Original subtitles

SURF ROARS

COCKEREL CROWS

FAINT SINGING

Cuba is the Caribbean's most precious natural jewel.

Forests still blanket large parts of the island.

Her blue waters hide some

of the richest coral reefs to be found anywhere.

And while many of the wild lands

and seas of the Caribbean are in trouble,

Cuba's extraordinary history has created a true wildlife wonderland.

Fully half of Cuba's animals and plants are found nowhere else.

From their very own crocodiles and snakes,

to the smallest birds and frogs on the planet.

My name is Colin Stafford -Johnson.

I've been a wildlife cameraman for over 30 years,

and have never lost

my boyhood obsession with this remarkable island.

I NSECTS CH I RRU P

BIRDSONG

BIRDSONG

WAVES CRASH

My grandfather lived with me when I was growing up,

and he had this lovely room.

And it was floor-to-ceiling books.

And that was sort of my window into the world.

WATER GENTLY BUBBLES

I must have been five or six years old, I guess.

My grandad came in one day and he took a book off the shelf.

When he opened it up, it was full of stamps, postage stamps.

There were these extraordinary

images of these really exotic-looking birds

and these strange-looking rodents and fish.

And he told me they came from

an island at the other side of the world that I 'd never heard of.

WAVES CRASH

Sitting on his desk, there was a globe.

And I searched the entire globe

and eventually, I tracked it down to the Caribbean.

And that island was Cuba.

BIRDSONG

My Cuban journey has no fixed agenda.

My only plan is to wander and explore,

and to find the very best that wild Cuba has to offer.

Lying on its south-western coast is Zapata,

a vast region of dry forest and flooded swamp.

Zapata is the largest

single protected area in the entire Caribbean.

When you wander along these old roads,

these old lanes in this part of Cuba,

in the great forests of Zapata,

you come across this... little orange flower.

This is Apocynaceae.

It's a native Cuban plant that's absolutely full of nectar.

And if you wait by it,

there's a very good chance that perhaps.

Cuba's most famous resident might turn up.

And you'll often hear them before you see them.

WINGS FLUTTER

I think I just heard one.

WINGS FLUTTER

BIRDSONG

There it is.

And that is the very smallest bird in the world.

BUZZI NG

It's the bee hummingbird, that's only found in Cuba,

and what a wonderful little creature it is!

I cannot believe how tiny it is!

It's... almost insect-like.

It's hard to believe it's a bird.

Cuba has been a real cradle of evolution.

So many species have evolved here.

I've spent a lot of time travelling in Central and South America,

and I've seen all sorts of wonderful hummingbirds,

but I've always wanted to see this particular one.

What is it that attracts us

to the biggest and the smallest of everything?

Some people say that the reason

that the bee hummingbird is so small here

is that it's a means of avoiding competition

with their larger cousin, the emerald, which is twice as big.

I've noticed they can actually both share this particular plant.

They can both feed from this one.

I love the Cuban names for these birds.

Zunzun and zunzuncito.

The hummingbird and the little hummingbird.

When his... his head catches the light...

they are indescribably beautiful.

The males are the show-offs of the family.

But this lady's showing no interest. She has already mated.

For her, it's nesting time.

What better material to make a tiny bird's nest

than silk from a spider's web?

She will collect all sorts of little things from the forest,

nest-building materials.

And she will use that to weave all those materials together.

And her piece de resistance, the ultimate camouflage,

is to collect little bits of lichen.

Her aim is disguise.

But to the human eye,

it looks like it's just been designed

for the sheer beauty of it.

It's the most perfect little structure, the size of an egg cup.

It looks so vulnerable.

And into that, she lays the tiniest of eggs.

Because it only goes to follow that the smallest bird in the world

lays the tiniest eggs in the world.

Three weeks must pass before she'll know if all is going to plan.

BIRDSONG

I think one of the biggest sort of surprises I had, coming to Cuba,

was that I really never realised how big it was.

I mean, I sort of vaguely knew

it was the biggest island of the Caribbean,

but in my head, I didn't have that concept, you know,

that it's 1,000 miles long.

About four times the size of Ireland.

When you look at a map, you can see why Cuba was so critical

in the history of this region.

It commands the entrance to the entire Caribbean.

WAVES CRASH

The very first human beings only settled on Cuba

some 5,000 years ago.

They came across the ocean.

But their journey was not without its reward.

A vast paradise island.

Observing from the shore, strange creatures witnessed their arrival.

Creatures that had been here for three million years before them.

They have the most extraordinary bodies, just armour-plated.

Very sharp claws. If they wanted to do you damage, they could.

And those eyes on the side of their head

mean they can see all around them.

In front of them, behind them, above them.

I love the way they walk.

These are Cuban rock iguanas.

They always look like they don't have a care in the world.

They live life at a very slow pace.

They really have very little to worry about out here.

They keep an eye on each other a little bit,

wondering what the neighbours are up to.

Oh, he's keeping an eye on his neighbour now.

Little head bobbing, saying, "Yep, this is my patch".

They can afford to spend an awful lot of their lives just sort of sitting around

because they don't have to feed an awful lot.

That's a great advantage of being an iguana.

They just eat plant matter.

They don't need to eat very much of it at all

because they get most of their energy just from the sun.

And so, they put an awful lot of what they eat into growth.

Unlike us. We spend most of the energy that we take in, just keeping warm.

FLIES HUM

The only time when things will really change around here

is when it gets towards mating season.

And that's when they've got to sort out who's boss.

Because the dominant male, the strongest, biggest one,

is going to be the one that's most likely to get the females.

Life here is about to get a lot more interesting.

LIVELY LATIN MUSIC

The iguanas may have hardly moved a muscle for more than a week,

but can move fast when their masculinity is on the line.

The big male has won the day,

and mating is a less-than-elegant affair.

But he's happy now.

Peace and harmony soon return to this patch of Cuban paradise.

GULLS CRY

WATER GENTLY BUBBLES

The deep waters off Cuba are home to

some of the greatest shark numbers in the Caribbean.

An ancient, perfect design,

sharks have patrolled these seas little changed

for more than 50 million years.

And this is their last great refuge in the entire Caribbean.

The Gardens of the Oueen - Jardines de la Reina.

Lying off Cuba's southern coast,

the Gardens are a marine wonderland.

150km of islands, coral reefs and mangrove swamps

form one of the greatest barrier reef systems on Earth.

Travel beneath the surface here

and you travel back in time to when the Earth's seas were pristine.

In the Gardens of the Oueen, you'll find corals that survive

almost nowhere else in the Caribbean.

Rich stands of elkhorn,

one of the very first to die under the impact of humans.

Coral reefs pulsate with life.

A single reef can hide

4,000 different kinds of plants and animals.

The richest single community of life on Earth.

The world's seas once teemed with

these most successful of all ocean predators.

But times are changing for the sharks of planet Earth.

More than 90o%♪ of many species have been killed by human beings.

Today, the Caribbean is in mortal danger.

Scientists believe overfishing and climate change

could wipe out its living coral in the next 30 years.

The Gardens of the Oueen are an orchestra of life

in an ocean slowly falling silent.

WAVES CRASH

Given Cuba's sort of amazing natural diversity,

it seems kind of strange that there are so few land mammals here.

GU LLS CRY

The ancestors of these hutia must have arrived on rafts of vegetation.

Perhaps blown by hurricanes a long, long time ago.

From a distance, they look like very sort of fluffy, benign things.

It's only when you look at their faces, you see

they're definitely rodents.

They have that typical rodent's dentition.

Those prominent front teeth.

The secret to their success, to the success of that great group of animals,

is that they have these continuously growing teeth.

So they constantly eat.

They're wonderful. Wonderful little animals.

And they can survive in places like this. It's hard to imagine.

But still today, there are plenty of iguana

and hutia,

and they still seem to be holding their own pretty well.

GULLS CRY

BIRDSONG

The people who lived here originally were known as the Taino.

It seemed as if life had been pretty good for them.

They had an agricultural system set up here,

they seemed to have enough to eat,

and were doing just fine.

WAVES CRASH

And when they were sitting on a shore, much like this one,

looking out to sea one day, they must have been amazed to see

these enormous ships appearing on the horizon.

When they spotted Columbus arriving here,

little did they know that their lives were going to change forever.

And Columbus, in his letters, describes them as a very benign people, very gentle.

How friendly they were, and how open and trustworthy.

And they didn't appear to have any weapons, any methods of defence.

So of course, they were ideal people to enslave.

European man brought with him disease,

which was to wipe out so many people at this side of the world.

From the moment those ships were spotted on the horizon...

within 50 years, the Taino had all but disappeared.

And it's just extraordinary to think that such a culture, such...

such a way of life could disappear so quickly.

A few faint traces of their language survive, even to this day.

The name of the country itself, Cuba, was a Taino word.

Hurricane. Canoe.

Faint echoes of a language that is otherwise long dead.

BIRDSONG

Amazing how a small bunch of people landing on a distant shore

can claim it as their own

in the name of some foreign king or queen.

And they legitimately felt

they had an absolute God -given right to do that.

The arrogance of man.

Today, nearly 12 million human beings live on Cuba.

Over two million in the capital, Havana.

Founded in 1519, Havana's old city transports you back in time.

Barely 100km from Florida,

Havana could be on a different planet

to its North American neighbour.

It's just one of those cities where, if you perch yourself down anywhere at all,

you can just people-watch for hours on end.

LOW CHATTER

There's a sense of sort of faded grandeur,

but that just really adds to its charm.

And like so many places, when, I guess, you've got a warm climate,

everyone's out chatting to each other, and...

there's a very nice pace of life here.

Today's Cuban people are a diverse mix of backgrounds and cultures.

European, Taino, African.

The slave trade had a huge impact.

A million people torn from their West African homes

and thrown across the island.

African influences are everywhere.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

MUSIC PLAYS

RHYTHMIC CLAPPI NG

The slave ships didn't only bring humans to Cuba.

Hiding aboard were stowaways,

who jumped ashore at every opportunity.

CLAPPI NG CONTINU ES

CH EERING AND APPLAUSE

Spend a night in Havana

and you might see flashes of movement under the streetlights.

African geckos.

A long way from Ghana and Liberia,

this tropical house gecko stalks Havana's city streets.

I n recent times, the geckos have started to move out of the cities

and across the Cuban countryside.

Yet another stage on their remarkable journey

from their African forest homes.

FOGHORN

GULLS CRY

Today, a whole new fleet of vessels

sail into Havana's legendary harbour.

FOGHORN

The government are hoping for a million cruise ship passengers,

to add to the four million-plus guests

who already holiday on the island every year.

Mass tourism will bring new roads and new hotels

and fresh challenges for Cuba's wild lands and wild creatures.

FOGHORN

INSECTS CH IRRU P

BIRDSONG

I n Zapata, three weeks have passed

since the mother hummingbird laid her tiny eggs.

It's a good year, and two healthy chicks have hatched.

Blind and helpless at birth, the chicks grow explosively.

Doubling their weight in just four days.

Such is the scarcity of these birds

and the difficulty of finding their tiny nests,

that this is a scene rarely, if ever, filmed before.

The bee hummingbird was once found all over Cuba,

but now, Zapata is one of its last strongholds.

The vast swamps and forests

an ideal refuge for a mother with young to raise.

18 days after hatching,

the chicks have already grown their flight feathers.

I n just a couple of days, they will leave the nest forever.

And with luck, live up to seven years.

A whole new chapter in the story of the world's smallest bird.

BIRDSONG

I feel very fortunate

to have spent so much of my life in places like this.

There's nothing like waking up in the morning,

that sort of tuning in to the sound of the world coming alive.

BIRDSONG

Particularly in the tropics, you really appreciate the coolness of this time of day.

The air is fresh, just for a little while, and everything's busy.

If you tune in to the sounds... right here and now,

you know there's only one place in the world that you could be,

and that's on the island of Cuba.

BIRDSONG

Hear all the sounds of the birds, but there's one sound...

which is made by one of the rarest birds in the world.

BIRD CALLS

The Fernandina's flicker, it's a kind of woodpecker.

Their numbers are now critically low.

Maybe 500 or 600 individual animals left.

When you think about it, that's almost nothing,

and they are still in decline.

But these ones are lucky to be here in the heart of Zapata.

Zapata is really the last stronghold for this species.

Cuba's the only place where they are found.

Once upon a time, they would have been found all over the country.

Deforestation, farming and wildfires have decimated their numbers.

They have no idea, of course, how rare they are, how special they are.

They're just doing what they've always done,

what generations of their kind have always done.

An incredibly important little future family here.

The thing about extinction is it's a silent thing,

it doesn't announce itself.

It's a gradual process, until you finally end up with just

the final pair, the final family, the final individual bird.

It can just happen any day of the week, at any time. Just disappears.

It doesn't make the news and every time something disappears,

the world just becomes poorer.

Such an incredibly beautiful bird.

Looking out from the little high-rise,

looking out into a very changed world now.

I've never been any place quite like this.

It's incredibly picturesque.

There's a lovely sense of peace about these valleys.

You know, the farming here is very benign on the land,

compared to so many other places I go.

They still use very traditional methods for tilling the fields and

it's low-impact, very few herbicides and pesticides are used here.

So much of agriculture these days is intensive

and relies on heavy machinery and combustion engines

and they're almost absent from this place still.

So you can hear people laughing and joking

and communicating in the distance.

I remember a time when I reland was a lot more like this,

when everything was a lot more manual and maybe communities

were a lot stronger as a result, because people relied on each other.

There's a real sense that people here are sort of working together.

THUNDERCLAP

I was brought up in a country where we had names for all

different kinds of rain,

but none of it falls like the rain that falls in Cuba,

and in this tropical belt.

You hear the thunder coming along in the afternoon

and you can feel this great energy in the atmosphere,

and when it's released, the rain just comes in absolute floods.

It's like a deluge.

Near the infamous Bay of Pigs, on the south coast,

the heavy downpours and high humidity trigger a truly

extraordinary event in Cuba's natural world.

It's an extraordinary sight,

millions upon millions of crabs on the move.

The entire forest is alive.

It's one of the great wildlife migrations.

Crabs evolved in the sea,

but they came on to land and adapted to this environment incredibly well.

It's strange cos for so many months of the year here,

you wouldn't see a single one

because they're totally nocturnal, and now, they've thrown

caution to the wind and that's cos there are hormones in the air.

It's mating time.

Lots of these females have probably mated already,

but their eggs are inside their bodies still.

Ah, this little one has eggs, she's got her precious cargo,

so she'll be off to the sea now.

They've adapted to life on land, but in order to reproduce,

they have to get to the sea.

For millions and millions of years,

they've been effectively unchanged, but we've come along

and made a very significant change, by building a coastal road.

It's an obvious place for us to build roads,

but it's right in the path of their migration and of course, they

have no behavioural mechanisms in their evolution to deal with this.

Although it may be difficult to stop traffic completely for weeks

on end, there's no doubt a lot more could be done than is done now.

It's just sad to witness an ancient creature that's perfectly

evolved, having to deal with man, same old story.

But there's often a gap of 15 or 20 minutes between cars,

so they have a chance to cross, and it seems,

because there are so many millions of them cross this road every

year, there's no evidence that the numbers are declining in any way.

So that's something.

She's got to bring those eggs to the sea in safety,

she's got to release them without falling in the sea herself.

What happens next, of course, is the eggs are then on their own.

But they will hatch extremely quickly,

because she only releases them when they're ready to hatch.

That's the key.

The great irony is that they need a certain

amount of water for those gills to work,

but if they fall into the sea, they'll just drown like you and I.

They left it so many millions of years ago,

that they're no longer capable of life underwater.

While making sure to release their precious young,

these mothers will never make it back to their forest home.

The crystalline waters off Cuba are home to one of the very

largest reptiles on the planet,

giants that can grow to six metres or 20 feet long.

American crocodiles.

Out here, they sit firmly on top of the food chain.

They fear nothing, and everything is afraid of them.

Crocodiles are a spectacularly successful design.

The giant meteor that finished the dinosaurs hit the Earth

just 1,000km west of Cuba, devastating life on Earth.

But these hardy beasts somehow carried on, unchanged to this day.

They're among the planet's greatest survivors.

This region of Cuba is world famous for reasons that Cubans

don't like very much. It's home to a naval base

occupied by the Americans for the last 100 years.

The base itself is only a small part of Guantanamo, which is

in fact one of Cuba's largest provinces,

taking up the entire eastern tip of the island.

And this is Humboldt National Park, named after Alexander von Humboldt,

who was one of the greatest naturalists of all time, who visited

this area in the early 1800s and was astonished by its natural wonders.

When you enter a forest, you really enter a whole new world.

You don't have to go far into a woodland

until you sort of get absorbed by it and you leave the world behind.

I guess birdsong is the dominant feature of woodlands like this,

but if you, if you listen closely...

I NSECTS CHIRPI NG

there's a hum and that hum is just like the sum total noise

generated by all the little creatures, and it's really the

little creatures ultimately,

that we rely on and that everything relies on.

That hum has stopped in many places.

If you're ever in an environment and you don't hear that hum, you know

that not all is well, cos that really is the hum of life itself.

That's the sound that we need to hear everywhere.

There's no reason why, with a bit of careful planning, that we can't

look after all the creatures and ourselves at the same time, and

we're such an ingenious species that I think

we can solve all the problems, but we just have to...

We just have to consider the natural world a lot more.

These are Polymita, a kind of snail only found in Eastern Cuba.

They're endemic to this part of the island.

They have the most wonderful colours.

And if you look at them really closely,

you'll see that they're not actually eating the leaves themselves.

Although snails are pests,

anyone who has a garden knows what it's like

when a load of snails turn up and your veggies start to disappear,

but that's not the case with these ones.

These just sort of graze along the leaves themselves

and they remove the little fungi

and things like that that are growing upon them,

so they're actually like little guardians for the plants

and the trees that grow here.

During the summer, they'll go to sleep, they'll estivate,

seal themselves off from the world and sleep the dry season away.

With the first falls of rain, they'll get active again

and start to mate.

And snail courtship is always quite interesting.

Mating itself is a long and drawn-out affair

and can often take four hours or more.

The snails are hermaphrodites.

They fertilise each other, using a large white organ to transfer

the sperm across.

The fact that they are so colourful and beautiful, that is

actually their downfall because they're very collectable and there's

actually an illegal trade in their shells that extends as far as Japan.

It's hard to believe, but they're very sought-after.

But there's been a significant conservation

and sort of awareness campaign, but it's always nice when you come

across a community and they're aware that what they have is special.

That's the beginnings of something and when it's a little animal

that a lot of people would just walk by, it's all the better.

Nothing ever goes to waste in a healthy ecosystem and even in death,

their empty shells are still prized by the creatures living around here.

Hermit crabs have the evolutionary misfortune of being born

without their shell, so they must find one for themselves.

Of course, there are downsides to not growing your own.

Every few months, hermit crabs must seek out a roomier house,

before they get stuck in their old one.

This crab thinks that property options might be

better down on the coast.

Where better to be a hermit crab

than in the land of the painted snails?

Hermit crabs are highly vulnerable without a shell.

Once they've found a suitable new residence,

they don't delay moving in.

Now safe and comfortable, it's time to get back to some cover.

There are still some patches of old -growth forest left in Cuba.

Forest that provided sanctuary for Fidel Castro

and the revolutionaries.

Hot and humid under the tropical sun,

the cool of night reveals a very different world.

Some 26 different types of bats make their home in Cuba,

seven found nowhere else on the planet.

These are Cuban flower bats

and this entire cave system here just has one exit.

But they're flying around and around.

They don't necessarily just exit the cave straight away.

They tend to spend a little bit of time flying around the entrance,

and bats do that.

They're constantly socialising, they're very social creatures.

You wonder what they're saying to each other.

All I can hear is just the flutter of myriads of wings.

Some of these little guys could be, you know, 15, 20,

25 years old, something like that.

Some of them will have come out through this exit

thousands of times in their lives.

I think, probably, I'm thinking,

blissfully unaware that danger is lurking out here.

Cuban boas.

Up to a dozen snakes gather around this cave entrance.

All just waiting. Waiting for one unwary bat.

Boas don't have good eyesight, but they have those receptors

that can actually see the heat that the bats are producing.

Oh, look, he's flicking his tongue, tasting the air!

They're in exactly the right place,

just where the bats are moving, around and around in circles.

Ooh! Just missed! But as soon as a bat touches one,

it seems to sort of fold its wings and drop away.

It's like that's an evasion tactic.

Sooner or later, one of them runs out of luck.

Oh! The poor little blighter! Not putting up any struggle at all.

Seems to just know that that's it.

Once he's in those coils, there's no escape.

This is how they actually kill them, by just coiling around their bodies.

And all the little bat's going to feel is pressure, and soon,

they won't be able to lift their ribcages to breathe,

and they essentially faint.

But it's a very gentle, sort of silent process.

They're pretty benign predators, if there's such a thing,

if that's not a contradiction in terms.

Boas have to eat too, I guess.

And they only eat what they need. One bat a week would be ample

for a snake of this size.

For some people though, this would be the stuff of nightmares.

Snakes crawling round above my head,

and thousands of bats in the air.

Not everyone's cup of tea.

But it is mine.

I couldn't be happier!

I love caves,

I love snakes,

I love bats.

I love Cuba!

Amazing place.

I n part two of my wild Cuban adventure, I encounter

a truly extraordinary living fossil in the sinkholes of Zapata.

I find out why Cuba has been described as woodpecker heaven...

and I meet the Cuban crocodile, reputed to be the quickest

and the most aggressive on the planet.