Original subtitles

Of all the dozens of planets in the universe, this planet, HMS Earth,

is the only one with a functioning broadcasting sector.

Here, and possibly only here,

can man sit in his grotty flat in Princess Risborough

and witness things eating each other half a world away.

This planet, she is ours.

This is Round Planet.

It's actually closer to an ellipsoid, Tabitha,

but don't concern yourself with such detail.

We're only one of the world's most trusted broadcasting brands.

Bears.

There are eight species on this planet-y sphere of the world's globe.

From the black bear of North America to the panda of China

and the koala bear of Australia,

which is a marsupial, not a bear. Yes, Tabitha,

I know they're your favourite animal,

but we will not be covering them in this programme.

No, not even the super cute ones.

Bears are the largest land predators on earth.

They live in the tropics and in the arctic.

On snowy mountains and in dense jungles.

Claws, teeth...

General bear-iness.

But how do these huge animals thrive in so many different habitats?

In the tropics and in the... oh, I won't do the list twice; it's silly.

So, how do they do it?

In more ways than you might think, that's how.

Bears: A Hundred Ways to Survive.

The number may be adjusted up or down as we go;

it's not legally binding, so pedants, please stand down.

To sustain their big, powerful frames,

bears seem to be constantly on the look-out for high energy sustenance.

An ox, perhaps

A couple of chunky tourists? No.

These massive predators hardly ever eat anything their own size.

Instead, they prefer tiny meals and lots of them.

It begs the question,

"Why don't these giants just kill one big thing once in a while

then take the rest of the weekend off?"

Works for the lions.

Why not Yogi and Paddington?

But as you'll see, there's a method to their madness.

Any idea where we're heading?

Bet you a fiver I can guess from the music, Tabitha.

Ah ha, yes, Tibet.

The Tibetan plateau is a freezing,

high altitude shelf, scoured by relentless wind.

But on the upside, they do a lovely line in bunting.

Ooh. Oh, that stuff really does get everywhere, doesn't it?

These are Tibetan wild asses.

Called "kiangs", they may as well have “eat me” tattooed on their flanks.

So, will this giant ewok thing, the Tibetan bear, pounce?

No. He has set his sights on something completely different.

Something far, far smaller and incredibly awkward to catch.

These are pikas: basically rabbits who appear to have had their ears stolen.

Our bear begins his approach.

Sadly, what with this being a treeless plain with no cover,

and him being a supermassive bear who keeps standing up, the whole creeping predator thing doesn't really work.

He might as well drape himself in fairy lights and play the bagpipes.

The pikas sound the alarm and scarper.

But what the bear lacks in stealth, he makes up for in muscle

and sets to work excavating the pika out of the frozen soil.

But someone else is watching.

Someone who's noticed that while the bear's busy smashing in the front door,

the pika just pops out the back and carries on eating.

This is the Tibetan fox.

He's got the whole stealth thing down.

He's what you call a "professional".

Low profile: check.

Same colour as the grass: check.

Not standing up like a complete tool every five minutes: check.

And that, my friends, is how you catch a pika.

The Tibetan bear feels thoroughly upstaged and goes off for a cry.

I know exactly how he feels.

Now, where's this?

Ah, yes! Minnesota in the United S. of A.

Yeah, I'll come clean; That's not fresh morning mist.

The cameraman, Garth Delaspong, ran out of nicotine patches,

so he went back on the real stuff. Then he filmed through his own cloud.

He told us it would add atmosphere, and he's absolutely right.

Bears may have questionable skills as hunters,

but they are very good at foraging.

You know, all these bears take me back, Tabby.

I once voiced a bear in a children's cartoon back in '82.

Yeah.

Patrick's Pipe, it was called.

It was about a boy called Patrick and every week, he inhaled a pipe

full of magic spices then went to sleep.

And him and his teddy bear would wake up in an enchanted land.

It was a lovely show.

'Course, BBC cancelled it after three episodes.

Some fuss about the child smoking.

And they got complaints about drug reference which was absurd.

No drugs! Just magic spices; clearly very different.

Anyway, where were we?

Ah, yes.

These American black bears live in the woods,

And everyone knows what bears like to do in the woods.

That's right.

Eat honey.

This rotten log contains a hive.

Inside, the bees tend their larvae

by regurgitating the nectar they've collected.

They never tell you that on the jar, though, do they?

May contain bee vomit.

I suppose they think it might put people off.

But did you think it came out the other end? Surely that would be worse.

If childhood stories tell us one thing, it's that bears love honey.

This young bear has sniffed out the fancy jam.

And is quite literally going to get stuck in.

These bees have a well thought out response to this bear's brazen approach.

They get furious.

One kamikaze bee goes in for the sting, leaving its guts behind.

It won't kill the bear but will definitely kill the bee.

Cracking plan.

But before the bee whispers, “Remember me!” to her loved ones,

she emits a pheromone, telling the others to go into attack mode.

The bees go berserk, but he grabs the honey and legs it.

That's the stuff.

While these three little bears like their porridge with a bit of honey,

What?

Yes, Tabitha, I know there are only two,

but "three little bears" fits better with the Goldilocks story;

viewers love that sort of thing!

Well, can't you just CGI another one in there?

Uhh.

Now, where was I?

While black bears enjoy a bit of honey,

another North American bear craves something that's just as hard to get.

This cuddlesome shambler is the grizzly bear.

"Grizzly" is quite a nice nickname when you consider its scientific name

is Ursus Arctos Horribilis, which means "Horrible Bear".

But as you can see, they're really quite lovely.

Their habitat boasts fertile grasslands.

And rivers which teem with fish.

Nature has laid out a veritable banquet,

but the grizzlies laugh in the face of such convenience,

and instead choose to traipse 3,000 metres up into the Rocky Mountains

to look for a food that is both inaccessible

and, by all accounts, a bit rubbish.

Tabitha, is that choir meant to sound angelic?

Because it's giving me the willies.

So, are our bears stalking that goat?

With their powerful muscles and four centimetre-long canines,

they could tear it to ribbons in seconds.

But, no. Bears are much more creative than that.

Here they are on the other side of the valley. Happily flipping rocks about.

There was one episode of Patrick's Pipe set on a mountain,

actually, but instead of rocks, it was made of fudge,

and whenever Patrick and Teddy ate some of the fudge, they could fly into the clouds.

Our grizzlies are after something very peculiar.

Moths.

Every summer, army cutworm moths migrate to the higher slopes.

Where they roost under the cool rocks.

Cardigan drawers and charity shops must be in short supply in the Rockies.

Hmm.

The bears can snaffle 40,000 moths in a day.

"How we do know that?" you ask.

Well, we had our researcher, Lily Buttleworth, calculate it

by picking moth wings out of the bears' poo.

No job too small for our Lily.

Moths might seem like a light snack,

but eating them in this quantity adds up to almost 20,000 calories.

Personally, I'm still not convinced it's worth the effort, but must be.

As the year presses on,

Grizzlies need to up their calorie intake before hibernation.

So they need something substantial.

They start on clams. No lemon, just as it comes.

But the main course is much harder to catch.

Pacific salmon that live in the sea, where the bears... don't.

Yes, I know. Makes about as much sense as an elephant using chopsticks.

The salmon are returning in their thousands to spawn.

And there is the grizzly, stalking the entire sea.

The fish ready themselves for the coming duel by swimming about a bit.

The salmon swim past, and the mighty bear strikes.

The bears are cunning, agile, ingenious.

They do everything, except... catch the fish.

Oh! Oh, that was close.

It's harder than it looks, and to be fair, it looks quite difficult to begin with.

The cubs have more success.

This bear will eat well tonight… oh. Ooh.

For a 300-kilo bear, it's all rather embarrassing.

Still, it's good exercise, and you get a bath at the same time.

The fish continue upstream smugly, insofar as a fish can be smug.

But the salmon aren't in the clear yet.

There's another hairy gauntlet waiting for them.

This group appear smarter than the average bear

and have gathered where the river narrows.

The leaping salmon are technically making it easy.

Offering themselves up to the bears, like flying sushi.

This bear's going to strike…

any…

minute...

…now.

Oh. All this bear has to do… oh! Oh.

All this bear has to do… oh!

Well, now they're just taunting you.

Catch a fish!

That's all the bear has to do: is catch a fish, which it does!

Ha ha! Thank you.

Oh, exasperating.

Unless, of course, it's a fish focused nature programme, then it's tragedy.

We're devils for playing with your loyalties.

Anyway, winter arrives.

And it's time for these huge beasts to settle down

for one of the longest after-dinner naps on earth.

During the bitter winter, they will sleep for five months or more,

in which time, they can lose up to a third of their body weight.

But you don't see them on the covers of magazines, boasting about it

because they have dignity.

While many bears hibernate through the cold winters,

there's one bear who doesn't.

The giant panda.

Perhaps the only things from China that aren't made in their thousands.

And the reason the panda doesn't hibernate?

He can't fatten up enough to sleep through the winter.

I wish I could relate, but I just can't.

Ninety-nine percent of a panda's diet is bamboo,

and bamboo is a rubbish source of energy.

So the panda has to spend 14 hours of every day eating, just to get by.

It's like trying to get fat on celery.

Biologically, pandas are omnivores, and naturalists have tried for years

to understand why they just eat bamboo.

No, the pandas, that is, not the naturalists.

Must play havoc with their digestive system.

Can you imagine only eating one food for the rest of your life though?

Drive you mad.

Actually, due to a packing oversight on a trip to the Sahara,

I once ate only multivitamins for a month.

The upside was that I've never had such long, glossy hair.

Where was I? Ah, yes.

Back to the panda.

Well, now it looks like he's just playing with his food,

but contrary to first impressions,

the twirling is a canny way of defrosting the frozen leaves,

meaning that he can carry on comfort eating even in winter.

On the other side of the round planet, however, it's a different story.

While most of the bears that live in the northern seasonal climates are asleep,

in the tropics, bears are all awake and noodling about.

Here, food is plentiful,

but tropical bears still excel in choosing the most awkward food possible.

You're starting to grasp the pattern with bears, I take it.

The Andean cloud forest:

wonderful land of condensed watery vapour.

And home to the spectacled bear.

It's called that for obvious reasons: with its distinctive facial markings

that give the impression of furry glasses.

Though I think it looks a bit more like a ski mask.

The be-spectacled bear is the inspiration for Paddington.

I like Paddington, I really do,

though I feel my bear from Patrick's Pipe had a tad more depth to it.

Spectacled bears could eat anything

but instead go for the most unobtainable thing: bromeliads,

which grow 15 metres up in the misty tree canopy.

These plants are the jungle equivalent of Krispy Kremes.

But bromeliads are not soft and doughy.

They are ruddy tough.

Luckily, the bears are equipped with reinforced back teeth,

with three roots instead of two,

so they can gnaw through their heavy duty dinner

and reach the sweet centre.

One reason I like the Andes is that Bolivia is the only country

that still shows Patrick's Pipe.

It's always been very popular there.

Anyway, not all bears like to go up high.

Another bear of the tropics stays closer to the ground.

Night time in the sweltering jungles of India.

This snuffly little number is the sloth bear.

The scientist must have been hungover the day he was discovered.

They just stole his name off another animal.

Do you know Baloo in The Jungle Book was a sloth bear?

But this is the real one.

You can tell because he's not dancing around to jazz.

The sloth bear is unique amongst his brethren:

in that insects are his favourite source of food.

And this is what he is after: tiny, tiny termites,

like ferocious couscous on legs.

Not an easy meal, but the sloth bear has a well-honed technique:

gently approach the termite mound and bash it to smithereens.

The residents all scatter.

So now, he's got to catch them.

Not easy with paws like these.

Well, not easy, full stop.

But this bear has special skills.

He can vacuum the termites up

which is possible because he's lost his two front teeth,

not in a bar room brawl, but via evolution.

No one has ever got a close-up of the sloth bear's gap-toothed grin.

We were hoping to, but cameraman Garth failed to bring the extra battery back,

for which he has been reprimanded.

Of course, the risk is a termite up the nose,

but Baloo here has a handy flap to protect his nostrils when he's hoovering.

Ingenious.

Come to think of it, we did have nose cams for this sequence,

but Garth didn't bring the right adaptor.

Really didn't have his head on that day.

Bears: hardy, frugal creatures.

Resourceful, dextrous, and very strong.

These huge animals have made their mark on every continent,

except Antarctica, Africa, and Australia.

Well, that's not every continent then, is it?

It's only four out of seven.

No, take that bit out, Tabitha.

It makes me sound like a pillock.

These huge animals have made their mark

on... a bit over half the world's continents.

Their unconventional methods to survive clearly pay off.

By eating lots of small, boring things,

rather than going all out for one big dangerous thing,

these clever bears improve their chances of surviving another year.

When it comes to food, bears do far more

than the "bear" minimum to get their "bear" necessities.

Ha, couldn't resist slipping in a few bear puns.

Well, you all knew it was coming. Don't pretend you didn't.

Well, you know what I've got in my head now:

the Patrick's Pipe theme tune.

♪ A world where clowns are kings ♪

♪ A land where the mushroom sings ♪

♪ Magic pipe, take Patrick there ♪

♪ Through swirly air with his bear... ♪