Original subtitles

This is Guelta d'Archei in Central Africa.

A hostile, seemingly empty world.

There is life here.

But it exists at the very limits of survival.

For this is a world with almost no water.

Lands like these cover over a third of our planet.

Here, life is forced to do things differently.

This is the most ancient desert of all.

The Namib - in south west Africa.

It is one of the hottest places on Earth.

Yet this male ostrich and his mate

have come here to start a family.

Few predators venture out during the heat of day.

But such safety comes at a price.

Out in the open, the newly-hatched chicks are exposed

to the crushing heat of the sun.

But not all of the brood have hatched.

Until they do, the family will stay here.

The adults take it in turns to protect the brood.

So whilst the female takes a well-earned break,

the male takes over for the most testing shift.

He gently rolls the unhatched eggs...

...calling to the young within them.

He doesn't want to leave anyone behind.

The temperature continues to rise by five degrees Celsius every hour.

He protects the chicks that have emerged...

...shading them with his own body.

At the end of another gruelling day in the sun...

...he's lost almost all his energy.

But he must resist the urge to rest.

The cool of the night brings some relief...

...but now predators are out and about.

It's going to be a long night.

Dawn brings a surprise.

Three additions to the family...

...to greet the returning female.

But there's a problem.

The chicks won't survive another day in these temperatures.

Yet the male is reluctant to leave.

Some of the eggs have still not hatched.

But time has run out.

They must depart.

Just a few minutes too late.

Alone and without the protection of its parents,

this hatchling's chances are slim.

HATCHLING CALLS

CALLING CONTINUES

Survival here, as in all deserts,

is on a knife edge.

So desert dwellers have had to evolve in remarkable ways.

Some have even given rise to legends of dragons and unicorns.

And even the dunes have their own magical quality.

Indeed some have their own voice.

Here in Arabia, this extraordinary sound

is created by billions of moving sand grains

vibrating against one another.

The eerie song they produce can be heard for miles

across the world's biggest sand desert.

Winds have also built sand into surreal shapes.

Deserts around the world can appear so alien,

that they seem to belong to another planet altogether.

Few more so than here in Australia.

Yet one little creature chooses this desert

to prepare for a most important event in its life.

A male spotted bowerbird.

For the last two months,

he has been busy in anticipation of brief rains...

That is when females will look for a mate.

So he's built a bower, a sort of theatre,

a stage on which he will dance with a female, if she is willing.

He decorates the entrance with piles of empty snail shells and bones.

How could any female resist?

The rains are due any day,

so it's his last chance for improvements.

You can never have too many shells.

But in his absence...

...a rival male drops by, to size up the competition...

...and cause trouble.

Wreck your neighbour's bower

and your own might look better.

And perhaps one of the best bits

would look good in his bower.

The owner is back.

And something isn't right.

Repairs are needed.

Still no sign of rain or females.

Undeterred, he continues his preparations.

Time to rehearse his courtship display.

But sadly he may only ever dance alone.

For the last three years, the rains have failed.

Without them,

the females won't mate.

They need the rains to provide food for their family.

Changes in the climate are affecting these birds,

just as they are affecting us.

A quarter of the world's people live in arid lands.

So we, too, have to deal with climate change.

Less rainfall and extended droughts allow deserts to grow.

And as they do, so does the likelihood

of one of nature's most intimidating events.

A dust storm.

A wall of dust up to a mile high,

travelling at almost 70mph.

Today these destructive storms are some of the most powerful ever seen.

Unstoppable, they can travel thousands of miles...

...overwhelming towns and cities across the world...

...in an instant.

It takes millennia for life to adapt to the extremes of deserts.

These baboons manage to survive

in one of the driest environments on Earth.

The Erongo region in Namibia.

Not a single drop of rain has fallen here for eight months.

Life here for these baboons is as hard as it gets.

And it's especially difficult

for this young female.

She has just given birth to her first baby.

She's desperate for water.

Without it, she can't produce milk.

The tiny of amount of moisture in her food

is simply not enough for both of them.

The troop must constantly search for water.

And they won't wait for her.

At last, one of the troop's scouts finds a tiny trickle on a rock face.

Relief!

But not for everyone.

The young mother will have to wait.

Access to the precious water is determined by rank.

She is so low in the pecking order...

...she might fail to get any drink at all.

Because jumping the queue

is severely punished.

It's risky, but she can't wait any longer.

A dangerous move.

But there's no match for a mother's determination.

This will be enough to keep her and her baby alive until rain falls.

Rain brings salvation not just to her and the troop,

but to the thirsty land.

When it does fall, it can transform a desert.

And turn it into one of Earth's most productive landscapes.

Grasslands.

They support the greatest concentrations of large animals

to be found anywhere on the planet.

Here nature is at its most spectacular.

This leopardess, believe it or not,

is ready to hunt at a moment's notice.

She is one of the few special leopards that have

learnt to hide in the tree tops,

and wait for their prey to come to them.

Without making a sound,

she gets into position.

Not this time.

And now her presence is known to all.

But leopards will go to astonishing lengths to succeed.

And some are more daring than others.

This leopard climbs up to a branch nine metres above the ground.

She's higher than the roof of a two-storey house.

Leopards have killed themselves jumping from these heights.

To succeed on these equatorial grasslands,

you must be adaptable and sometimes brave.

The Eurasian Steppe,

the largest grassland on earth.

It tests animals in a different way.

Here, the wind can blow at speeds of nearly 80mph.

And temperatures drop to below minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Yet one bizarre creature has evolved ways to survive in these extremes.

Saiga antelope.

Small but tough animals that lived alongside woolly mammoths.

The male's enormous nose both filters out the dust

and warms up the cold air before it reaches his lungs.

But at this time of year, it also serves a very different purpose.

It impresses the females.

And the bigger it is, the better.

This old male knows what it takes to hold their attention.

But they make him work for it.

And if that isn't effective...

...he has other ways of impressing them.

A bush - very majestic.

But when you are king of the steppe,

there's always someone waiting to claim your crown.

This young buck fancies his chances.

He aims to steal the king's harem.

The challenger charges, ready to do battle.

This could be a fight to the death.

70% of rutting males will die.

The older male eventually begins to gain the upper hand.

And with one final effort,

he drives the young rival away.

The king has kept his crown -

and his harem.

Only the strongest saigas can endure and succeed

in one of the harshest places on Earth.

But close to the equator, where there is constant warmth and water,

there are grasslands close to paradise.

This is the most bio-diverse grassland in the world...

...the Cerrado in Brazil.

Here there are thousands of species of both animals and plants

found nowhere else.

A rich and complex community that is kept in balance

by this ghostly creature.

A maned wolf.

Quiet and shy, it's little known and seldom seen.

Unlike any other wolf in the world,

their diet is mostly vegetarian.

And they particularly like lobeira fruit.

This plant increases the fertility of the land,

and helps to sustain the entire Cerrado.

The maned wolves, odd though it may seem,

are, in effect, the gardeners of these unique plains.

The dense grass in turn provides this female

with a comfortable home...

...and somewhere to hide her three puppies,

just one month old.

She is so rare that she's been fitted with a radio-collar

so that scientists can study her continuously.

And our remotely controlled "den camera" reveals a mother

only comes here for a few hours a day to suckle her pups.

She spends much of her time foraging to provide for her growing family.

Now, alone in the den,

her puppies are suddenly in danger.

Not from other predators...

...but from fire.

Their home is being burnt all around them.

These fires can race through a mile of grassland

in a matter of minutes.

The Cerrado devastated.

Why?

In order to clear land to grow crops.

This particular fire didn't reach their den.

But it's empty.

This time, the family were lucky.

But her species faces an alarmingly uncertain future.

At the current rate of habitat destruction,

these may be some of the last maned wolves to survive in the wild.

In grasslands, the land and the animals

are so closely interconnected, that the loss of one key species

could well trigger the collapse of the entire ecosystem.

That's what happened here in central Africa,

when 95% of the elephant population

were killed for their ivory.

Without these essential gardeners -

life couldn't flourish.

This male is one of the few survivors.

He still bears the scars from his persecuted past.

But the slaughter was stopped just in time.

With an end to poaching,

this male is part of a growing herd that now lives in safety.

Today, it's thought this is one of the largest groups

of African elephants surviving in the wild.

As they recovered their numbers,

their grazing encouraged a healthy growth of new grasses.

And they created space for other animals...

...bringing life back to Zakouma.

This miraculous transformation

shows what can happen

if nature is allowed to restore its own balance.

Abakar is part of the team of local rangers who risked their lives

to protect these elephants.

And the elephants didn't just heal the land.

They did something no-one had anticipated.

As we understand more about the wonders,

the connections and the fragility of these landscapes...

...the consequences of our actions are thrown into sharp focus.

They show we urgently need to do

everything we can to help nature heal itself.

To film maned wolves,

the Planet Earth crew joined pioneering scientists in Brazil.

If you get a direction, Bela, please let me know.

Yeah, she's like three o'clock from the car here.

Like 800 metres, too.

Without their help the wolves are almost impossible to track,

let alone film, in the dense grass of the Cerrado.

It's so hard to find them,

they're sort of solitary animals in a huge grassland

with sort of metre high grass,

which is the same height as the wolf.

And it's like looking for a needle in a haystack currently.

Shall we turn the car around, if she's going to head that way?

Yeah, maybe.

The researchers have radio collared two female wolves.

Both have puppies.

They hope to track one to a den and set up remote cameras inside.

The footage would provide the researchers with crucial information

and help to protect this endangered species.

She's in here somewhere.

Maned wolf, they're so special.

It's very important to understand more of this species.

When we get more knowledge, its getting easier to protect them.

But the signal from one of the females

takes them in a worrying direction.

So it's led us directly into this huge epic scale farmland,

the likes of which, to be honest, I've never seen before.

And it shows you what little is left of their natural habitat.

50% of maned wolf habitat has been lost to farmland.

And the radio collars show they now regularly stray

into this unfamiliar landscape.

Tragically, the researchers discover the body

of one collared mother wolf on farmland.

The cause of her death unknown.

Her puppies won't survive alone for long.

Without delay, the researchers set out to find them.

They rescue five, one-month-old pups,

hidden in the long grass.

To assess their condition,

the pups are taken to an emergency rescue facility.

They will be cared for around the clock,

until they are strong enough to be released back into the wild.

Their mothers death is a huge blow for everyone.

For the crew, the only chance of filming in a den

now lies with one remaining collared female known as Nhorinha.

She's more here to the right.

Is that her there? No.

Yep, I can see her, she's there. She's here.

Yeah, got her, got her, got her.

She's coming towards two o'clock now.

50 metres away from the car.

She's coming behind this tree in the middle here, let's wait.

I've got her, I've got her. OK.

Eventually the team capture the first images of Nhorinha on camera.

To finally see our wolf is amazing.

Using a drone camera, they follow her to her den.

The drone reveals the first glimpse of Nhorinha's puppies.

Oh, my God.

And she's moving them...

...something that's never been witnessed before.

This is very special, my heart stopped there, like...

I can't believe what I'm really seeing here.

We know where the den is now.

The following morning, they return to the den site.

They want to rig their cameras,

but can only approach when they know Nhorinha is not at the den.

Is she nearby?

No, no signal yet.

Nhorinha is out of here, at least 1km.

So it's very good news for us.

Let's try to approach it.

Barbara checks that Nhorinha is away from the den,

so the team can go in without disturbing her.

Very good.

The den isn't immediately obvious,

but the grass here is flattened,

so they place their cameras and hope for the best.

We're about 80m from the den.

This is as close as we can be safely.

This is the moment of truth, we're turning them on.

And we're live,

and the camera hasn't moved.

Luke keeps watch over the cameras,

while the team continue to monitor Nhorinha's movements.

Before long, they are stopped in their tracks.

Just see this huge plume of smoke in the distance,

you know, directly behind the den where our mother maned wolf

has been with her puppies.

I'm quite anxious. I'm sure the other researchers are as well.

And the fire may well have been started by farmers,

in order to clear land to grow crops

that will be used to feed chicken and cattle around the world.

The heat from the fire when we're working that close

is so intense that I can feel it burning the skin on my arms.

It moves so fast, there's no way you'd escape something like that.

Every single cell in your body just wants to get out of there.

But actually this whole place,

this whole Cerrado, is surrounded by farmland and roads,

so, actually, when you really think about it,

the wildlife has nowhere to run.

After a difficult few weeks for Barbara and the research team...

Hello, how you doing? How was it? It was good.

The crew have some good news for them.

Oh, track, there's one right there.

Right now. Yeah.

Can you see? That's live? Yeah, yeah, that's live.

Oh!

Oh, my God!

I've never see anything so cute in my entire life.

No! Me neither. Me neither, guys.

Look at this! Look, it's looking at the camera.

Unbelievable.

That's the first record in the world,

so intimate inside the den.

Nobody ever saw this.

Such new information of such important species.

You feeling emotional, Barbara?

It's difficult not to be.

I don't have words to describe it.

It's too much for me.

The cameras continue to gather first-of-its-kind footage,

providing insight into the all-important first weeks

of a maned wolf's life.

And, crucially, how much space must be protected

to support future generations.

I really hope that every person in the world could see

from their house, how special, and how beautiful,

amazing these animals are.

I feel quite worried, but not hopeless.

I will fight every day and every year to help them.

I was born in Cerrado, I grew up in Cerrado,

and Cerrado, it's my home, I have to protect it.

Next time...

...the world of freshwater.

The lifeblood of Planet Earth.

And a stage for the most extraordinary animal dramas.

Habitat Explorer brings animals and their habitats to life.

Explore this free interactive and make origami animals!

Go to...

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visit the website or call the numbers on the screen.