The desolate wastes of the Antarctic -
so cold that insects would freeze solid.
Volcanic springs in Africa - spouting water so hot and corrosive
that it will strip skin from flesh.
The waterless deserts of the tropics -
hundreds of square miles of baking sand.
The earth can be an inhospitable place,
yet birds of some kind
manage somehow to endure and survive all its privations.
Indeed, there is scarcely a corner of the globe
that birds have not colonised.
Sandgrouse live in the sandy deserts of Africa,
as barren a landscape as you can imagine.
Yet hidden in these sands are tiny seeds.
They were shed by plants months or years ago
after a storm briefly dampened the desert.
The sandgrouse, by searching incessantly,
manage to pick out several thousand every day.
But they have to drink.
Waterholes are few and far between in this desert,
and some birds may have to fly for as much as 50 miles before they find one.
And when they get there,
all it is is a little puddle like this one in front of me.
After such a long flight, their thirst is huge.
But some must do more than satisfy their own needs.
They have left behind them,
away in the desert, their newly-hatched chicks.
Chicks can't fly, but they too must have water....
and the males will take it to them.
They can't carry it in their crops.
They'll need all that water to sustain themselves.
But they have extra tanks.
Their breast feathers have a special adaptation.
They're covered on their inner sides
with a mat of filaments so fine that they absorb water like blotting paper.
And then they're off again on the long return flight.
A female is waiting for her mate.
It's roastingly hot, and with her are her chicks.
Here he comes, and the female makes way for him.
While the last chick struggles from its shell,
the others cluster around and suck from his breast,
for all the world like puppies or kittens.
So one comparatively small adaptation of its feathers
has enabled the sandgrouse to colonise a corner of the world
closed to others.
The ground in the wake of one of the bush fires
that regularly sweep across the grasslands of Africa
seems initially just as parched as its deserts.
Yet the courser, a relative of the plover's,
is a nomad who actually seeks it out.
Insects killed by the smoke and flames are easily collected.
So it has some attractions.
Yet it is also here that it chooses to nest.
This must be a long-standing habit,
for its eggs are camouflaged to match the incinerated earth.
Since all the scrub has been cleared by fire,
the bird has the advantage of being able to see approaching predators.
Dawn on the shores of the Persian Gulf,
and crab plovers, having fed on the edge of the sea,
come back to their breeding grounds.
It will soon be so hot that the sand will be painful to touch.
Yet this is where the crab plovers choose to nest.
Every other plover in the world lays its eggs in a simple scrape in the ground.
But not these.
They, in spite of their unsuitably long legs,
have learned how to become burrowers.
They've discovered that, only a few inches below the surface,
the sand is wonderfully cool
There, a bird can sit on its eggs in comfort
throughout the crushing heat of the day.
To feed, the plovers have to go down to the edge of the sea.
There, they can keep cool by bathing.
The African Rift Valley offers no such relief.
This steaming-hot water comes from volcanic springs
and is so loaded with soda that around the margins of the lake
it solidifies into white curds.
Yet flamingos come here in thousands.
The attraction? The salty, tepid water is full of algae
and small crustaceans which the birds can collect,
using their specialised beaks like filter pumps.
The fact that so few creatures can tolerate these conditions
means that any animal that can
has the place to itself and so can proliferate in vast numbers.
That applies to the crustaceans and the algae in the water
and also to the birds that feed on them.
For the birds, there is an additional attraction.
The soda-rich waters are so caustic
that hunters such as hyenas, lions or smaller cats won't wade through them,
so the centre of the lake is one of the safest places for a nest.
The flamingos pile the mud into mounds
just high enough to be clear of any salt spray blown by the wind.
That, if it caked the eggs, would kill them.
But the heat is so extreme,
the congealed soda so caustic,
that sometimes a whole generation is lost.
Nonetheless, the success rate is still sufficient
to maintain the size of the flocks.
This white desert is also hostile to life,
but for a very different reason.
The crust that I am walking on is not soda.
It's snow and ice, and that too causes huge difficulties for birds.
Here in the Arctic, during the winter,
such things that are edible are locked away beneath the snow and ice.
Nonetheless, a few birds manage to survive through this bleak season,
provided they get help...
..from polar bears.
The bears will eat almost every part of a seal, their staple diet.
But they leave enough from their kills
to provide scavenging gulls with a meal
In summer, on the tundra,
it's warm enough for plants to grow in the lakes.
There, spectacled eider duck swim and dive
to collect insect larvae and worms from the muddy bottom.
But when winter comes, the lakes freeze and then the ducks vanish.
Until very recently, no one knew where they went.
The answer was found in 1995.
Hundreds of miles from the coast,
they gather together on the surface of the sea, surrounded by ice.
There are no more than half a dozen such assemblies
and between them they contain the entire world population
of the spectacled eider.
The birds are so tightly packed and so continuously on the move
that, within their huge pond, the water does not freeze over.
They can dive to collect food from the bottom of the Arctic 0cean
200 feet below;
food that would otherwise be denied them by the sea ice.
In the Antarctic, at the other end of the globe,
the winter can be even more severe.
Temperatures can fall to 80 degrees below zero
and the gales blow at over 100 miles an hour.
Yet this is the time the biggest of all penguins, the Emperors, have to breed.
Having mated at the beginning of the winter,
the females return to the sea, leaving the eggs with the males,
who hold them on top of their feet to keep them off the ice.
Emperors are so big that there is not time in the short Antarctic summer
for the chicks to grow into sea-going adults.
So breeding must start before the winter sets in.
The males cannot feed for four months.
Then the females will return,
allowing the males to go down to the sea for a meal
Meanwhile, in the continuous darkness of mid-winter,
broken only by the Southern Lights,
all the male Emperors can do is endure.
The darkness perhaps doesn't trouble them unduly.
Penguins, after all, don't fly.
But most birds do,
and they rely on their sight in order to navigate.
So, for them, darkness is a major problem,
and no darkness is more complete than in a cave.
This is the Caripe Cavern in Venezuela.
(TREMEND0US DIN)
And here there is no natural light whatsoever,
and yet, as I can hear from this deafening chorus of calls,
there is a huge population of birds here.
How can they see to fly?
Well, we have with us some very, very dim lights
and an extremely sensitive low-light camera.
So if I turn this out...
I can't see anything at all,
and presumably the birds can't either.
But, hopefully, you can.
These are oil birds.
They're related to nightjars, and like them have large eyes
that help them fly by the light of the moon and stars.
But in the depths of caves, even eyes like this are of no help.
Instead, the birds navigate by sound.
Their raucous social calls
are augmented by high-pitched rattling sounds.
The echoes produced by these
enable the birds to visualise their surroundings so well
that they can unfailingly find their own nest.
In the evening, they fly out into the comparative brightness
of the starry sky to feed.
They seek out the fruit of palms and laurels
which have a strong fragrance, so the oil birds are able to find them by smell.
They are now in no danger of being attacked by hawks,
as they would've been if they had not spent the day
in the safety of their cave.
So all over the world, birds,
by changing their habits or adapting their anatomy,
manage to survive in the most hostile of places.
A century ago, a completely new kind of environment appeared on earth.
Nothing like it had faced the birds before
in their entire 200 million years history.
Yet some species began to adapt to it almost immediately.
This is it, the modern city.
Sao Paulo in Brazil -
a wilderness of glass and brick, concrete and steel
And circling among the skyscrapers...black vultures.
There are plenty of ledges on these man-made cliffs
to serve as nest sites,
and the vultures have little hesitation in using them.
(P0RTUGUESE FR0M NEARBY RADI0)
This devoted parent has brought back a crop-load to feed its chicks.
The adults have little difficulty in finding all the food they need
for themselves and their young.
There is, literally, tons of it around.
A short flight away, on the outskirts of the city,
the rotting leftovers of a million meals are dumped daily,
mixed with inedible refuse of all kinds, some of it actively poisonous.
Not many birds have either the temperament to tolerate such places
or the digestion to cope with such food.
But those that have, swarm in huge numbers
like flamingos on an African soda lake.
In the same way, when farmers bring industrial methods into agriculture
and devote huge fields to raising just one particular crop
and it particularly suits the taste of one particular bird,
that bird will turn up in huge numbers to feast on it.
Waxwings.
They love these blueberries ripening in plantations in Florida,
so they come in thousands to collect them.
If these assemblies reach plague proportions,
then that is no more than a reflection of the intensive way
in which man grows his crops.
Few other birds can manage to eat these large cultivated blueberries
and indeed, even waxwings sometimes have a little trouble in doing so.
Crows have become highly skilled at making a living
in these new urban environments.
In this Japanese city,
they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can't manage.
Dropping a nut from a great height onto a hard road
does, sometimes, crack it.
But some nuts are particularly tough.
So the crows have devised a better way.
Drop it among the traffic.
The problem now is collecting the bits without getting run over.
So some birds have refined their technique.
They station themselves beside pedestrian crossings...
..wait for the lights to stop the traffic...
..then collect your cracked nut in safety.
City life may offer birds attractions
that are rather less obvious than just food.
This is the centre of Glasgow, 5 o'clock on an autumn evening.
For half an hour, thousands of starlings
put on a spectacular display of formation flying
over the darkening city.
Why they do this we don't really know.
Maybe it is to get to know one another, creating some kind of team spirit,
for they tend to spend the winter in parties.
Maybe it's because there is safety in numbers
when trying to avoid predators such as hawks.
When it's too dark for aerobatics, they come in to roost.
Such assemblies may be information centres.
Birds that fed well today will head back tomorrow
to where they know there is food.
And the hungry ones will follow them.
Here in Europe, towns are also attractive
because it is a little warmer than out in the countryside.
You might think that this is just about the last place
that a bird or any other animal would choose to sleep.
This is an oil refinery on the banks of the Amazon River
in central Brazil
Just across the water, there's a lovely virgin rainforest,
yet here - well, just look and listen.
A fine mist of acrid droplets stings your eyes.
The noise hurts your ears.
Yet promptly at 5 minutes past 6 o'clock every evening,
there is an invasion.
Purple martins.
Stay still and they will settle within inches of you.
Why they come here in such numbers is a mystery.
It can hardly be that they seek warmth
in this muggy tropical atmosphere of central Brazil
They don't feed here.
Perhaps it is because there are fewer hawks around
to harry them than in the forest.
But whatever the reason, come they do.
In March, however,
many of them will migrate north to the United States,
and there they take up residence in very different homes.
A small lakeside town
in Pennsylvania.
This luxury tower block
has accommodation for over 40 adults and 200 youngsters.
Each apartment has all modern conveniences.
It can be wound down regularly by the local people
and the shelf brought out to make sure that the young are fit
and don't need help with the housekeeping.
In fact, these apartments are so luxurious
that these days, purple martins don't nest in natural sites any more.
The purple martin has become totally dependent
on human beings.
It's said that the tradition was started
by the people native to this part of North America,
Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians,
who were glad to see the birds when they arrived each spring
and hung out gourds to encourage them to nest around their settlements.
Today, over a million people in the United States
offer hospitality to purple martins in this way.
It seems that those of us who live in towns and cities
feel increasingly cut off from the natural world
that lies beyond our buildings
and so we treasure any contact we can find with wild creatures.
Certainly, an affection for birds is shared
by all kinds and conditions of people all over the world.
In Arizona, Jesse Hendrix is particularly devoted to hummingbirds.
His home lies on the migration routes of several species.
The black-chinned is one of the most common.
In spring they travel up from Mexico on their way to nest
as far north as Montana and British Columbia.
Then in autumn, he sees them again on their way back
to their winter quarters in the warmth of the south.
Some of them have been fitted with leg-rings,
so he knows the same birds visit him each year
to drink from the same feeder.
It's possible that many now vary their routes
to make sure that they pay a call at such a reliable restaurant.
At the height of the migration, he may be visited in a single day
by about 9,000 different birds.
And every day he provides his customers with over 13 gallons of sugar water.
Meals like these must surely make the difference between life and death
for many of the little rufous hummingbirds
which, on leaving Jesse's fuel station,
have still to tackle the last stage of their 2,000-mile migration
across the Bay of Mexico
in one single 600-mile non-stop flight.
The very regularity and predictability of birds
can be part of their appeal
..it is quite unpredictable. We can never be terribly certain where...
0n Philip Island, near Melbourne, Australia,
people come from all over the continent
to watch a regular evening parade.
Little penguins, the smallest of the family.
They fish for pilchards and anchovies out at sea during the day,
and every evening come ashore together
to return to their nest burrows,
following paths that have probably been in use for thousands of years.
Scientists started to tag them back in 1968.
It's the longest-running bird study in the whole of Australia,
so by now they are well used to being stared at.
Human beings over the last century
have built houses for themselves along the penguins' beach,
but that hasn't deterred the birds.
Two half-grown chicks are awaiting their evening meal
And the human residents are only too delighted
to have such engaging lodgers with regular habits
living beneath their front doorstep.
Humanity's impact on the bird world, however,
has not always been so helpful
Birds reached all the islands of the Pacific
a very long time before people did.
Small birds such as white-eyes are not very powerful flyers,
but they probably made the sea-crossings inadvertently,
carried by storms.
0nce on land, they and others, like fantails, found insects to eat
which doubtless had made the journey in the same sort of way.
Honeyeaters found plants in bloom from which they could drink nectar.
And pigeons found fruit.
But when people sailed across the sea, they brought animals
that by themselves could never have made the journey.
This is the small island of Guam
that during the Second World War became a major military base.
Some time in the 1940s,
brown tree snakes from New Guinea appeared here,
brought accidentally by ships.
Tree snakes hunt birds,
and Guam's white-eyes, flycatchers and fantails, having no experience of predators,
had no defence against them.
Today, Guam is an island without birds.
Species that evolved here and differed from any elsewhere
have now gone for good.
Insects and spiders, without birds to keep their numbers in check, have proliferated.
And the forests have fallen totally silent.
These New Zealand forests
have also been invaded by foreigners -
foreigners that have caused great problems for the local birds
and, in particular, the kaka, the local parrot.
These invaders are surprisingly very small.
They are European wasps, but their effects have been devastating.
Kakas eat a great deal of vegetable food - fruit and seeds and nectar.
But they also feast on honeydew,
a sticky fluid excreted by insects
that live beneath the bark of these trees, drinking sap.
Female kakas rely on this high-energy food
to bring them into breeding condition.
But the European wasps found honeydew much to their taste as well.
The kakas are unable to compete,
and they are already under severe attack from introduced predators such as stoats.
These latest insect invaders may well be the final competitors
that eliminate the kaka from these forests.
But the greatest destruction of the world's birds
has been inflicted by human beings.
The huia, which once lived in New Zealand's woodlands,
was hunted precisely because it was rare,
and was finally totally gone in 1907.
The great auk, a giant flightless relation of the razorbill
that lived in the islands of the north Atlantic,
was hunted and exterminated by the middle of the nineteenth century.
The dodo, a pigeon that, safe in its island sanctuary of Mauritius,
also evolved into a flightless giant,
was easy prey for hungry sailors.
They exterminated it by the middle of the seventeenth century,
less than 200 years after men first set foot on their island.
It's not only on islands that birds are vulnerable
to changes brought by humanity.
150 years ago, prairies like this in the United States were home
to flocks of birds 2 to 3,000 million strong.
They were so big they darkened the skies
and took two or three days to pass.
They were what was probably the most numerous bird
that has ever existed on earth -
passenger pigeons.
Their numbers were so astronomic
that no one considered them as anything but pests,
nor could imagine that they would ever be in danger of extinction.
But a combination of hunting and changes to the landscape brought by farming
destroyed them.
The last wild passenger pigeon was sighted in 1889,
and the last survivor of all, a lonely female called Martha,
died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Birds are still being slaughtered in huge numbers even today,
particularly when there are economic reasons for doing so.
Dickcissels in Venezuela also swarm in flocks millions strong.
The whole world's population comes here in winter,
and they sometimes roost in only three or four sites.
Should anything happen to those sites,
the dickcissels could go the same way as the passenger pigeon,
and they are a very serious pest.
Farmers know how to deal with insect pests.
They spray them with poisons.
So the same technique is sometimes used against dickcissels,
in spite of the fact that it's against the law.
The birds, recorded here by amateur video,
take several days to die.
Yet humanity, so often in the past
the mindless and merciless exterminator of birds,
can sometimes become their guardians.
Here, in a remote part of Tasmania,
a mining family has become the saviour of the orange-bellied parrot.
For years, they've been putting out food daily on a bird table,
and these parrots became their best customers.
A century ago, there were certainly many thousands of this bird here
and in south-east Australia.
But in the 1940s they began to decline.
The cause was probably competition from introduced seed eaters
such as sparrows, goldfinches and greenfinches.
Furthermore, 70% of their mainland habitat was destroyed.
European cats living wild in the bush also took their toll.
Now, not more than 200 survive,
and nearly all of them are here during the nesting season.
The area is very isolated,
but bird-watching enthusiasts are very enthusiastic.
They come not only from mainland Australia
but from all over the world to see these rarities.
A special observatory has been built for them.
And special nest boxes within binocular range
have been put up for the parrots.
So, although the orange-bellied parrot is still few in number
and therefore a very rare bird, it's seen by thousands,
and, for the moment at least, seems safe in its remote sanctuary.
This kestrel comes from Mauritius,
the scene of one of mankind's earliest annihilations, of the dodo.
In 1974, only four known individuals survived.
Today, there are 5400 on the island.
They were saved by conservationists, who took young from their nests
and reared them by hand, so allowing the adults to lay again.
Today, each nest is still being carefully monitored.
The bird is now totally self-sufficient in the wild.
Just two free-flying pairs are given extra food
as part of a long-term study.
The present population
is now just about as many as the island can sustain.
The Mauritian pink pigeon was thought to be totally extinct
until a small colony was found in the mountains.
But that dwindled to just nine known individuals.
They too were persuaded to breed in captivity.
The young are taken from nests and given to barbary doves to rear,
so releasing the adults to breed again.
Now, pink pigeons are being released in three different parts of Mauritius.
Feeding programmes have also been started
to help these new populations establish themselves.
Today, the birds are breeding regularly,
and the population has risen from 9 to over 300 in just 7 years.
The Mauritian echo parrakeet was once the world's rarest parrot.
Now, using similar captive breeding techniques,
there are 20 in captivity and 80 in the wild.
The island of Mauritius, once a black name
in the history of humanity's relationship with birds,
has become one of the showplaces of species conservation.
In West Africa, in Cameroon, villagers celebrate
the forest beside which they live,
and in particular one of its birds.
Bannerman's turaco.
Many of the creatures of the forest,
such as the elephant that also figure in this celebration,
have long since disappeared.
The turaco, however, still survives, though in the whole of this forest
there are only about 4,000 pairs,
and it lives nowhere else.
For decades the forest has been felled
to make way for fields in which the people can grow their food.
It's now only half the size it was 30 years ago.
Yet the people also know that they depend on the forest
for water and firewood, for medicine and for meat.
So now, a balance has been struck.
The traditional beliefs of the people
have been harnessed to come to the forest's defence.
The masked figure of Mabu, their spirit guardian,
accompanied by the village elders, regularly patrols the margins of the forest.
Stakes are planted to mark the point beyond which no tree may be felled.
The turaco has become a symbol of the villagers' regard
for their environment.
And Mabu is now in league
with international bird conservation bodies
who are also concerned about the survival of Bannerman's turaco.
In North America, there are other masquerades,
to protect a bird that is even rarer than the turaco.
A whooping crane chick learns to feed,
encouraged by the gestures and calls of its human foster parents.
In 1945, only 16 whooping cranes existed.
Today, there are 300,
thanks to captive breeding and the patient rearing of chicks by hand.
(SPEAKING QUIETLY) And this is surely
one of the most extraordinary hand-rearing devices yet invented:
a whooping crane adult hand glove puppet
with a trigger inside so that I can operate the beak.
I'm speaking quietly because behind each of these doors is a whooping crane chick,
and it's very important
that they don't get used to the sound of human voices
at this early stage in their lives.
It's even more important, of course, that they don't see human beings,
which is why they are fed with this glove puppet.
Here at the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin,
they believe that, were the chicks to be fed by humans directly and visibly,
they would risk becoming humanised, so that when they became adult
they wouldn't be able to breed with their own kind.
As they grow, the whoopers lose all their brown plumage
and replace it with white feathers.
They must now learn how to use them in flight.
And once again, they have to be shown the sort of thing they must do.
Away to the west, in Idaho, a farmer with a passion for cranes, Kent Clegg,
has also been rearing a small group of whooper chicks.
He has a mechanised way of persuading his little flock to fly.
He has reared them in a quite different way,
initially in small groups,
which he believes will avoid humanising problems.
He then taught them to follow him.
Now he has put them together with the young of a commoner, smaller species,
sandhill cranes.
They are the all-brown ones.
So the little mixed flock has become confident in the air.
There's one further problem: whooping cranes are migratory.
In the past, some used to overwinter in the United States,
but many in the autumn would fly south to New Mexico.
If these birds were to remain free, they might try to do the same thing.
But how would they know which way to go without their parents to guide them?
And how would they find somewhere safe to feed when they got there?
Well, that problem is being tackled too.
Kent Clegg is planning to lead them there himself, in his microlite.
Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were.
They reached the coldest place on earth, Antarctica, long before we did.
They can survive in the hottest of deserts.
Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe.
Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky,
but with skill and care and knowledge
we can ensure that there is still a place on earth for birds
in all their beauty and variety...
..if we want to, and surely we should.