Original subtitles

Specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

For this Collection, Sir David Attenborough has chosen documentaries

from the start of his career.

More programmes on this theme and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

Madagascar lies in the Indian Ocean here,

and even on a globe this size it looks a tiny island,

perhaps because it's dwarfed by this vast continent of Africa.

But, in fact, it's an immense island,

over 1,000 miles long, bigger than the British Isles,

and it's a very varied island.

Up in the north there's a landscape of extinct volcanoes,

in the middle here there's a great plateau of high mountains,

along the east coast a thick jungle, as thick as any you'd find in Africa,

and down in the south there's a parched desert,

and, to the naturalist,

it's one of the most fascinating places in the world.

You might think that because it's so close to Africa

there'd be elephants and giraffe and hippopotamus

and rhinoceros and antelope and so on,

but, in fact, there are none of these African creatures there.

Instead, Madagascar has a fauna entirely of its own,

creatures that live nowhere else in the world,

and creatures with strange names like aye-aye and sifaka

and indris and fossa.

Indeed, before Europeans ever went to the island,

it had a reputation for being the home

of really strange fabulous beasts,

and Marco Polo, 700 years ago,

believed that it was the home of a fabulous bird, the rukh -

the rukh which carried off Sinbad the sailor

and which was reputed to be able to carry off elephants in its talons

as this one is doing,

and the people really believed in the existence of these birds,

and what were supposed to be their feathers

were sent to the courts of European kings as curiosities.

Unfortunately, those feathers turned out to be nothing more

than dried, withered palm fronds.

But Marco Polo had better reason

for believing in the existence of the rukh

than just palm fronds,

and a very good reason for thinking that it lived in Madagascar,

because he heard stories

that in Madagascar were found gigantic eggs over two feet long.

What else could have laid them but the rukh?

Well, just over 100 years ago,

just such an egg was discovered and sent to Europe.

Scientists looked at it

and gave a name to the bird that must have laid it of "aepyornis".

Well, those eggs came from the southern, desert part of Madagascar,

and one of the first things we did was to go down to the south

to see if we couldn't find a rukh's egg for ourselves.

Here, even during the wet season,

when the rest of Madagascar is drenched with rain,

this country is parched and dry.

Wells are few,

and those that exist are the focal points of all life, animal and human.

It was by this one that we made our camp.

People come here every day from miles around

to draw water for themselves and for their flocks.

One of the first travellers to see the eggs of aepyornis

reported that he found it being used by a chief as a water bottle -

a water bottle that held a good two gallons.

But here, though there were oil drums, gourds,

old wine bottles and tin buckets, there were no gigantic eggs.

But then I hardly imagined our search

was going to be as easy as that.

Because there are no streams or lakes,

people come to the well to do everything

that involves the use of water.

CHATTER

The herds were kept at a distance from the well

and were only allowed to come down

when water had been hauled up from some 30 feet below ground

and poured into drinking tanks.

The goats are particularly valuable, not only for their

milk and their flesh

but also for their wool, for it's very fine and silky.

The Arabic name for it is "mukhayyar",

meaning "select, of fine quality",

from which we get our word "mohair".

GOATS BLEAT

The cattle, however, are the main symbol of a person's wealth,

and nearly every family has its own herd,

but the pasturage is meagre and many of them were pathetically thin.

It was in this scorching wilderness

that egg fragments were supposed to be found,

so I set out to look for them.

I took a hammer with me,

because it seemed the right sort of thing to take on a fossil hunt,

in case I needed to tap any rocks or something.

But I soon found that there were hardly any stones at all,

nothing but dry sand,

extremely hot and blindingly white in the ferocious sunshine.

Inhospitable though it seemed to be,

there was nonetheless evidence of animal life -

here, the trail of a small snake.

And here a larger and more impressive track

of a four-legged animal.

It seemed fairly recent, so I followed it out of curiosity.

And here is its creator, a tortoise, most beautifully patterned,

with bright yellow stripes on a deep brown background.

The tribe that lives here venerates this creature.

They believe it to be holy.

If a man meets one as he sets out from his village in the morning,

he makes a little prayer to it,

places a small piece of wood on top of its shell,

and goes on his way, delighted by the encounter,

for it's regarded as a very happy omen,

which will make it almost certain

that his day will be a successful one.

I hope the omen might apply to my day too.

Unfortunately, not all the tribes of southern Madagascar

regard this animal as taboo, and in past years,

great numbers of these handsome creatures have been killed for food

or traded up the coast of the neighbouring island of Reunion,

where they are very highly valued as tasty meat.

As a result, this tortoise is now sadly becoming somewhat rare.

I was walking down the middle of the dried-up bed

of a huge river nearly a mile wide.

Although it still carries a stream of water during the rainy season,

which drains down from the wetter central plateau of the island,

it's a clear indication of the drastic changes in climate

that have overtaken this part of Madagascar.

It's likely that only a few hundred years ago,

when the gigantic birds were alive,

this was not a desert

but a great area of swamp in which the aepyornis paddled.

Was this an egg fragment?

No, merely a pebble.

And I thought at first that these, too, were merely pebbles.

But then I realised that here I had found what I was looking for.

These were pieces of eggshell nearly a quarter of an inch thick.

But they were tiny.

Perhaps there were larger pieces still buried in the sand.

And there were.

I had little hope of finding a whole egg,

for, of course, most eggs are broken by the chick as it hatches,

and only the rare addle ones remain whole,

and even most of those must have been broken

during the course of time.

I just wanted to find a really large piece

or perhaps enough of the smaller fragments to fit together

to give me some idea of the actual size of the original eggs.

This lad, who had appeared so silently

while I was engrossed in searching,

was obviously mystified as to why I should be grovelling beneath a bush

out in the desert, miles from anywhere.

I did my best to explain to him in French

that I was looking for gigantic eggs.

"Not... Not little bits," I said. "Pas petits."

"No good. Er...really big.

"Grandes. Grandes. Grandes pieces."

And my French, I knew, was not very good,

but I don't think he'd have understood even a genuine Frenchman.

He obviously spoke only his local language.

When he left, I was quite sure he hadn't the faintest idea

of what I'd been trying to explain

and was probably going back to his village

to report that he had met a harmless lunatic.

Although I searched for the rest of the day,

I found no more pieces of egg.

But when I came back in the late afternoon

with the few precious fragments that I had found under the bush,

I was feeling very pleased with myself.

I reckoned that I'd been pretty sharp-eyed to discover them.

The tortoise had been a good omen after all.

I spent that evening and the next morning

trying to fit the pieces together

in the vain hope that they might all belong to one egg.

But nothing seemed to fit onto anything else.

Then I had a visitor.

She didn't need to explain what she had come for.

Her actions spoke for themselves.

Hundreds and hundreds of the egg fragments that I had thought so rare.

I began to explain once again that I didn't want any more small pieces,

but I was feeling both astonished and abashed.

Astonished, because the boy I'd met the previous day

must have understood exactly what I was looking for.

And abashed

because I clearly hadn't been as sharp-eyed

as I'd prided myself on being.

In fact, I must have been blind

if this woman could have gathered this great basketful in a few hours.

However, I gave her a reward for having gone to so much trouble,

even though the pieces that she had gathered

were smaller than the ones I had found myself.

I might have been blind, but at least two of my bits fitted together,

and then I had a second visitor.

Obviously the little boy's news had, by now, spread far and wide...

..and she had just as many egg fragments.

I paid her a reward, too.

In a way, it now seemed fortunate

that I hadn't been able to talk freely with the boy,

for at that time I thought that these egg fragments

were extremely rare, and if I'd been able to explain myself,

I might well have offered a price for each piece.

If I'd done that, by the end of the morning I would have been bankrupt!

It was astonishing evidence

of how abundant the aepyornis must have been,

for all these pieces had been collected from within a few miles

of our camp.

And then, in the evening, my first friend reappeared

with what seemed to be a very modest contribution

to the several thousand pieces in the tip in front of the tent.

I prepared to pay him the same reward of a few francs

that I'd given to the women.

But then I had a shock.

These were easily the largest fragments I had seen so far.

This really WAS a find.

Even at first sight, it looked as though there was a possibility

of some of them fitting together

to give a rough idea of the dimensions of the original egg.

I thanked him profusely and sincerely and gave him a very generous reward.

But he left without any trace of emotion whatsoever

on his impassive young face.

Could THIS be the remains of one egg

that he had found in one particular spot,

or were they perhaps pieces that he had gathered from all over the place?

There was only one way to find out - to try and piece them together.

And the best method of starting

seemed to be the same as you use when you begin on a jigsaw puzzle -

to lay out everything face up on the ground.

Now, would they fit together?

These two certainly did.

To fasten them temporarily, I used adhesive tape.

With a jigsaw,

you at least know that all the pieces belong to the same puzzle,

and that they do go together somehow to form a complete picture.

But this was different, much more exciting and tantalising,

for I had no idea how much of the egg was present

or whether all these pieces belonged to one egg or to several.

With mounting excitement,

I managed to get piece after piece to fit together.

The egg began to appear even bigger than I had imagined.

At the end of an hour, I had two halves.

And to my joy, they fitted together perfectly.

There were only three or four small holes

and I still had several pieces left over.

There was a place for even such a tiny fragment as this.

The egg was well-nigh perfect.

As I held it, I had little difficulty

in imagining the country as it must have been

only a few hundred years ago

when this riverbed was filled with a brown, eddying flood,

and when great numbers of gigantic birds over ten feet tall

strode majestically through the swamps.

And this is what scientists today believe

the rukh, the aepyornis, really looked like -

not a flying bird, as Marco Polo imagined,

but a sort of ostrich-like creature.

It wasn't the tallest bird that's ever existed -

the extinct moas from New Zealand were a little taller -

but it's almost certainly the heaviest bird that's ever existed,

weighing something like eight or nine hundredweights.

It seems to have been alive as recently as 300 years ago,

for a Frenchman called Flacourt, who went to Madagascar in about 1650,

heard stories from the local people of this creature.

He even had a name for it.

They called it "Vouron patra",

which perhaps is an indication that there really was such a bird.

But they said it was very rare

and lived only in the remotest parts of the island.

Today, it's certainly extinct.

But never mind. I've got one of its eggs,

the equivalent of about 140 chicken's eggs.

But although the aepyornis is extinct,

there are many creatures very much live and kicking in Madagascar

which are almost extraordinary.

Madagascar, above all things, is the land of the lemurs.

Indeed, true lemurs live only in the island.

But there are relatives of the lemurs occurring elsewhere

which are more familiar to us.

The... On Africa, there is the bushbaby,

and this creature, the potto.

When you look at him...

Look over here.

I don't think you think that he's a monkey,

although, in fact, he has a number of...

of features which are quite monkey-like.

He has these two eyes facing forward, which is the hallmark of a monkey,

and he has fingers on his hands and toes on his feet, which can grasp,

which is also a monkey-like feature.

And indeed, scientists believe that the lemurs

and their close relatives, like the potto and the bushbaby,

are the ancestors of the monkey group.

There is one lemur in Madagascar

which looks, in fact, quite like this potto.

It's called the reed lemur.

But there are over 20 different sorts of lemurs in Madagascar,

varying in size from a mouse to a young chimpanzee.

And close by the place where we found the aepyornis egg

lived one of the most beautiful of them all,

a pure-white creature called a sifaka.

It lived in a strange, weird forest

close by the place where we'd found the egg,

and we then went to have a look for it.

The plants in this weird forest rose over 30 feet high.

Though they look like cactus, they're not, in fact, close relatives,

but belong to a peculiar group called "Didierea",

which occurs nowhere else in the world but in this part of Madagascar.

The hard, fleshy stem is barbed with savage spines,

and, here and there, set with lines of small, bright green leaves

the size of sixpences.

The tops of the stems are crowned with the flowers -

dry brown tassels rustling in the breeze.

Inhospitable though this bush seemed to be,

it was here that we were told the sifakas lived,

supposedly clinging to the tops of the waving didierea,

though it seemed to me that the thorns

must make their life extremely uncomfortable.

Certainly, it was very unpleasant merely to walk through it,

for the thorns of the bushes and the didierea

ripped our clothes and scratched our flesh.

There, a patch of pure-white fur - a sifaka.

But it was gone almost before

I was able to get my glasses focused on it.

One of the few things known about this rare animal's habits

is that it's capable of making huge jumps of up to 40 feet.

But so few scientists have ever observed it alive

that there's some dispute as to how it achieves these gigantic leaps.

Some authorities claim that it glides

by means of a sort of parachute of skin

between its forelegs and its chest.

But to begin with, it hopped easily

across the short distances between the branches.

Finally, it came to the last plant in this particular clump.

To retreat any further,

it would have to leap across a gap of at least 20 feet

onto the next bush.

Now we should see whether it had to glide

to achieve its magnificent leap.

That, surely, was proof that there was no gliding.

It was done by the sheer muscle power of its powerful hind legs.

He was not a big animal, only about two feet long, excluding his tail,

and pure white except for the naked black skin round his muzzle

and the cap of black silky fur on top of his head.

The legs which enable the sifakas to jump so beautifully are so long

that it's almost impossible for them to walk on all fours.

Because of this, they hardly ever descend from the trees,

and when they do come down to the ground they have to stand upright.

They can't walk or run in this position

and instead jump with their feet together

like people competing in a sack race.

We followed him through the didierea for an hour or so

until he came to some tamarind and locust trees

that grew in a clump on the banks of a tiny dried-up stream.

There, he was joined by two others.

The group was assembling for their afternoon meal.

Most lemurs can produce a wide variety of noise -

yaps, purrs, barks and howls,

but the sifaka is exceptional.

The only call it can produce is a very faint noise,

something like a...a polite sneeze,

and it only makes that when it's alarmed.

By four o'clock, there were five of them in the trees.

Now they began to feed.

Their food is almost exclusively vegetable,

and they're very particular about

what sort of leaves and flowers they eat.

As a result, it's almost impossible

to keep them satisfactorily in captivity.

Indeed, they've hardly ever been seen alive outside Madagascar,

and we, therefore, made no attempt whatever to try and catch them.

We were more than happy simply to sit and watch them

as they feasted high above us.

By now it was late in the afternoon and the sun was low in the sky.

Its setting rays gave a warm yellow tint

to their beautiful snowy white fur.

The sifakas adore the sun.

Indeed, the local people believe that they worship it,

for in the early dawn they will climb to the tops of the didierea

and sit facing east, holding their arms raised as though in prayer,

so as to catch on their chests the first warming beams

of the rising sun.

There are also other equally charming beliefs about them.

The people told us that they're very wise animals

who understand the principles of medicine,

for when they are wounded they will chew up certain special leaves

and plaster them over their injuries,

with the result that they're cured within a few days.

A charming story, but one, as yet, uncorroborated.

After some time they had eaten their fill,

and, one by one, they descended the trees

and prepared to leave for the didierea forest

where they will spend the night.

I thought that this would be the last we should see of them

for that day, but I was in for a surprise,

for there then followed one of the most delightful hours

that I've ever spent watching a wild animal.

While three of these group leapt away rapidly,

these two, a young male and a young female,

lingered in a tree nearby and began to play.

This was certainly not a fight, for neither was biting the other.

It was simply a friendly wrestling match,

interrupted every now and then when they stopped

to look down and see precisely what we were doing 30 feet below them.

Of course, lots of animals play, but usually only when they're young.

Most of their games are ones designed to exercise their limbs

and to practise the skills they will need later on in life.

Kittens play at pouncing on their prey and at fighting.

Puppies shake a sock in the same way

as they'll shake a rat later on in life.

This sort of play continues as long as their mother's looking after them.

But usually it stops when the young animals become independent

and are involved in the grim and all-absorbing business

of searching for food and escaping from predators.

There's little time for recreation in the savage world of nature.

Adult animals in captivity also play,

probably as an outlet for their energies

which are not fully occupied.

But cases of fully grown animals playing in the wild,

not for exercise nor for training, but for sheer pleasure,

are rare.

But I had no doubt whatever that this is just

what these beautiful, gentle creatures were doing,

and they seemed to be enjoying every minute of it.

And now watch the female as she leaves.

She kicks out her tail behind her

just like a fashionable Victorian lady

kicking her train as she leaves the dance floor.

The one thing we never really did discover about the sifakas

was how on earth they manage to cling to these spiny didierea

without hurting their hands or feet.

But, apart from the lemurs, there are many other creatures in Madagascar

which exist nowhere else in the world but in that strange island,

including such odd things as this,

which looks like a hedgehog and isn't -

a creature called a tenrec.

But I'll tell you all about that next time.