Original subtitles

Oh, God!

This, six foot below the surface of the earth,

is the coolest place in the entire colony.

And it draws down the hot, stale air from above...

I'm being bitten!

...draws it down from above,

down these deep, long chimneys which extend right up the side.

(DIRECTOR) Sorry, David, cut! We'll have to do it again, we couldn't see you.

If you're making a series of films about animal behaviour,

seeing the narrator may or may not be useful.

But you certainly need to see the animals.

This is the tropical rainforest,

famous for being the richest proliferation of life on Earth,

so where are the animals?

You can walk for hours and not see any, let alone get close enough to film them.

But they're here all right. You can hear them all around.

(VARIOUS ANIMAL SOUNDS)

At last, something.

Only a fleeting glance, and hardly the most appealing view.

Chimpanzees. They're hunting colobus monkeys.

But I only know that because I'm with an expert: Christophe Boesch.

Christophe is a Swiss zoologist who, with his wife Hedwige,

was the first to discover that chimpanzees in these West African forests

regularly catch monkeys.

Each member of the hunting team has his own particular job in setting up an ambush.

To me, this seemed total confusion.

And it was only Christophe's explanations and predictions

that enabled the cameraman and me to follow the battle.

When the hunt was over, it was only because we were with him,

wearing clothes similar to his,

that they allowed us to get close to them as they relaxed after the chase.

How did get these animals so accustomed to you

so we could stand as close to them as this?

Just patience. It took us five years.

Five years just following them, being always very quiet, never aggressive,

always the same colours, same clothing, the same... patience, patience.

- And how long every day? - It's difficult to know.

At the beginning, we are ten hours in the forest and maybe see them two seconds.

And it's just by accumulating the contacts that, with time, the contacts get longer.

And after some times... Now, you see, we were able to follow them hours.

But at the beginning, it was absolutely impossible.

It's difficult to imagine what it was at the beginning, just bottoms running away.

So after five years, you could get close to them,

but then you now know them individually, don't you?

For sure, that's the main purpose of this long-term study,

to work on the individual level.

How many are there in that group?

- About 60. - And you know all 60?

All 60, yeah, but two very newborn babies that are less than a month old.

- How do you recognise them? - A chimp's face is easy to recognise.

How they look and the nose form and the ears.

I say even I recognise better chimpanzees than the human beings.

Just the eyebrow and I know who it is. A human is more difficult.

What about their voices?

The voices. I can recognise each male individually by their voices.

They are very clear and, I think, all the females should be possible to recognise.

The chimps recognise each other, for sure, just by the voice.

I can do it only with the males, but it's still a great help.

Following the hunt, it's important to be with the hunters.

If I know the voices I can say, "OK, here's Brutus, let's go there",

because I know he's the best hunter.

Chasing bottoms and recognising eyebrows, for Christophe, are means to an end:

understanding the way chimpanzee society works.

His research has shed unexpected light on our own ancestry.

It used to be thought that our primate ancestors only developed tool using,

cooperative hunting and food sharing,

when they left the rainforest and colonised the open savannahs.

Christophe's findings, however, contradict that.

When we compare chimpanzees, we are surprised to see the opposite.

It's the forest chimps who tend to hunt more frequently, more sophisticatedly,

cooperate much more, share more food,

make more tools, use more tools.

- It's rather a surprise. - Very much so.

Yeah.

Does that mean they're going?

No. They might be, but if a group's resting like that,

infants, there is always some fight, something.

When we were talking earlier, you inadvertently described yourself

as a member of the chimp group.

You said someone was coming to join "us",

and actually you meant "the group of chimps".

Yeah, I feel part of the group, but I'm sure the chimps don't feel I am.

So if I say "us", it's just my personal bias because I have to behave like the chimps.

Sometimes I even feel, the way they look at me,

that I am making mistakes...

What kind of mistakes?

As I told you, it's when we are going on patrol to the neighbour territory,

so we tend to be very... "We"! You see my mistake.

They tend to be very silent, and they don't even...

You've seen the way they walk. They try not to make a single noise.

I'm just a human and I make lots of noise,

and they always look at me in a reproval way,

as if I've made too much noise, so I'm trying to be very...

...trying to be part of the group.

For hunting, it's the same.

A group of hunters will arrive under a group of colobus without being noticed.

So I've trained myself alone to walk under a group of colobus,

so that I will not disturb my chimpanzees before they hunt.

It's only too easy to empathise with chimpanzees,

but ants, surely, are totally inscrutable.

How could you possibly develop a fellow feeling for these?

If anyone has done so, it must be Nigel Franks.

He guided our filming of army ants in Panama,

and I also tracked him down to his laboratory in Bath University.

He confessed that he really liked ants.

It's a very strange thing. I also admire them enormously.

If we were to walk onto Barra Colorado Island together

and find some army ants at last,

I can hardly believe what I'm seeing, all the complexity and the organisation.

My heart skips a beat, it's so exciting.

You stand two inches from the edge of a trail, and they don't even know you're there.

That's the beauty of studying ants.

Their world is so different, you can observe them

like an Olympian god, without even interfering.

These merciless hunters bring back their booty to the bivouac,

a million ants clinging together in a huge ball.

Although this camp site is always shifting, with Nigel's guidance we found it.

But what goes on inside?

The only way past these vicious guards was with a long optical probe

normally used by doctors to look inside the human body.

And the view it gave thrilled Nigel as much as us.

These army ants are devouring other ants, and you've got all these voracious larvae.

How do they control them? All these hungry things live inside a wall of ants.

How do they prevent them eating one another?

Nobody, before that filming expedition, had been able

to look into a bivouac without disturbing it.

To see how they were beautifully holding on to each larva...

There's a living colony creating a basketwork,

and we hadn't been able to look into it, so it was a revelation.

Is this pure research, just because you're interested in ants,

or do they have a deeper significance?

I see deep significance in studying natural history,

even in just knowing what's living in this world that we're all living on.

But, in addition, ants have some technologies

that we're only just beginning to explore.

For example, there's no foreman, nobody's in charge,

the queen's not giving out instructions.

They all simply interact with one another and react to one another's successes.

So we can look at how a lot of simple processing units,

albeit ant workers, interact and communicate

so you get the emergence of complexity in structure.

That can tell us about technologies possibly involving teams of robots,

or how to wire different computers together.

After all, they're just simple processing units.

We can really learn extremely deep and important lessons from studying them,

and yet you can go back to the natural history and rejoice in simply looking at them.

Elephants, of course, are rather easier to spot than ants.

But we hoped to film some of the major events in an individual's life.

To do that, you need to know exactly who is who.

Cynthia Moss, in Kenya, has been following one group of them for 25 years.

I asked her how she'd started.

The first thing we tried to do was to get to know all the elephants individually.

At that time, there were about 500-600 elephants in the population.

That was a very nice number

because we felt it was possible to know each of those individuals.

- How many hundred? - Between 500-600.

- How long did it take you to do that? - Quite a long time. A couple of years.

I think, in fact, it wasn't until 1978 that I knew every individual in the population.

- How do you recognise them? - By their ears, first of all.

That's the main characteristic.

Their ears are never absolutely smooth along the edge.

There's usually little nicks or holes or whatever.

And also the vein pattern is very distinctive.

But after a while, you get so used to them and you recognise the whole elephant.

And we can recognise them maybe sometimes 100-200 metres away

by just the body, the way it walks, the way it holds its head.

Just as if you were walking along

and a friend of yours was walking away from you across the street,

you know that's Jack.

And the same with elephants. We recognise the whole animal now.

- Do you give them names or numbers? - Well, we give them names.

We started out giving the males numbers and the females names.

And, of course, I've been accused of being a female chauvinist for this.

But it was hard enough thinking up enough names for the females.

That's one of the major trials, trying to think up enough names.

They each must have a unique first three letters.

I've been through five of those names for babies books.

What's your research day like? How do you start?

Well, it depends really on what we're looking at at that time.

We've done a number of studies.

Now, for instance, I did a study that was just on calf behaviour.

So what I did was to choose 14 calves and follow their lives for 18 months.

Then my research day would consist of trying to find one of those calves,

and then stay with it and build up a record of how that calf developed,

when it started to feed, how much it suckled, how close it stayed to its mother,

when it was one month and when it was nine months,

just getting the developmental material.

Filming the critical moments in the life of a calf, its mother, auntie or grandmother,

is only possible with such detailed knowledge.

It must be very demanding.

You must think, if only I could look at something else other than this elephant.

- Never, never. - Really?

It's one of the most amazing things, that even I find surprising,

that every time I go out to find elephants

I'm looking forward to what I'm going to see.

I know I'm going to see something interesting and I've never been bored.

- Do you have favourites? - Yes, I'm embarrassed to say.

- Why? - I don't know.

It's something about the way they interact, maybe, with the rest of the family,

certain personalities that we like, and I have a new favourite whose name is Tulip.

She's just a very sweet calf and is full of fun, she does a lot of playing.

She comes around the camp a lot, that whole family is here, so I see them a lot.

You do get very caught up in their lives, what's going to happen to them,

when is so-and-so going to reach sexual maturity,

will she have the calf, will it live, who will she mate with?

You do get caught up in the whole history of the family.

There may be some austere and puritanical scientist

who'd say that if you call an elephant, say, Elizabeth,

you would be, almost inevitably, conferring human characteristics on it.

- Do you think that's a danger? - Not any longer.

It could be in the beginning of a study,

but elephants are such overwhelming creatures in their own lifestyle

that you soon stop any ideas that they might be human

or might have human attributes.

But we must share some characteristics.

I mean characteristics like bad temper or jealousy or sexiness or something.

I think there are some that you could use English words to describe,

such as... I've always said elephants can experience something similar to joy.

Just being with them a short while

you realise they're certainly experiencing some kind of emotion.

If you use the word joy, you're accused of being anthropomorphic,

but there is some sort of elephantine joy,

we just don't have the vocabulary to create a new word.

But it's certainly there and it's similar to human excitement and happiness.

But I don't know what you could call it that would satisfy the purists.

Cynthia's elephants were very cooperative.

But these waders in Norfolk are always extremely nervous.

To film them effectively you need more than just powerful lenses and hides.

You also need some inside knowledge,

and RSPB warden Paul Fisher certainly has that.

When the tide begins coming in,

it covers over the feeding grounds, the mud-flats out there,

and the birds are forced more and more to come in towards the shore

onto smaller areas of mud, gathering together in larger and larger numbers.

He knows that the biggest tides drive the birds off the estuary,

forcing them to roost in a nearby gravel pit.

I think we can look forward to the next couple of days,

when there'll be particularly high tides,

amongst the highest we can expect in the year,

and at that time, although it doesn't look much now,

looking out over these shingle sites,

we can expect to see 40-, 50-, 60,000 birds roosting here.

One shot we particularly wanted was of a huge flock wheeling above my head.

With the birds all crowded together as predicted,

Paul knew exactly the right tactics to get it.

Yes, somewhere around here for the exact flightline.

Now then, yes, I think probably about here,

because the birds will fly in from that direction there, over the wall,

and make a beeline for this part of the marsh over there.

So I think if we had the camera crew here,

I think they'll fly practically over his head.

Now, as so often, it's just a case of patient waiting.

There are warmer places to do that than the Norfolk coast at dawn in November.

They'll only make the flight from gravel pit to mud-flat once.

If we miss it, we may not get another chance.

They're on the road.

Just what we wanted.

(HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRR)

But birds can be very obliging.

We never had a more cooperative subject during the three years of filming

than the one I met here among the stunted palm scrub of southern Florida.

It's a harsh territory for birds.

Food is hard to find and there aren't many places to build a nest,

but it's the home of an interesting bird

that has been studied almost as intensively as any bird in the world.

And this is it!

The Florida scrub jay.

Because every jay in this part of the world has been banded

for the past almost 20 years,

we know who each is and what part they play in the community.

(HE CALLS TO THE BIRDS)

And that's all thanks to Glen Woolfenden.

Is that noise your invention or one of their calls?

I think it's a bird invention.

It's a rough imitation of the call they make

when they want to chase somebody from their territory.

So why do they come to you if you're making that call?

They've also learned that when we do it -

and I'm sure they can tell us from other birds -

it means food, like the peanuts in my hand.

- Do you deliberately tame them? - Absolutely.

Because our objective is to have the birds so tame that they tend to ignore us,

so when we go to follow their behaviour we can watch a bird behaving normally.

As soon as we want to watch them behaving normally, I take the food away,

then they begin foraging on their own or other normal activities.

So what do they think you are?

That's complicated and varies with the individuals.

We're here with the tamest individuals.

Obviously, we're a food supply.

When we visit their nest, they're a little uneasy.

I don't think the tamest ones consider us predators,

perhaps more comparable to a deer browsing through the habitat

that might bump into the nest, so they try and scold us

as they would a deer to move us away from the nest.

So you can know every one of these birds as an individual, right?

Absolutely, but we can't tell individuals apart by their appearance,

but by the colour rings they have on their legs.

We have ten colours, a silver band, and when you put them together,

you could have 1,200 unique combinations before you had to duplicate any names.

Who is this?

This is a one-year-old female called Silver Azure Green Dash.

The silver is the metal band, and the dash tells you which leg the bands are on.

When was she hatched? What's her history?

She's just under a year old. She was hatched in a nest relatively nearby.

There's somebody back, a different one, this is its sister.

She was hatched in a nest within 100 feet of here about a year ago.

What's the advantage of this detailed study of every single bird?

Our objective is to really know the sociology of a wild animal,

the demography, the behaviour of the animal.

If they're tame like this, we can follow virtually their every move

with their paying very little attention.

The Florida scrub jay has a social system known as

"cooperative breeding" or "helpers at the nest".

These birds, right now, are helping at a nest of their mother and stepfather.

Last year, other birds, like the one on your head, helped raise these.

So there's a cooperation within these families or clans

that we're interested in studying.

That was why we wanted to film them.

The helpers didn't see us as a threat,

but they gave us a perfect demonstration of how to see off real intruders.

(SCREECHING)

Do you manage to retain a scientific, dispassionate view

or do you develop favourites among them?

I have to remain objective in order to study science,

so when we see a bird about to be depredated or that seems hungry,

we don't change its natural behaviour, because we want to study nature.

Secretly, perhaps, there are birds that one of us likes a little more,

but we can't help him.

This relationship between man and bird has been going on not just for 20 years,

but for at least 20,000.

The honeyguide will lead you to a nest of wild bees, if you understand its signals.

This has been studied by Hussein Isack from the National Museum in Nairobi.

Where I come from in northern Kenya, we use the bird to find honey.

It's very important to us.

So I've always been very interested to find how this behaviour works,

what the benefits are for the bird and for people.

So you've known honeyguides since you were small?

Yes. I followed it as a young boy, but I never looked at it as a scientist.

What have you discovered through this work?

First, honeyguides know the locations of all bee colonies in an area.

So when they find a person, they take him straight to the nearest bee colony.

Previously, it was thought that when the bird finds a person they get excited,

then fly in front of you, looking for bee colonies at the same time.

This isn't true.

They already know where the bees are, and they lead him to this fairly straight.

That means that the honeyguide has a map in its mind of a very big territory.

Yes. If the colony's far, say, two kilometres,

the bird will fly straight and then come back after 2-3 minutes,

so it's as if it has to go and establish the direction,

which is difficult because the whole forest looks the same.

That means, too, that the birds explore their area and find all the bees' nests.

Yes.

If you sit near a bee colony in a hide and don't make any noise,

you will find, in the morning, several birds come to check and fly away.

So they seem to check whether a honey badger or a person

has attacked the bees in their absence...

- So they even update their knowledge. - Yes, they do.

When the bird arrives at the bee colony,

the guiding call changes, so you know, or the honey hunters know,

before they reach the colony, that the bird has arrived.

This is important because some people may give up.

Following the bird in the bush is so difficult, with acacia thorns, people do give up.

So the bird has evolved a way of telling the person, "We have arrived,

"now look for the colony".

Thank you.

Mmm!

The bird has not only led us to honey, it has posed for us to film it,

and that certainly deserves a reward.

But how could this relationship have started?

It is thought that guiding behaviour may have started with the honey badger.

The honey badger?

Because honey badgers dig up bees' nests,

if the bees' nests are underground where they're accessible to the badger.

It is thought maybe this behaviour started with the badger,

so I want to see if this actually happens.

How are you going to find that out?

I've got a model car

which I operate remote with this thing,

and I have a badger on it.

And if the bird does indeed guide a badger, it should respond.

Obviously, I've got to operate it from a height.

- Have you tried it yet? - I'm trying.

The problem is the terrain, it's quite rough,

and this little car gets stuck a lot,

so I have to help it and the bird sees me.

But I have started and I think they'll respond,

if they do guide the real badger.

In the Serengeti, another scientist uses electronic gadgetry

to investigate his subjects.

Craig Packer and his team work with lions.

A powerful loudspeaker

and a very long lead...

...the truck driven away to a safe distance...

...and a recording of the roar of a particularly powerful stranger.

(ROAR FROM LOUDSPEAKER)

(LOUDER ROAR FROM LOUDSPEAKER)

The advantage of the playback experiment is that we can intervene,

we can create a situation to elicit the behaviour,

so that we can actually watch in detail in a controlled situation.

It seems much of the roaring has to do with their territorial behaviour.

If they've just chased away a stranger

then they'll roar as a parting shot to the retreating opponents.

But often it seems they're roaring more to stay in contact with their pride mates.

The pride is often split up and spread over a wide area,

and they might be roaring to find out where their companions are at any time.

And they show a really interesting variety of cooperative behaviours.

They hunt together, rear their cubs together,

and they defend these group territories.

We filmed Craig's lions tackling buffalo in the only way they can -

as a team.

Lions are such familiar animals

you might think we know all about their behaviour, but not so.

They generally seem to surprise us with what they're up to.

How do they know if they live in a pride of ten

they'd do better than a pride of 11?

Then we say, "They can't do that. They can't count to ten".

Then we look at our data and find they mostly live in prides of ten or less.

It's as if they do make some of these decisions,

and we've no idea how they do it.

We assume they use certain rules of thumb.

In a certain situation, I'm a bit hungrier than I would be if I did something else.

It's not that they're counting to ten,

but maybe something happens between ten and 11that we can't see,

and they see something that correlates with that.

After 25 years of study,

do you think now you can empathise into the mind of a lion,

that you can really know what it's feeling?

Not really. A few things seem straightforward.

If they're to kill or a male is guarding a female, they seem very possessive.

It's obvious when they're hungry.

But for the rest of the time, it's difficult to try to understand what's going on in there.

If you look into the eyes of a baboon, you get the sense of wheels turning,

and a sense of what this animal might be thinking about for its next move.

But when you look into the eyes of a lion, it's like cold fish.

It's just nothing. You cannot really read into it in the same way.

The Sahara has one advantage for anyone studying animals.

It's such a simple environment, it should be easy to sort out

what's affecting an animal's behaviour.

There aren't, of course, many animals, but there is one:

an amazingly accomplished ant.

Cataglyphis comes out at midday, when the sand is hottest,

to collect insects killed by heatstroke.

And after wandering about in all directions over the featureless sand,

it can still run straight back to its nest.

How does it know which way to go?

The man who discovered the answer, making cataglyphis famous amongst ants,

Rudiger Wehner, was still busy with his apparatus.

What exactly is this extraordinary device?

This trolley is an almost perfect tracking device

for following accurately the coordinates of an ant.

There is an ant walking in the centre, and we now follow its every movement.

This ant has left its underground burrow to search for prey,

and it has found a piece of food which it now carries straight back to its home.

So you can see exactly which direction it's going in and plot its course.

Yes. To find its way, the ant would use the position of the sun

and other sources of light information.

What about these extra bits on your device?

By these devices, I can show that the ants use the sun as a compass.

I now block off the direct light from the sun,

and turn this mirror and reflect the light from the sun onto the ant.

So, for the ant, the position of the sun has shifted by 180 degrees.

And, actually, the ant turns around and now walks away from home.

Well, it proves it. It's very unkind.

You see it? It's still walking away from home, not knowing what it's doing.

Is it only the sun? If the sun goes in, does it get lost?

No, it would also use the pattern of polarised light in the sky,

but this is now blocked off by this orange filter in the centre of the trolley.

Polarised light? We can't see polarised light?

Polarised light is invisible to humans, but insects can see it

because they have built into their compound eyes tiny polarisers,

by which they use polarised light as a compass.

So there's a pattern in the sky that we can't see...?

Exactly, a complicated pattern.

The polarisers in the ant's eye are a mirror image of this pattern.

The ant scans the sky to get the best fit

of its own analyser pattern and the outside polariser pattern.

Astounding!

So Rudiger Wehner has shown that a tiny creature like an ant

has an astonishingly advanced computing capacity.

But one answer just prompts more questions, and he's still working away.

His subjects do at least come out into the open.

Other insects with equally astonishing talents live almost entirely below ground.

Termites.

Several million live in a single community,

largely ruled by a huge, bloated egg factory, the queen.

They build some of the biggest constructions made by any animals.

To see inside, a delicate approach is no good.

You need a pick, a shovel and a big hole. Mark Collins showed us.

Here's one I prepared earlier. Let's go in and have a look.

Here we are in the cellar, directly beneath the termites' main nest.

Above us, unknown to science until a few years ago,

these clay veins, spiral veins, going round and round under this huge clay plate,

which cools the colony.

It's absolutely spectacularly beautiful, I must say.

But haven't we killed this colony now, by digging this hole in it?

By our actions, I think not,

because the termites, unbelievably, can move 1 cwt of soil overnight,

and they can soon seal this hole.

But, unfortunately, we're on the edge of a farm,

and it's the farmers that kill off these nests by ploughing the soil.

They destroy the termites' galleries and they can't survive that.

In these soils, the termite population can reach 4-5,000 per square metre of soil.

Once the bush is clear,

termites start to feed on the crops the farmers are trying to grow.

In some cases, like the nest we've seen, those species die out,

but others become pests.

You've spent a lot of years studying termites.

Would you be sorry if they were exterminated?

Very sorry indeed.

They're crucial to the recyling of materials and nutrients through the ecosystem.

They're the engine of the ecosystem, turning over the dead plant litter,

bringing it back into the soil.

Many predators depend upon them for their everyday sustenance.

Not only that, when you look at the way they run their societies,

they're so efficient that one can only admire them.

There's so little waste, almost none.

On these fungus gardens, they recycle everything, so unlike ourselves, in fact.

We can learn things from them. The world would be a worse place without them.

Even with the best advice, of course,

filming doesn't necessarily go smoothly and without interruption.

They move around in a flock, scratching around for what they can get...

(COW MOOS) Cut!

Cut!

I've got sweat in my eyes.

I burnt my thumb!

They are remarkably sweet and delicious...

And also gritty! (SPITS)

But you wouldn't want anything to go wrong here.

We'd read detailed scientific accounts of how these killer whales, orca,

plunder the colony of sea lions on this beach in Patagonia.

Although scientists can tell you what is happening,

it's the cameraman who has to get the shots.

And Paul Atkins took on the job.

How practical did you think it was going to be?

We thought it was going to be very practical to get good shots from the beach

of whales attacking sea lions because,

according to scientist Juan Carlos Lopez, it happened fairly predictably,

at predictable places on the beach, so we knew we could get something.

The very first day, Juan Carlos took us to a hotspot on the beach.

He said, "Sit here a minute". The tide was right.

And a whale charged out of the water and grabbed a sea lion.

Juan Carlos was so pleased it had happened like he said it would.

But after watching that for two weeks, and watching them take the pups out,

toss them around like a volleyball game, it was quite horrifying to watch,

we concluded it would be suicide to get in the water.

We checked with Argentinian divers

and they all said don't ever get in the water with orca.

And Juan Carlos,

who'd studied these whales for 17 years, had never been in the water with them.

There was no problem getting shots from the safety of the beach.

The spot where we got most of the shots of the whales grabbing sea lions

we called "the dead zone", and it was an attack channel.

Killer whales would be lying out at the beginning of the channel, waiting.

Sea lions crossed this channel and a group of adults usually made it across

without any response from the orca.

But if there was one pup in that group, there could be five adults and one pup,

the orca, from 100 yards out, detected that and charged right in.

But there was another angle we wanted, which was lying on the beach,

like a seal, unfortunately, right in "the dead zone".

We were trying to get a point-of-view shot,

as though it was the point of view of the killer whale.

This is my partner, Mike DeGruy, lying in front of the colony.

He's in quite a bit of danger here. This is exactly where whales beach themselves.

He wouldn't be lying with his back to the ocean,

unless we knew this was not the time of day in which the whales would attack.

This technique also came in handy for pointing the camera towards the ocean

while the whales were attacking, to get low-angle shots

that feel like the whales are bursting out of the screen and into your living room.

We wanted to get some shots from above,

just to get that much closer to the whales, to get some fins passing by etc.

Juan Carlos thought this was the first time the whales had seen a boat with them.

It's a tiny 12-foot Zodiac.

There was some surf, we had trouble getting in the water,

we finally got through the surf and were getting the equipment arranged,

and the driver was trying to start the engine and it wasn't starting.

We'd drifted about 20 feet from the shore, the waves are crashing,

we looked up and here comes this huge fin,

one of the males had done a right-hand turn, headed straight for the boat.

This is a dorsal fin that sticks five feet out of the water, so it's pretty intimidating.

It was obvious, with nothing else in the water, it was coming straight for the boat.

One of Juan Carlos's worries was

maybe he'll think this is a rival whale that has moved into his territory.

So we saw that and were yelling to the pilot, "Start the engine!"

And he's going...

And finally, just like in a movie actually,

just as the whale got about 30 feet away, he started the engine,

and the whale, one of the males called Mel,

curved around and looked at us,

tilted his fin down 'cause they do that when they look up,

circled around the boat, checked us out, and left.

Next day, I thought if that whale does the same, circling the boat,

I can get an underwater shot by submerging my camera.

Stay in the boat safely, and dip it in the water.

So we had the same experience, we got in the water,

the whale, a different male, Bernard, who'd not checked the boat out before,

saw us and headed straight for the boat.

He came in, circled the boat, came up very close,

I stuck my camera in the water, pulled the trigger and it didn't work.

It's one of those horrifying moments in film-making.

I've got this perfect shot and the camera's not working.

I was extremely upset.

I thought that was the last opportunity.

The whales probably wouldn't approach the Zodiac again.

Having sussed it out, they weren't curious about it any more.

Besides the fact that the longer you're on location,

the more obsessed you get with getting a better shot,

we were watching the sea lions for quite a while,

and we noticed that they preferred sea lion pups, which are very small.

So we thought the whale should be able to tell the difference between us and pups.

So that night, we decided it's time to get in the water with the whales.

We thought we'd watched them enough to take that chance.

That's the way we played it next day.

We went out, put the Zodiac in the water.

Again, the whales weren't approaching the boat any more.

So we had to position ourselves right in the attack channel.

When the tide was right, the whales would head down this channel to the sea lions.

We decided to put ourselves in the channel to see them underwater passing by.

So we anchored right on the edge of the kelp forest,

and saw the fins coming, about 100 yards down the channel.

So I started getting on my scuba gear.

Juan Carlos looked at me and started putting on his scuba gear.

I started getting my camera ready. He was getting his still camera ready.

He was looking at me and I looked at these two fins coming down the channel.

So I jumped over, held onto the side of the boat, and Juan Carlos jumped over.

It was the first time he'd done it.

The thing about getting an underwater shot of the whales is the visibility...

The water's really murky, so the visibility's about 5-10 feet.

So you've got a 30-foot whale looming out of the murk at you.

So you didn't want to dive under, wait in the murk,

and say, "Where's it going to come from?"

You wanted to watch the fin till the last minute, then duck under.

I also held onto the boat till the last minute

to give me that option of, "Well, I've made a mistake!"

So the camera's in this hand, boat's in this hand.

Juan Carlos is behind me, Keith Turner's at the engine, in case of trouble.

Keith's saying, "They're coming, you'd better swim out now..."

I'm going, "I see them, I'm waiting, I'm going to swim out..."

These huge fins, talk about hearing the "Jaws" theme music...

These huge fins are coming straight for us.

And there was that instant when I thought, "We've made the wrong decision.

"These whales aren't going to be friendly." Just that moment of fear.

Then I thought, "I can't jump back in the boat, I'll be so embarrassed."

Out of the gloom materialised the head of this orca.

It looked at us and slowly swam by.

That was our first encounter. We came up and Juan Carlos's eyes

were that big, and he was exhilarated at having finally seen his whales underwater.

That was Mel, a male he's watched for 17 years, watching the back and the fin,

and bursting out of the water feeding, but he'd never been that close.

We tried to be very objective when making the decision.

We looked at the pros and cons and thought, finally, we could do this.

But it comes down to, are you going to jump in or not?

And you're not quite sure until that moment comes.

Research into animal behaviour is going on all over the world.

Some will provide knowledge essential for the conservation of the species concerned,

some may have wider applications and help us develop techniques

that animals themselves evolved millions of years ago.

But all help us towards an understanding of the world as a complex, living entity,

and of our own place in it.

Only if we have that are we likely to be able to maintain

the diverse magnificence of life on Earth,

and ensure that next year, too, there will be elephants and lions,

army ants and chimpanzees, and a chance, once more,

to go into a termite mound.

(GRUNTS OF EFFORT)

This, six feet below the surface of the ground,

is the cellar of the fortress.

Its floor is studded with shafts which go down as much as 12-14 feet...

Did I... Did something go wrong with the words?

We could do with another take, if you're willing...

Six feet below the surface...