The Darker Side of the Animal Kingdom | Bad Natured: Full Series | BBC Earth

often when we're filming our mammal cousins it's very tempting to impose our own human anthropocentric values on their actions and that is I think a mistake probably the most interesting example of this I've seen has been working with Orca sometimes known as killer whale on a beach in Patagonia at exactly the right time of the right tide a pod of orca will surge up onto the Sands to snatch seal pups and to drag them back down into the surf where they feed on them we waited for 5 days to see this

hunkered down low against you know freezing Patagonian winds trying to make as little an impression as possible on the seal pups that were playing around in the surf and finally uh the pot approached they came up and one animal surged up and onto the Sands itself to snatch an animal and drag it back down into the water it's an incredible thing to see you know or ER could weigh eight or nine tons and to risk beaching themselves to find a meal you know that is a really heavy investment of energy

and of serious risk to themselves as well but the next bit was the the part of the whole scenario that took us by surprise so once they had this tiny pup in the sea instead of just finishing it off in a heartbeat as they surely could have done they seemed to to play with it to toy with it to go round and round it in circles tossing it out the water with their tails and not going in for the final killer bite well this wasn't an adult F seal it was a small animal that seriously couldn't have done

them any damage and then it got even weirder because we found on that same Beach several carcasses of pups which have been taken by orca they had very definitive bite marks from the orur on them and they had been killed but not eaten otherwise the carcass was completely perfect why would any animal go to that degree of effort and risk and then not eat it didn't make any sense to us perhaps the answer lay in a different filming trip also with Orca but in British Columbia my team and I had been lu

cky enough to happen upon a pod of orca that were socializing and we went out in our sea kayaks and paddle alongside them the Orca were leaping out of the water breaching coming alongside me and just rolling onto their side so they could look up at me as they came past it was truly bre taking but then they went from this this playful supersized dolphin which is essentially what they are into full-on predatory mode and I've never seen an animal switch as fast as this ever they'd encountered a ful

ly grown male Stellar sea lion which is 3/4 of a ton 750 kilos of flashing teeth a serious predator in its own right and the pot of Ora cornered it into a bay so we got out of our kayak and got onto Shore and we came right up close to see the whole breathtaking spectacle play out they took it down by breaching up and landing on top of it by slapping it with their tails and just generally tiring the animal out you know it was outgunned outnumbered outweighed and it it simply had no chance althoug

h it kept trying to to make a run for the uh for the kelp beds where the Orca wouldn't follow watching this happen it took a long long time and you could see it getting more and more tired more and more worn out and you know you feel for them everyone's seen sea lions and they have these great big dark eyes they really pull on your heartstrings because they have it would appear so many similarities to us as human beings and certainly are they do share a common ancestor with us but then finally w

hen the animal was no longer a threat when it was so tired and so beaten that it couldn't fight back then they brought in their young they brought in their carves they were quite young animals but they were clearly being taught by their parents how to hunt replicating their parents Maneuvers they were also breaching up out of the water and tail slapping on the Stellar sea line and this went on for for a good while you can see that it was an instructional process they were using the Stellar sea l

ion as a teaching Aid and that was pretty uncomfortable to watch it would appear to us to be incredibly cruel but the next bit was the the bit that just took it to a whole different level because once all of that was finished once the the lesson was over rather than coming in and finishing off the ca lion they all turned on some unseen unheard signal and just swam off to Sea and left it they didn't eat a single mouthful of that cell sea lion and we just couldn't understand why but it seems that

Orca are one of the animals that indulge in what is known as Surplus killing that is killing that is not designed to be for food kind of seems that they compartmentalize their lives so if they're traveling they're traveling they're socializing they're socializing if they're hunting that's what they're doing and likewise if they're teaching and learning well they don't play with their food it's really tough for you as an observer to see an animal going through so much stress and pain and overwhel

ming exertion and then for it not even to result in you know precious calories for the Orca it seems so cruel but then surely we as human beings are the worst culprit of that there is no other animal that will that will engage with a and kill potential food but then not eat it and just kill it for sport in that surely we human beings are the master my name is vien and and I'm a wildlife [Laughter] cameraman back in 2016 he was in the Mas Mara and I was following a two baby AAS um it it is a very

Grim story but um I would like it to be balanced and this this event happened right toward the end of um our shoot on that very last week we're waiting for all the females to come back to the den and being greeted by their babies usually they will turn up they give that slight little ground noise and then this the extraordinary things it it's is that the the old babies will pop out you know listening to their mother's very specific GRS so it was just before the sunset we were at our usual spot

waiting and I'm there you know happy with my cup of coffee in the car but I sported at same time two lions in the peripheric of the the den and I thought something's going to happen no h and came back and I was a bit suspicious by this time they should all be there cuz I just knew the routine I go so into it and start suspecting that something is not quite right all of a sudden is alpha female she turns up she's on her own no other IRAs and she come she comes right close to the entrance of the d

en and then she's calling she's calling um and nothing happens and she keeps calling and I'm like well she's not actually part of the story I should concentrate on the liance and I keep I kept my eyes between the two well it did actually last about half an hour and she kept doing that and I thought oh no there's something no quite right and she she starting pushing her head in into the those tiny little hole where the baby um um goes into so um and then she's pushing ahead and and and starting t

o engage the driver and he was like no that's just a normal thing but and then all of a sudden she comes out with a baby on her mouth but that's just how hyena carry their babies with that powerful Jo but they know how to be gentle with that sort of uh movement the baby was just going of Flappy you know she wasn't moving at all and then she puts the baby on the ground and started moving touching the baby with her nose and the mouth just to check I think she was checking whether um the baby was r

ight and mean then baby was moving oh she was simply dead and and and the driver confirmed it said that that baby's dead and then all of a sudden she she sort of she became larger than usual the hair on her neck was completely raised you know you can just tell that that animal is not quite self um would just witnessing a mother basically eating her own baby there are a number of reasons why she probably did that perhaps she just wanted to to keep a social standing High not showing her weakness t

o um other aenas because she's like the queen therefore everything about her uh Offspring should be powerful you know she get access to the best Meats she gets to meet with the best and specimen and and perhaps that's one of the reason she didn't want to show that weakness and or she didn't want to attract or the Predators or maybe she just wanted to keep the the den clean only and hyena can you tell you can tell you why that happens usually when I come back from a shoot um and I I'll tell my ki

ds um everything I've been filming and at I know beautiful stories oh you wow look at that but um that one I never told my kids that so um yeah one of my favorite animals if I was really pressed to name one out of the whole Animal Kingdom it would have to be the African Buffalo now if you're not familiar with these animals you could be forgiven for thinking they're glorified wild cows or some ancient ancestor of the domestic cow they're not actually they are only very distantly related their unp

redictable wild Nature has earned them quite the reputation as one of the most dangerous animals in the African Savannah when I was growing up in Kenya as a young girl I was fascinated that of all the animals out there Lions hyena leopard cheetah elephant it was the African Buffalo that was the one that seemed to inspire the most reverence and and actually fear as well but also it was often an animal that was at the heart of some of the best stories that I would listen to around the campfire at

the foothills of Mount Kenya called abdz national park it was a very bright full Moon that Lit the scene beautiful stars like just filled the sky it was back in the day where we didn't have normal cameras any kind of night vision capability any night filming infrared all that stuff we've been up for several hours mostly what we saw were various Impala gazelle some elephant as well that had gathered around this salt lck all of a sudden it was heads up of course you know everyone watching the scen

e was hoping that this is the moment a big Predator was going to rock up to the scene and slowly the Impala the gazelle and eventually even the elephant sort of cleared and moved off the Salt Lake and went to the edges in came this lone male old African Buffalo limping he looked tired he looked like he was in pain they tend to have these kind of almost like wrinkled circles around their eyes and on their face as they get older so there were a lot of cues there that we were picking up that this w

as an old male but he wasn't just old he injured he just slowly walked through head hanging low very determined moving in in one clear direction to the center of that Salt Lake and when he got there he dropped his head down and started licking lapping up the salt that he'd come for in the wild an animal will do everything in its power to hide an injury if they're not predated they're either injured or they simply get too old to keep up with their herd it doesn't want to look vulnerable it doesn'

t want to be singled out by a predator as an easy kill all the other animals looked incredibly wary of him with such an obvious injury he could barely put any weight down on that foot he was clearly in a lot of pain even despite his size vulnerable so there he made his way right to the center presumably cuz that's where he felt saf as that was where there was no scrub where potential Predators could lie and wait the elephants particularly who because of their size and numbers you would have expe

cted to dominate the area around the Salt Lake the older females definitely look like they weren't interested in trying to challenge this um buffal so these two young male elephants sort of tried a few mock charges you know trumpeting and flapping their ears and and moving towards him and watching this old bull buffalo he sort of raise his head up and just kind of stare them down just face them head on and just tip his head up at them like that and the body language there was no mistaking that t

he message was clear this Buffalo was saying I am here and I'm not moving for anybody you know what I saw in that scene was tenacity resilience and holding space taking up space ever since that day I have the utmost respect for African Buffalo the very same personality traits they earned them that reputation of being ill-tempered bad-natured dangerous animals are the same traits that mean they are also unbelievably resilient animals the number of times I've either seen firsthand or natural histo

ry films where a single animal will be taken down by three four lions and you're thinking to yourself come on buddy this has got to be it you're your numbers up and just at that moment it finds another gear and it fights its way out of that situation to Live Another [Music] Day hello my name is Gavin thirston I've spent over 30 years watching and filming Wildlife for series such as planet Earth blue planet frozen planets Etc my job has taken me all over the world but there's one place that's dra

wn me back like a magnet time and time again and that's where this story takes place it's the Massa Mara in Kenya the event I'm going to tell you about took place almost 30 years ago but it was so shocking that it stuck hard in my memory the mass Mara is a national game reserve it's mainly Rolling Hills of open Savannah dotted with trees and the mara river flows through it west to east dividing it from the serengetti to the South this has to be in the top five places for abundant Wildlife on thi

s planet and is home to the usual top predators Lions cheetah leopard you may also know of the mara because of the annual wilderbeast migration tens of thousands of animals follow the rains as the seasons swing north and south over the year and this rain brings fresh grass which is food for the herbivores once such common her before is the Thompson's gazelle or Tommy it's a small goat sized gazelle with a white belly it has a white rump patch and he's got two distinctive horizontal black side st

ripes the males have quite substantial horns for rutting in defense the female horns are shorter about yay big but would still do some damage one morning heading out to film expert spotter driver Dave breed saw a female Tommy out on its own and it was behaving really strangely he drove us a bit closer to have a look looking through binoculars we could see she was pregnant and it was soon clear she was going to give birth her borce Ed their births to coincide with the rains as there's them much m

ore Lush grass to eat to raise their young by all giving birth around the same time there's less chance of your Offspring being the one to get eaten by a predator as a wildlife cameraman I'm always on the lookout for interesting behaviors even if they're not strictly on the script I readed my camera and Dave swung the car around into position for me to film she circled slightly and then knelt down on her front knees within 30 seconds or so a tiny head and feet appeared 5 seconds later the tiny b

aby flopped out onto the grass a mom turned around and began to lick the tiny form it's a magical moment to witness the licking helps clear the baby's nose so it can breathe and creat a stronger bond between Mom and baby it also helped suppress the smell of the birth fluids that could attract a predator a minute or so later and the baby was already trying to get up on its feet but these newborns are vulnerable out on the plains of Africa and so have evolved to get up and running quickly I was en

joying this tender moment between the mother and her newborn baby when she started to look nervously into the distance David's sharp eyes soon picked it up there was something running in from almost a kilometer away a large male baboon baboons are omnivores and opportunistic they'll eat pretty much anything they've got amazing eyesight and clearly this baboon had seen the baby from way way off Dave warned me about what might be about to happen so I swung the camera around and focused the baboon

was running at Full Tilt pounding across the plains making a be line for the Tommy and her baby closer to us the young form was almost standing its legs wobbling taking its first steps but the baboom was closing in I really felt for the gazelle mother her Instinct knew what was coming and she desperately tried to nuzzle her new baby to walk too late the male baboon was soon on them and it grabb the baby from under mom's nose mom was not going to give up on her baby though and she just charged an

d charged and jabed the baboon with her horns and the baboon leap back and dropped the baby and for a moment it looked like the mom might be able to defend it but these males are smart and quick he darted in and grabbed the baby again this time he took it in his mouth and ran it happened so fast that the mum didn't see the baby go and she stayed looking in the grass and that was it the Boon just went off a few hundred meters and sat behind the nearest termite Mound it's pretty Grim not the sort

of thing you can show on any screen the baboon slowly ate the Baby Alive as it bleeded for its mother and that's the image and memory I have in the space of maybe five minutes I witnessed the full gruesome circle of life from being born and taking its first breath its feet on the plains of Africa to staring into the jaws of death and taking its last breath life can be harsh and these brutal scenario iOS take place daily in the wild thankfully we aren't there to witness it all the whole Silence o

f the entire forest was just broken this is not usually how a tiger makes a [Music] kill my name is shiang MAA I a nature in wildlife photographer based out of India I've been spending the last two decades documenting White cats and other rare species of my country this encounter happened in ranmor National Park in Rajasthan in India rambur is probably one of India's very unique habitats where uh it's a combination and blend of ancient history and natural history so the park is has got a very un

ique kind of a habitat with some beautiful lakes uh ruins monuments and the grand ranmor fort in the backdrop this is a place where wars were being fought at one point of time and in today's time uh Wars are still fought but in the animal kingdom in the tiger Kingdom the key character around which this story is revolving is t19 Krishna who was the reigning queen of rambur at that time I started following krishna's lineage because I was fortunate enough to document her mother Queen machle the Lad

y of the Lakes as she was called in fact the most photographed tiger of the world at one point of time and she died as uh uh the oldest surviving Wild Tiger so Krishna was mle's last litter in 2014 uh Krishna gave birth to three Cubs those three Cubs were called Arrowhead Pac-Man and lightning Arrowhead and lightning were the two daughters uh the two female cups and Pac-Man was the male cup Pacman in in fact derived his name because of a peculiar mark on his forehead uh which resembled that vide

o game which PE uh children play called Pac-Man all three Cubs were very different from each other you know Arrowhead was a much more dominating uh cub and a bold Cub uh and uh lightning was a bit a bit of a timid tigress and Pac-Man was also bold but as in case of all uh Young young male tigers you know they he he always used to stick around with his mother so sometime in the Summers of 2015 in the month of April uh while we were following this family that day uh that morning you know it was a

very dull morning nothing much was happening uh but you know we guys are Wildlife photographers so we like crying till the last moment and uh so I just uh saw my watch and there's still around half half an hour 45 minutes for the park to close uh for the morning session so let's take one more round just when we were going towards the lake area there was a stretch which was flooded with with around 15 20 Vehicles all the cameras were pointed in One Direction and it was very evident that there's s

omething happening out there so we decided to park ourselves uh away from from this entire crowd and uh our plan was just to wait for some time and maybe the whichever tiger was out there you know it decides to move and we may get some kind of a view just when we were waiting you know I just uh turn around and saw that this young bloke Pac-Man you know he had started stalking a deer and uh you know I just quickly changed my lenses and switched on to a wider focal length because it was too close

and he charged the deer now when tigers are making the kill you know they normally go in for the neck uh and just uh choke their prey and that's when you know the prey dies instantly but in this case uh the approach of young Pacman was totally wrong because he caught hold of the deer but from the backside the deer was struggling in his mouth and then he dragged this deer to a higher vantage point where he tried to suffocate the deer by sitting on top of it but still you know the deer didn't die

and the whole Silence of the entire forest was just broken because of the constant cacophony and uh the shrilling sounds of uh this deer you know this confused tiger he decided to just flip around uh the prey and he started uh you know eating the deer from the hindsight and the deer was still alive and this entire struggle continued for around 15 to 20 minutes that's when the Deer uh died finally in experience was at public display because you know this is not usually how a tiger makes a kill as

this inexperienced Cub was trying to make which I consider it as his first kill because uh in so many months uh I had never seen these young cubs uh you know attempting any kind of a hunt on their own uh surprisingly the mother and the daughter Arrowhead they were seen in the vicinity I could see them um uh standing at my location uh but they didn't do anything the mother could have come and helped his son to successfully complete this hunt but nothing happened as this whole drama was unfolding

in front of me my heart was going through mixed emotions on one hand there was this tiger I had seen as a cub and I had followed his journey for 14 months and I was so happy to see that he had taken those first steps towards becoming an independent Wild Tiger by making his first kill and on the on the other hand there was those loud Shilling sounds painful sounds of the deer all that you know pain and Agony it was very difficult for me to handle there are lot of questions which still remain una

nswered you know it's it's a Mysterious World of tigers why didn't the mother come and support this hunt you know I feel that the The Tigress was helping his son to become independent when I look back and think about this entire incident my key takeaway was learning about a key human value being independent there are moments in life when one bold step has to be taken by every person and that probably will be the step towards independence this male tiger this male tiger cub had taken that particu

lar step that morning and every time I pass through that area in ranmor you know those sounds uh still are quite fresh in my mind but it would have given so much of confidence to him to become a independent Wild Tiger living in solitude my name is Alex vile and I'm a wildlife cinematographer although I'm from tropical North Queensland um I'm lucky enough to do a lot of my work in the polar regions of the world so up north in the Arctic and down south in the Antarctic and what I'm going to tell y

ou about today is leopard seals we're going to what is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen Siever Cove now pulling into it my my breath was just taken away it's it's got this huge Glacier on one side and then there's this Bay of the ocean that's just filled with all these icebergs of different shapes and different Hues of blue and then on the other side uh is this rocky area these big sort of rounded rocks kind of unusual for Antarctica and perched on top of these is this small Arg

entinian field station so we were there to film a sequence on gentu penguin fledglings being predated upon or at least attacked by leopard seals the ultimate villain so I got there about couple of weeks before the main action was due to start and during this time I was filming the gentu penguin chicks up in the colony so the colony is just right around the Argentinian base only had about an hour commute to work each day and I absolutely fell in love with the chicks they're just the most gorgeous

little things penguins in general are one of my favorite animals actually so the little chicks the genos they're just these little sort of fluffy gray and white balls of Joy that's probably about the best way that I can describe them the chicks are prettyy clumsy they fall over bits of rock and down little Ledges but they just pick themselves up and and off they go again so they're absolutely gorgeous and I really fell in love with them and that made what happened next even sort of harder to se

e so the main event was when these penguin chicks go into the water for the first time in their lives which is called fledging so they lose all of their down and they get their adult feathers and they have to learn to swim basically immediately and they're not particularly good at it to start with leopard seals are basically the ultimate Predator they're massive about 3 and 1/2 M long really chunky really strong very fast in the water and they've got this really kind of evil look to them they've

got a massive long head makes them look a little bit like a velociraptor but underwater and their their mouth almost seems to go too far back in their jaw and it sort of comes up at the end which gives them this slightly Sinister sort of grin so they seem to know when the the fledging season for the the um gentu penguin chicks is which is only for a couple of weeks each year and I imagine these leopard seals come in from far and wide cuz there was about four or five of them there at a time they

just sort of zoom up behind them and grab them by the feet and pull them down cuz these these penguin fledglings they're not particularly good at swimming yet at times there was Brash ice in the bay so these sort of bits of ice of different size that the Penguins would have to sort of clamber over and the leopard seals would come up underneath that and they just pull the penguin chicks down certainly some of the the fledglings escaped but a lot of them got taken but the really bad natured bit o

f what the leopard seals did was how long they would play with these chicks before they finally kind of put them out of their misery so they'd grab the chick they'd pull it underwater and then they'd let it go and you're thinking what what's this leopard seal doing that chick was hardly even struggling and the chick would shoot off and the leopard seal would chase after it not very fast really for a leopard seal and grab it again pull it underwater chick would sometimes play dead sort of seeming

ly to make the leopard seal Let It Go and then it then leopard seal would let it go and the chick would trying to get onto a bit of ice which would fall over and seal would grabb it again and and oh man just watching this it was pretty heartbreaking like it was it was what we were there to film so you know we were of course glad that we were getting the sequence that we'd come for but it was pretty disturbing to watch to be honest just it just had this feeling of oh come on leopard seals just ju

st put these poor chicks out of their misery these are the chicks that I'd been filming for weeks and I just so going to get eaten they could at least get taken out quickly but that's not really what happened eventually the leopard seals would kill the the chicks they would um well it was pretty Grizzly actually they they do it through this process called flailing where they'd grab the chick by the head eventually um and then they'd sort of toss it from side to side and that would cause the chic

k to separate into a couple of parts and it was pretty nasty pretty Grizzly most of the time the leopard seal would eat the chick after it had done this a few times we saw just the dead bodies of the chicks floating around but generally they would eat them but in some cases they wouldn't and that was another thing that made us think man why you know why are they killing these chicks if they're not even going to eat some of them so this really got me wondering you know why on Earth do the leopard

seals do this why don't they just eat the chick straight away now we've talked to a really eminent um leopard seal scientist in the there's a few theories of why the leopard seals might do this so one is they might be trying to sort of weaken the chicks um before they go in for the killing blow so that the chick is less able to fight back penguins have got really sharp beaks they could totally uh Peck the leopard seal in the eye now another potential explanation that I think is probably more li

kely in that it may allow them to learn how to catch these penguins better now you might think well what why do they need to learn how to catch the Penguins chicks better like they they catch them really easily right this really abundant food source of the fledglings is only available for maybe a couple of weeks a year for these leopard seals and then in other times they need to catch much faster prey such as adult gen two penguins now I filmed um a leopard seal a couple of times um trying to ca

tch an adult gen two penguin before the um the chicks went into the water and boy those leopard heels have a much harder time with the adults you know the the adults are so fast in the water and so maneuverable and the leopard seal is just zipping around behind it and eventually the adult just flies out of the water towards the Rocks probably launches itself 5 to 10 m uh through the air skids up onto the Rocks runs into a rock and sort of shakes itself off and it's fine and poor leopard seal did

n't catch it so this sort of instinct of the leopard seals which leads them to play with the chicks when they're they're not really that hungry hungry and the chicks are actually very easy for them to catch this may actually be really beneficial for the leopard seals in getting better at catching harder to catch prey such as gen two penguins so what appears to be kind of bad natured cruel behavior on the part of the leopard seal may be really important for helping it to survive through the harde

r times of the year the moment I saw it I thought my God I'm looking at ceps camera rolling so I'm Lizzy Daly a biologist and Wildlife broadcaster a number of years ago uh I had the opportunity to venture into a beautiful part of the world it's a place called danham Valley and it sits in Borneo I remember you know arriving feeling really excited this is a place with you know clouded leopards uh orangutans you've got you know uh rhinoceros horn bills flying over you can hear them flapping you can

feel the warmth and the humidity of an environment like this rainforest and we were really lucky because we were there at a time where there was a unique event happening it's called Mass flowering it's basically where you know all these trees life and fruits burst into into flower and into life and it creates this kind of supercharged environment at the beginning of our trip we start heading on these kind of overgrown trails and you know the minute you step on these Trails you are immersed in t

his environment you can feel the humidity it's raining on an awful day so you're damp there's lots of noise you're surrounded by the sounds of these Empress cicadas which kind of almost like the pulsing heartbeat of the rainforest now I like to think I'm quite comfortable in natural environments uh in hostile environments but there is nothing like walking through a dense rainforest by yourself you are truly swallowed up by the en environment suddenly you're in an overwhelming chorus of just the

rainforest you're being you know rained on every 5 minutes I would keep stopping along this uh along this path to notice some of the life around me and I remember stopping and I saw a trail of ants you know ants are a big player in this environment and these ants were kind of going across the foot path that I just crossed I was watching them for a while I noticed that next to the trail there were a few individual acting kind of strange there was one ant that was carrying off another dead ant I t

hought you know not much of it perhaps that ant was Ill but there was another ant kind of moving slowly it wasn't part of the rest of the trail constantly cleaning itself it would stop and and you know clean its antenna and its legs quite thoroughly and it was just moving in a really odd way later on in the day as I was walking along a different Trail I was standing next to this trunk and it was kind of kind of covered in in mosses this beautiful kind of vibrant green that you can only get in th

is kind of environment and I noticed uh kind of like a Mossy lump that was attached to this tree and I realized it was a cicada but the cicada wasn't singing it wasn't calling and it wasn't moving at all I realized that that cicer is actually dead it was covered in this kind of fungus appearance and it was basically or looked like it melted into the side of the tree I wasn't looking at a natural death here all of a sudden this beautiful environment which has so much wonder and Beauty in it sudde

nly the darker side came to the FL and it at that moment changed my entire perception of this environment I was looking at ceps when we think of a fungus images of mushrooms crazy toad stools or just blue mold on some bread comes to mind it all seems quite benign but ceps is anything but benign it's a parasitic fungus that infects and can even manipulate the behavior of its animal host that sounds Sinister but here's what probably happened to the ant that I saw when a cep bore landed on the ant'

s body it would have released a mix of proteins and enzymes such as kienas to break down the antt harder outer shell and the infective Hyer used mechanical pressure to basically drill through the exoskeleton once inside the ant ceps H set about reproducing but unlike say a bacterial infection these cells now start to get organized joining together to create a melal network similar really to the networks that run Underground through a forest but in this case through the body of the ant using the

ant's own cells as fuel a few years ago in fact a research team in the US painstaking SE inly scanned an infected carpenter ant discovering that the melal network actually wrapped its way through the individual muscle fibers of the ant what's more this network seemed to leave the brain intact the traditional view was that the fungus controlled the ants Behavior through a cocktail of mindbending drugs but this new research has led people to liken ceps to a macabra puppet master cutting off the br

ain from the body and controlling the limbs of the ant through its network of melal filaments then ceps is ready for its Grim finale in the case of the zombie ant fungus it drives the infected ants body to climb to the top of a nearby plant once the fungus detects is at the perfect height the ants then forced to lock its tiny Jewels around a bit of foliage and here finally the ant dies in what has become known as as the death grip the CPS mycelium causes the ant to bite so hard that it destroys

the muscle filaments that slide past each other causing the jaw to lock shut forever finally a fruiting body Sprouts at the back of the ant's head showering down fungal spores on the rainforest below hoping to land on another poor unsuspecting ant restarting the whole cycle again there are over 500 species of ceps that have been identified and we can safely say there are many more that we don't even know about each species of ceps has evolved to infect a specific host such as an ant a cicada a c

aterpillar or even a spider speci species we understand the precise nature of very few of these relationships little is known of the true biodiversity of the fungi Kingdom around 120,000 species have been forly described but it's thought there may be as many as 2.2 to 3.8 million species we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what evolution has to offer but this Insidious fungus crafts Nature's very own Walking Dead earning its victim the very worst of deaths I think it's that aspect of

its life cycle that really fires up our imagination earning names like zombie and fungus and inspiring science fictions such as the girl with all the gifts and video games such as the last of us where parasitic fungus has jumped from infecting ants or caders to infecting and controlling humans but before you have nightmares you'll be glad to know that it doesn't infect [Music] humans [Music] yet they were circling around one individual all going for this one otter the single most brutal most in

teresting and the hardest to watch thing that I've ever I've ever witnessed in [Music] nature I'm Dan O'Neal I'm a documentary filmmaker and biologist the first expedition I ever went on was uh nearly 10 years ago to Guyana it's a small country in the north of South America and it's incredibly special to me it's 85% pristine tropical rainforest right on the equator and it is known not just as the land of giants but also the land of many Waters it was a ambitious Expedition a very small team of u

s and we were going 300 mil into the interior of the am up this river system that basically nobody goes to I kind of had this hit list of creatures I wanted to see iconic Amazonian Wildlife like howler monkeys Harpy eagles tapers even the Fable Jaguar but in the land of many Waters in Guyana the king of those Waters is really the giant river otter 100 years ago they were pretty much found across all of South America all of the river systems but in 1993 their status was changed to endangered beca

use over that period of time they had massive pressures from hunting mining logging habitat loss so I was hopeful but I never thought that really I was going to have that kind of iconic otter encounter that I dreamed of having until I went up to these remote regions of Guyana the only way to get to the kind of areas of the Amazon that humans don't bother to go is to go along the rivers and go up waterfalls and you have to Portage you get out of your boats you cut a transac Through the Jungle rig

ht to the top where it comes out and then you drag your boats all the way up and all of your gear up this is the bamboo line and then you get back in your boat and you push on and you push on you find another waterfall do exactly the same thing and some Rivers have several sometimes tens of waterfalls that go far up into their most remote regions and every kind of waterfall stairwell you go up you reach a new land a new Citadel of the wildlife where they're slightly less afraid of people and eve

ntually when you go four five six waterfalls up those animals have never seen a person before they don't know to be afraid of you and you can get unbelievably close it's a wild tap be about 5 ft from us we would drift down the river and we'd set our camps along the River's Edge and we do that before nightfall and we wake up early and then we break down our camp and we carry on but one morning I woke up really really early about 5:00 and you could hear the dawn chorus and everything is Extremely

Loud the the the rainforest is waking up and I got into the canoe and I just drifted down the river and I remember hearing this unmistakable sound which is the sound of giant river otter a troop of them and then as I got closer and closer they started to make another unmistakable otter sound a kind of you often hear them one sound and they're gone but this was really powerful much more gutural than any of the otter sounds we'd heard along our way and I came around the band and there were all of

these Spy Hopping otter loads and loads of them coming up up and looking at something at first I thought that it was a battle of two troops of otters and I was going to be able to get in close I realized that they weren't really all at each other but they were circling around one individual they were mercilessly just going for this guy at him and at him and at him and they were all on the tops of the water usually when when they come up they go down and they disappear and they come up somewhere

else but these were all all up their heads were all out of the water they were working in such a way they were using their hunting teamwork against this individual they would spy hop up when he was up and they'd go down when he was down and they would Corner him and they'd attack and attack and attack and obviously I couldn't see underwater but I know how brutal they can be they could have easily been giving him really bad injuries that could end up in death it was really incredible to watch and

never been so close to such an a visceral Wildlife encounter they are predators they're big Apex Amazonian Predators with very sharp very large teeth very sharp claws and they're intelligent hunters and they were using all of those skills on this one otter smart animals know that fighting is costly it's a really costly thing to do so there's very very few confirmed cases of otter fights you know there's one thing being excited about seeing something that's you know often never captured and anot

her thing to actually witness just how brutal those rare situations can be otter live in primarily extended family groups but they will occasionally accept new individuals and they will drive out individuals mostly males they have their sections of river they respect other groups and they know their lines and they'll avoid each other and I think what might have happened in this situation in this case was a male was either in the process of being kicked out of a group or it was one was on its own

and it thought this is my chance to join a group and they weren't having any of it but it's understandable if one's on its own all of those skills all of that evolutionary history it's not made for that that incredibly territorial animals and that is the choice that they make they have to show their strength and they have to rule their section of river and if that means killing other otters that's exactly what they'll do and it's not what you expect to see you think you can imagine fights betwe

en different species but there's something particularly horrible about watching One species attack its own kind um and how much more scary that would have been for an otter to to watch animals also look like you trying to kill you it's such a powerful image of the realities of the competition of the Amazon this expedition was 10 years ago and um I've been going to Guyana almost every year since uh I've I've even done that expedition more than once and in all the times I've been out there and all

the trips I've been on I have never had an encounter like that since it is the single most brutal most interesting and the hardest to watch thing that I've ever I've ever witnessed in nature put it as a juvenile probably year or so old maybe just over a year old I think and they actually just car I'm guessing so you know pretty much three times I think um and they new newborn about 4 and a half met so that's uh yeah that's that's that's a car from last year I guess yeah [Music] yeah I'm Cal maj

or I'm a vet I'm an advocate for our ocean and for nature and a filmmaker and I'm an adventurer so 20121 I was stand up paddle boarding around the whole of Scotland and I'd come around to the East Coast I woke up to beautiful weather the water was really still and calm which is amazing for stand up paddle boarding and paddling from the this incredible little tiny Harbor past amazing Rock Stacks rock formations incredible Heritage places like wo steps past bird colonies puffing colonies Gill Mars

this is one of the most amazing puddles I've ever done there are birds every were it was a really really special day on the water it felt really peaceful and calm and I felt like I was just surrounded by amazing nature everywhere I couldn't have imagined the contrast between the morning to what I was about to find in the afternoon so I saw something floating on the horizon I couldn't really see what it was cuz it was about a mile away so decided to paddle out to have a little look at it as I go

t closer and closer to this big floaty white thing the Water started getting really oily and there were flocks of full Mar all around it the smell was horrendous as I got closer I realized that it was a dead whale it took took a moment to register what it was that we'd found um I was still convinced it was going to be a big block of plastic that's what I'd hoped we'd found not a dead whale when we did come across it it was almost this kind of um adrenaline fueled reaction of okay this is what we

found and so we went into this very kind of clinical mode of we need to capture this because this is really important and at that point in time I had to really suppress what I was feeling and just get everything we possibly could captur on cameras we didn't immediately know why it had died we could see that it had been dead for at least a few days it was starting to decomposed and it was really smelly and so I paddled quite close to it which was quite distressing and found ropes wrapped around

its pect orins and then I followed those ropes back to its tail where I put a GoPro in the water and found that the tail stock was completely entangled with ropes and there was actually a rope leading down towards a seabed with lobster pots attached to it this is really tragic to see these are really rare animals in these Waters it's very very highly likely that this whale has died as a result of entanglement in fishing gear is absolutely devastating it wasn't just the finding a dead body I'm qu

ite used to seeing dead animals as a vet that sounds really morbid but I'm quite used to seeing a dead animal it was more the implications the fact that this was a juvenile whale this was a potentially one-year-old humpback whale who had not only died but potentially suffered quite significantly as a result of that entanglement I didn't really have time to process any of this until I got back to land and I paddled back into land I've been out on the water for something like8 hours that day I was

quite exhausted and the adrenaline was just starting to crash from having found the whale and James put the camera on me and said you know how are you feeling and I I literally had no words I felt really devastated but I also felt angry I felt frustrated that this huge important animal this you know juvenile animal had managed to succumb to human activity in that way that it was just felt so wrong and I felt so hopeless and helpless because what could I do about that hump back Cal floating upsi

de down and the thing is now what do I translate that to what do I do how do I how do I make turn that into action oh dear my instant reaction was definitely one of Despair and feeling like I really needed to do something about this because this was such an injustice it's so unfair that a massive satation that belongs in our ocean cannot swim through our Waters I think one of the reasons I was most affected by this is that humpbacks they live in family groups the carves stay with their mothers u

ntil they're about a year old they have this close family bond I think as well with whales we really relate to them they're such intelligent creatures and we're learning so much more all the time about their culture about their family groups about the way they communicate with each other you know you you look into the eye of a satation of a whale or a dolphin and you feel like you're looking into a a creature that's very similar to you the idea that a calf could have been lost amongst this group

of humpbacks and the implications for them as well and the impact that it might have had on them felt quite painful over the next 18 months between the incident happening and now that kind of anger and frustration has definitely morphed and evolved and I feel differently about it now having spoken to lots and lots of people who are working in this field and learning about the hard work that's going on to help mitigate this and the measures that are out there which are being tried to help stop c

itation entanglement in Scottish Waters it's also really important to remember that entanglement in fishing gear is never intentional and actually it can be quite distressing for Fishers who find animals entangled in their gear so I think it's really essential that we don't actually demonize a particular group of people but work with them to help solve these issues and that is exactly what the cre fishermen in Scotland are trying to do is trying to solve these issues looking back it's still affe

cts me to this day but I think it's changed from having been a really devastating thing to experience to having had quite a positive impact on my understanding of entanglement you hear about entanglement but it's so intangible it's such this kind of out there in the ocean issue and then seeing it yourself seeing this enormous animal having succumbed to entanglement is very very different seeing it actually for yourself so it's estimated that globally 300,000 whales and dolphins every year are ca

ught up in fishing gear but we have no real idea of what the actual numbers are because for every animal that we find caught up in fishing gear there could be another one that's out to sea lost out to sea or that's sun to the Bottom of the Sea we need to keep working hard and to keep coming together and supporting those at the Forefront of this work so that we can find Solutions as fast as possible without hope we have no reason to keep moving forward and to keep making positive change but at th

e same time the issues facing our seas are so enormous and I found that quite difficult when telling the story to make sure that it wasn't just a tale of hopelessness and of Devastation but that actually we take note of the good stuff that's happening and the positive movements forward to help create safer oceans for cations last year something quite incredible happened a behavior that I was quite shocked by this was something that actually kind of threw me quite a bit and it really challenged w

hat I knew and what I thought about Urban foxes I'm sha McCormack I'm a conservationist and vet and I run eing Wildlife group and this is our Nature Reserve here in West London which is an old derel allotment site that we've turned into a Community Asset for people and Wildlife I'm fascinated by Foxes I grew up uh kind of in the suburbs in Ireland and my cousins lived in the countryside and I only saw foxes in the countryside really but in recent decades you know they have moved into towns and c

ities we've been looking at a family of foxes for the last three years now last year something quite incredible happened in terms of fox Behavior we had two Vixens raising their young together in the same Den but in the middle of the summer it kind of took a bit of a dark turn when we were watching these foxes we realized the two had Cubs together because we saw the little babies coming out of the den we were watching them with trail cameras and coming up here in the evenings to see them when I

came up and saw one Cub come out and two cubs come out I thought that's fairly normal but when we got to five 6 7 8 nine Cubs in total coming out I was just completely astonished and scratching my head a little bit to be honest how was there nine Cubs could a single Fox have nine Cubs and then placing a trail camera there and watching the family I realized actually there was two Vixens there was a young one um presumably the daughter of last year having her young uh with the mom I can only assum

e that this was to do with kind of competition for Den space um but it's something that it's not very well documented in foxes so it was really exciting to see here by and large you know it was all very very happy scenes we had uh these nine foxes frolicking and asking mom for food and and flattened a whole area of vegetation outside the den and it was really you know a happy little family story but unfortunately one day uh that took a slightly darker turn I came down to uh put some tools back a

nd unfortunately found one of the Cubs um dead at the front of the Reserve I realized the Cub had puncture marks um in its neck and there was fresh blood there in puncture marks like the animal had been killed by presumably another Fox kind of got thinking that this must be kind of territoriality or competition maybe another male Fox came in and killed this Cub maybe a competing female came in and killed um one of their cubs but in any case the Cub was dead and um the biologist in me was very in

terested in this uh the vet in me was quite interested in the anatomy and the forensics of the of the scene um but the human in me that you know is putting aside the kind of scientific mind thought oh that's pretty sad you know I've been watching these Fox Cubs for several weeks at this stage and and seeing them Thrive and grow so to have at least one killed I was a little bit worried about the other ones so I thought wa not what not I'm going to actually set up a camera um at this fox Cub's car

cass and see what happens we know we have red kites in the area we sometimes have buzzards flying overhead so I thought let's see what comes and makes use of this food resource and I was really really surprised as to what happened next so we had the usual culprits come along crows we had magpies feeding off the carcass that evening the same evening one of the mother foxes appeared she gingerly stepped around this little fox Cub's carcass and and kind of was looking at it from a distance and look

ing very hesitant about it and just having a look and trying to decipher what exactly had happened in my view it was quite a sad scene you know to see these two vixin coming in I'm not sure you know which one was actually the mother of this Cub but they both raised these Cubs together um so quite sad to see them kind of looking at this Cub and trying to figure out what happened none of the Cubs came near the carcass as far as we could see but the vix were coming in and getting gradually closer t

o the the carcass and starting to sniff it on the second day and starting to take tentative little nibbles or bites at it on the third day that evening on the third day um we saw a behavior that I was quite shocked by they actually started to eat the [Music] carcass as a vet you know I can tend to compartmentalize or kind of keep emotional side of things um out of the way because you have to make tough decisions and you have to be impartial for your clients and um yes you can acknowledge the kin

d of emotions and sentiment behind our relationships with animals but you have to try and have a bit of self-preservation as well with this this was a family that I watched you know growing up and thriving and um would normally watch with a biologist's hat on and just be interested in their behaviors but this was something that actually kind of threw me quite a bit and I found it quite sad but I guess the rational brain came in to think why is this happening how can it be explained what is the l

ogic what's the evolutionary Advantage here in this mother fox or both mother foxes eating um their offspring this was a really fascinating thing to see because um for me I was trying to think why would these foxes do this are there several reasons behind it and I could think of two really and looking at the research this is supported as well one would be that this is a valuable nutritional resource you know they're in an urban environment there's lots of foxes very dense populations competition

for food is really high and sometimes there'll be times of Plenty and sometimes Food Supplies will be in scarce demand so they could have just been utilizing this fox Cub because it was there it was a rich food resource and why wasted after putting all of that energy into it so these Vixens realize that there's competing foxes around one of which may have killed this Cub and actually by cleaning the remains and taking them away they may reduce the risk that their other Cubs are going to come to

harm it tends to be the rule that they don't do that because there's a high risk of disease transmission particularly when it comes to parasites so certain parasite life cycles rely on a predator eating a prey species and a parasite like a worm or an internal kind of protone parasite completing its life cycle by being getting the prey to be eaten by the Predator a predator eating a predator can actually have really harmful effects if they load up on that parasite life cycle or that parasite spe

cies so generally mammals it's been shown will avoid eating other carnivores the biggest kind of difference I suppose when you compare them to their Countryside cousins is they're living in much denser populations you can have you know kind of two to 10 um foxes per square kilometer sometimes in some cities depending on food availability and kind of the richness of the habitat you can have up to 30 individuals per square kilometer so that's a really really high density of foxes and the things th

at allow them to do that really the prime kind of factor is food availability we are as humans a wasteful species we throw out a lot of food we leave scraps on the street we leave our bins exposed and foxes have really really cashed in on that out of the nine Cubs we don't know how many survived um what we do know is that we've had just a single pair here this year and only two Cubs so obviously you get some some good years where things go all to plan and other years where the foxes struggle to

raise so many foxes are quite opportunistic omnivores they will take advantage of new situations and new sources of food which is perhaps why they do so well in urban environments and why we're seeing all these strange and new behaviors compared to their Country Cousins although you might think oh you know that's must have been difficult to watch it actually wasn't cuz in that moment I remember I was just really excited despite being out all the time seeing all kinds of things I've never seen th

is before I'm Yola Williams I'm a wildlife TV presenter but for 15 years between 1984 and 1998 I worked for the rspb and I'm going to take you back to late June 1998 and part of my role was to monitor rare breeding birds and on this particular day I was heading up this quite narrow quite steep valley but on the way up I knew that I was going to pass a massive old Raven's Nest but it been taken over that year by a pair of nesting pigin all of a sudden I could hear a commotion and I looked down se

e all three chicks two males and a female they've been out to the nest maybe at that time probably anything between 1 and 4 days so they weren't experienced birds at all but the commotion was because the adult female was coming back to the nest with prayer and of course the chicks knew they were going to be fed only this day was a little bit different looking through my bins I could see this powerful bird of prey carrying a fairly large prey with her and as she came near I could make out the pre

y it was a c Dove so she'd been a long way off to get that cuz the nearest urban area the nearest Village is about I would say maybe 2 2 and 1/2 miles away it's a long way off and that's where she would have had to go to get that prey usually the female would come back the prey would be dead she'd land either on the nest or on a Ledge nearby and then she would leave the prey for the young to fight over and to feed themselves but that didn't happen this day she came back and then she gained heigh

t and she circled around and the three young chicks were screaming away begging for food and by now I'd lost all interest on the mo on on on the harriers and the Merlin for all I know the harriers could have been sky dancing they could have been Strictly Come Dancing going on there for all I know my focus by now was just down on this perig Nest on this cliff and then she gained height and she was almost eye level with me by now and the Three Chicks were coming up after her and through my binox I

could see that actually the dove wasn't dead she was still very much alive and what happened next was a real eye opener cuz I'd never seen anything quite like it before the female let the Collard Dove go and the Collard Dove could still fly she flew away she flew back up the Valley from where they'd come and this collard Dove just turned around and went out of sight and the female pedig the adult female went straight after it like an arrow zipping up the valley and I thought that c isn't going

to go away surely on the next thing she comes back down the valley again with this Cod dove and I watched as she came and she was holding on tightly and as she flew she actually bent down to take a peack at the back of the C dev's neck and I thought that's it she's killed it but she hadn't and it was at this point that I realized what was going on she was bringing back the prey alive for the chicks for the Three Chicks to learn how to hunt by now one of the chicks a young male had landed back by

the nest still screaming but the other two a young female a young male were in the air getting all excited all over again and she dropped the Dove and I saw that the dove couldn't fly as well as she had before and the young male went after it and had a go and came down and bear in mind you know these are these are the Lamborghinis of the bird world you know an adult perigrine can dive at speeds of over 200 M an hour stooping down and hitting its prey often killing it and then before it hits the

floor coming back down getting hold of it carrying it away so they they magnificent Birds real masters of the air but of course the young birds weren't they had to learn all of these skills and despite the young male having a go trying to catch this Dove it just couldn't it just couldn't and the dove eventually got away again heading up the valley didn't get as far wasn't flying as fast and the adult female circled around she went after it again caught it one more time and by now I was thinking

is this bird going to get away is is it going to escape this time although you might think oh you know that's it must have been difficult to watch it actually wasn't cuz in that moment I remember I was just really excited I was watching something that very few people get to watch I was watching something that I'd never seen before despite being out all the time seeing all kinds of things I've never seen this before and then when she came back again I saw her this time the the the dove didn't ge

t very and she just caught up with it didn't stoop on it caught up with it and got hold of it and then turned around and brought it back up again and this time let it go and this time the dove well to be honest with you it really could barely fly at all and it was the young female that had to go this time and she stooped down not from on high but she stooped down she hit the dove I remember hitting a dove but she didn't hit it in the right place she supposed to hit hit the dove you know by the h

ead or the neck and try and well at least injure it so that it lands or if you can kill it outright she hit the dove somewhere near the back a puff of feathers came up started to Tumble down but the dove just kept on going and at this point the young female she must have been a bit confused and she just more or less just gave up she just screamed Circle and screamed and the dove tried to get away one more time and this time poor thing just got you know maybe 50 100 m and I could watch her all th

e way and the adult female went after a caught her again easily this time brought her back to the nest onto the the the nest itself this time the big old Raven nest and despite all three chicks now being airbone screaming at her begging come on we want food we want to be fed she just ignored them she obviously now she'd had enough and thought no no no no listen I worked hard for this this now is going to be my meal and she mantled she had her wings out over the the dove she dispatched it she kil

led it and she started to feed and she just ignored the cries of the young female and both young males and she just fed on that and she fed on it for about good 20 25 minutes and eventually I could see her fly off with a full crop real bulging crop here full of meat and then the adult female and both young males went to squabble over the remains it was an amazing thing to witness and and witness so close as well to watch this the the sort of king of birds when it comes to speed you the fastest a

nimal on the the whole planet just bringing back this Dove and trying to teach the youngsters how to hunt by the time those youngsters leave the adults and it that takes more or less 2 months or so they have to be able to hunt they have to be able to stoop at speeds of 200 plus mil hour they have to be able to catch prey to survive bear in mind that over the first you know year 18 months or so maybe one in three young Perrin survive that's it and they lucky if they live to be five or six years o

ld so all of that learning has to be crammed into those first two months and I suspect that that would probably have been the first time that the adult female perig would have done that would have brought back live prey released it for the young to chase but um you know I've been I've been going back up on those MOS every year now I love my harriers I love my Merlins I love my birds of pray my pigin and I've never ever seen anything quite like that again what was meant to be a happy ending turne

d out to be just the opposite it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever seen in terms of animal behavior in the wild hi my name is ashika Kapoor I'm a wildlife filmmaker based in Kolkata India so when I was young I used to travel up a lot to the northern part of uh the state so North Bengal in the foothills of the Himalayas as a child I used to go a lot to that region because my dad worked for a Tea Company all of duas is like a patchwork of forests Villages and tea plantations because

the forests are so close to the to the Villages and the tea plantations they're just absolutely adjer to each other we used to see a lot of wildlife there you'll see elephant conflict stories in the news quite often from North Bengal because they constantly come into contact with human beings it's one of the trickiest places on Earth for elephants to exist really because this is a completely human dominated landscape this particular incident that I remember um although it happened a very very l

ong time ago it sort of burnt into my memory because it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever seen in terms of animal behavior in the wild we were staying at at a standard Tea Garden a big Bungalow in the Tea Garden we had finished dinner it was evening it was after Sunset when out of the blue suddenly we started hearing in a whole lot of noise coming from the village area people were shouting and we could hear drums and we could hear all kinds of noise and one of the most telltale si

gns were these big firecrackers that were being shut up into the air that was a straight cut Telltale sign that elephants had strayed into the village or into the pad field people tend to collect in really large numbers make a lot of noise they use firecrackers and they just shout a lot and and be drums just to be able to sort of Drive The Herd back into the forest they come to forage uh the Patty fields are right there it's easy food for them and they essentially come to raid the Patty Fields a

s soon as we heard this big noise coming from the village area within minutes I remember we just piled into this one vehicle by the time we reached of course they had already uh quite successfully managed to drive most of the her back into the forest and in that chaos initially I didn't notice that there was a whole different story playing out on another side of the paty field there was one very small elephant tiny absolutely tiny elephant that was left behind by the her in that moment I didn't

at all feel like the villagers were trying to harm her there was just a lot of chaos a lot of excitement there is obviously conflict in that region in the sense that people have to protect their Patty fields and have to protect what keeps them alive and keeps their families Fed so in that sense there is conflict because they have to get the elephants to go back into the forest but in terms of animosity towards the elephants the Beauty and the complexity of North Bengal is that the people don't n

ecessarily feel like the elephants are their enemies not at all actually I remember coming back back that night when asking Dad what's going to happen to that baby elephant the manager of the of the Tea Plantation said look this happens this is not unusual this happens and the forest Department takes care of it they will uh sometime over the next few days try and find the herd that um this baby belongs to and reunite the the calf with the herd the te Garden manager had made a few calls saying th

at when you're dealing with it let us know and we you know if we can witness it and and somebody gave him a call letting him know that they had found the herd that this baby belonged to and they were going to take the calf to the herd and um reunite the calf with the family we piled into the carar I remember it was quite a long drive I was very surprised at how far the herd had traveled overnight and from a vantage point we could see this big elephant herd uh on the other side of the riverbed I

remember standing there and watching the forest Department people sort of try and guide this tiny quivering uh helpless sort of tired cough trying to sort of direct this scal towards the elephant herd but what was meant to be a happy ending is what I was expecting turned out to be just the opposite the mother was constantly ignoring the C and walking off not paying any attention to this SC when she finally managed to get really close to the her and almost got like right inside it the mother turn

ed around trumpeted really loudly and sort of pushed the scarf full force with her trunk essentially rejecting her I couldn't believe my eyes elephants are in my mind they're supposed to to be these loving caring gentle Giants especially when it comes to their own families they're so protective of their of their babies they're tender with their babies they're like the ultimate symbols of uh of matriarchs in the wild what I saw in front of me was just it was just betrayal it was cold betrayal and

what looked like cruelty and there came a point where this H sort of disappeared into the forest and this scarf was was just standing there alone waiting to sort of I don't know just waiting to understand where to go next and the forest department at that point sort of stepped in again and guided guided her back towards the car and put her back onto the truck and that was that but one thing that I was quite clearly told is that the survival chances of a cough that small is quite is quite uh low

because the survival chances of that Cal may not be particularly great there is a chance that the herd the mother will reject that baby knowing that she may not make it I've tried to find out why this happens and tried to look into the science of why it happened in most cases it seemed to uh sort of suggest that elephants uh tend to reject uh car in particularly stressful environments but in this particular region This Is Not Unusual because these elephants live under some of the most stressful

conditions on the planet they are living in an area which is surrounded by human habitation and they're constantly and constantly in conflict with people all the time and they can't move from one region to another without constantly coming in contact with people and therefore there's that conflict and they are such a complex species when it comes to U sort of emotional Evolution and you expect a very different sight to elephants but then you wonder whether the circumstances changes that narrati

ve all of a sudden this girl went head first you grab the rabbit in its belill there was a huge kind of ruckus there was huge movement the goal was flapping up flapping around the the rabbit was kicking trying to run away I couldn't believe what I was seeing I'm Lizzy Daly I'm a wildlife biologist and broadcastter I was on SCA Island to film a series and I was with uh a friend who was helping me film all the Behavior everything from Seals and poo offshore to watching the wildlife on land such as

the shed owls you know hunting and feeding the puffins going back and forth to their Burrows and I remember I went to a part of the island to you know see if there was anything interesting going on so as I looked over this one section of Cliff you know watched puffins coming in and out with sandals in their mouths going into their Burrows flicking away mud uh as they do cleaning their Burrows and in the the remnants of blue bells and C Campion there was a few rabbits and there was also a few go

s as well as soon as a gull would come off the cliff it would send these puffins kind of in a huge swirl like a tornado around the island it's an incredible thing to [Music] see this goal was trying to steal the sandal out of this Puff's mouth and they'd go tumbling through the air the Puffin would be trying to make it back to the burrow uh with all that food in their mouth to feed to their chick out the corner of my eye I noticed one great black back go just standing you know near a few Burrows

and behind the blue bells there was uh rabbits and the rabbit was just feeding as they do along this Cliff I got my binoculars up and was just watching them for a while when I started to notice this gal was getting closer to this [Music] rabbit and this was going on for a few minutes not a lot else but um the skull was inching closer and closer and I've known of this behavior for a while and I know it's been captured on video but I've never seen this with my own eyes so all of a sudden this gir

l went head first you grab the rabbit in its Bill and there was a huge kind of ruckus there was huge movement the goal was flapping up flapping around the the rabbit was kicking trying to run away and it happened within seconds and before I knew it this girl had this rabbit halfway down its throat it was kind of pushing this rabbit down its throat hole and I couldn't believe what I was seeing as this huge bird was literally swallowing this Rabbit [Music] Hole eventually everything calmed down an

d unfortunately two little feet in the mouth of these of this girl turn to you know just a gal looking very very full and very happy with himself as the gal is swallowing the rabbit hole it will kind of push the rabbit down its esophagus and it's a process known as esophageal peristalsis where it will essentially push down this animal hole and it will sit in that crop that huge kind of bulging animal hole will sit there and essentially uh suffocate to death then the bird has a true stomach and a

gizard and this G gizard is really important for breaking down those bigger chunks or harder to break down bits of the rabbit the European rabbit is not native to the UK they've spread all over the world and they're very successful they're actually native to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa they then weren't released on islands like SCA Island until uh the 13th century by the Normans the rabbits are the perfect prey and they're on the menu for lots of different Predators they have a lot l

ong breeding period between January and August they reach sexual maturity around 4 to 5 months as little as one out of 10 of these rabbits will survive to adulthood we'll make it through that first year across the UK rabbits are a really important prey for lots of predators but on Scoma Island in particular they're really important for managing the vegetation keeping the vegetation nice and short for a lot of the endemic floral species that can be found on Scoma so they have an important role to

play one of the things you'll always see with rabbits is they're constantly alert and they never venture too far away from their Burrows either so you know if there's any uh any sign of danger they are always listening out always looking out in their surroundings and they're they're extremely quick and they can always go back to their Burrows if there's something dangerous around them one of the characteristics of pre species is the fact that they you know few years which is really important fo

r them uh in terms of detecting Predators so they need to be able to have really good listening abilities and also their eyes on the side of their head which is very typical of prey it gives them much better Vision to be able to detect what's in their surroundings girls uh belong to the family larid there are 60 different species of go uh and they have huge variety but you know they can live anywhere from Coastal habitats to Inland habitats and they are ground nesting carnivals essentially they'

re very good at adapting to their environment and you know when you're seeing the species in the air you know it's it's got a real presence and a real size on the wing and also you know when you just see it standing along the coastline this is not just any other go this is an impressive large species that's also a very effective Predator when we think of Aven Predators you don't necessarily think of a girl but they are really up there you know they will eat anything well largely fish but they'll

eat Crustaceans they'll eat other birds uh they'll eat rabbits so they are really opportunistic feeders and they're really agile Hunters as well I myself have seen seen uh you know a great blackb girl eating a crab taking off its pinces and cleverly stripping the meat uh from a crab I've also seen them hunt M sheer Waters which are a fantastic bird on SCA Island and they actually carry the man sheer Waters to freshwater ponds on the island to wash off the salt we think I've also seen them you k

now trying to steal sand deals from the mouths of puffins as well so they will eat whatever they can get their bills on whenever I'm in penri Shire or you know seeing SCA or visiting SCA today you know I'm brought back to that moment of seeing this incredible but gruesome behavior and I always have an appreciation for the great blackback girl a true preditor but we'll always be reminded of the gruesome death you know that day on SC Island that