spotters and all the time there was a steady hail of lice and droppings and once as I passed a

dead bat flopped onto the floor I vented inside and found on a lead at the back this large python it's a dwelt in the back of the cave for many years living off the dead bats as they dropped from the roof [Music] thank you not far from the cave he found a colony of a different sort of bats the giant fruit bat or flying fox they were hanging upside down from the top of the trees Fanning themselves in the midday Sun I kept and the entire Colony took to flight now comes the balong's main antagonis

t held by two attendants rangder the dreaded evil witch [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] approaches her and now Begins the fight [Music] the men from the village in a State of Trance rushed down from the temple waving their swords to attack Granda and protect the barrel but Randa by her evil power is able to hold them at Bay [Music] foreign [Music] ly with a flourish of her magic cloth she forces them to turn their daggers upon themselves the men almost insensible try to thrust these sharp swo

rds into their chests but the badong's power is stronger than Rangers and he is able to protect his followers so that their swords do not pierce the Flesh and no blood is shed [Music] now the priest comes from the temple and scatters holy water to bring the men out of their trances thank you [Music] [Music] the men rushed back into the temple the baron disappears and all that is left are the main jikkers eating the priests offerings to the Gods the bait lay in a dry riverbed in front of us we wa

ited but not for long within half an hour there was a rustle in the bush and there was the Dragon this was tremendously exciting for us our first sight of this magnificent Monster the climax of four months of arduous travel he was enormous I reckoned about 10 feet long as he circled us flicking out his great yellow tongue savoring the smell of the goat's flesh he looked almost as though he had walked out of some Prehistoric Age there was a noise from the direction of the bait and another Dragon

this time a much smaller young one had come to begin investigating the bait the big one joins him and it begins tearing and ripping at the goat's carcass that is the leg of a full-grown goat that he's tugging at so you can judge his size for yourself they're trying to drag them away back to their lairs but we've tied the bait with rope onto a stake so they have to eat it here we were so close to him that we could see every scale in his horny black skin now he had proof that the dagons were indee

d here so before they ate too much of the bait we shouted and waved to scare them away not being able to get inside to the smell which was attacking him he came out to the front but now he caught a whiff of the smell of the suspended bait I hadn't reckoned on him being so big and to our dismay we saw that he could reach this hanging bait but fortunately he couldn't get enough to satisfy him and he retreated with some of the goats intestines dangling from the corner of his mouth and down came the

door hastily we pile Boulders on the door so that he couldn't lift it up we had got him and we thought our troubles were over we'd filmed him and we had caught him but we reckon without one thing unfortunately in the end bureaucracy defeats this and we won't give him a permit to export those dragons from Indonesia so I'm afraid they're still there that was the end of our Zoo Quest they were all emphatic that their particular part of the Jungle was teeming with wildlife and that if that was all

we wanted well we should go no further but no one seemed to be able to explain exactly what animals were to be found until one old man said oh yes Tuan many animals in this place very good place for Animals why only two weeks ago he said a tiger came into this very kampong and ate two men this is a fine place for animals well I explained hastily that man-eating Tigers were not actually on our list of desirable animals to be caught and as no one seemed anxious to volunteer for the task of catchin

g the Tiger we let the subject drop we talked for a little time more and then one man said that when he had been in the forest a few days ago he had seen a very large snake in one of the trees maybe he said it's still there well that sounded much more manageable to me and the next day with him as a guide we set off to look for it and sure enough we found it it looked enormous and from its size and markings I was quite sure that it was a python and therefore non-poisonous which was something of a

relief foreign it's important to grab his tail as soon as you grab his head otherwise he'll wrap his great coils round he won't give you a very nasty squeeze as he climbed the tree we saw that he was feeding his long sticky tongue flickering over the branches Gathering the ants which swarmed everywhere not a particularly Pleasant meal one would have thought but at least his hard scaly coat would protects him from the worst of the his stings without a regular daily supply of live ants the Pangol

in can't live we couldn't help to provide him with the right sword events in London so we didn't try to catch him but just sat quietly and watched him as he continued undisturbed with his morning meal we noticed that the ants on which the Pangolin was feeding had constructed nests for themselves by fasting together classes of leaves there seemed to be a great deal of activity going on around these nests so we looked closer at first we couldn't distinguish exactly what the ants were doing as they

bustled about so busily however then we noticed this group with their jaws locked tight in the lower leaf and their hind legs attached to the upper leaf the colony is constructing a new nest and these patient workers are holding two leaves of the future nest in position so that other members can fasten them together to form the outer wall of their new home [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause]