Original subtitles

BBC Four Collections -

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.

That is the picture of a very rare bird,

the white-necked picathartes.

It was drawn from some preserved skins

that were sent to the British Museum many years ago

from Sierra Leone in West Africa.

But, to a certain extent, it's guesswork

because when it was drawn, very few people had seen the wild bird itself.

No European had ever seen it on its nest

and it had never been brought alive out of Africa.

It was, in fact, one of the puzzles of the bird world.

With its extraordinary bald yellow head and long legs,

no-one was quite sure as to which bird family it really belonged.

The British Museum wanted to know more about it

and the London Zoo wanted to exhibit one alive.

Jack Lester of the London Zoo was one of the few people

who HAD caught sight of it.

This is the story of another expedition, led by him,

which went to West Africa to look for the bird,

to film it on its nest and to try and bring it back alive.

We landed at Freetown on the coast of Sierra Leone.

Jack had caught his fleeting glimpse of the bird

near a village 100 miles away in the protectorate.

So as soon as we could, we set off in our lorry

along the dusty red-earth roads

which cut through the thick tropical bush,

on our way to the interior.

But distances in Sierra Leone are not only measured in miles,

they're also measured in rivers

and the slow, hand-pulled ferries that cross them.

But to us, the time spent on ferries wasn't wasted.

In addition to picathartes, we were also wanting

to collect snakes and chimpanzees,

antelopes and sunbirds - in fact, we hoped to take back to London

a representative collection of the whole of the animal life

of this part of Africa.

And the ferrymen, being the biggest gossips in the area,

were just the people to tell us

if anyone had caught any animals recently

and to pass on the extraordinary news

to all travelling along the road that a party of Englishmen

were willing to buy animals of all sorts

and were offering rewards to anyone

who could show them the nests of some extraordinary bald-headed bird.

Across the river,

we came to our first really primitive African village,

where life continues in the same way as it's done for hundreds of years.

TRIBAL DRUMMING AND SINGING

An old man sits patiently weaving his cloth in the ancient traditional way.

Women sit in the shade of the huts,

carding and spinning the locally grown cotton, ready for the weaver.

Cassava and rice has to be pounded to flour in wooden pestles.

It seemed to us that most of the work in the village was done by women.

But here, as everywhere else, there's time for beautification.

In this part of the world, partings have to be cut in with a knife,

a much more permanent and convenient arrangement.

Outside the village,

as outside every village, large or small, in West Africa,

there was one tree supporting a great chattering colony of weaver birds.

They're very destructive creatures,

causing a great deal of damage to crops of grain

but, although it would be easy enough to cut down the trees

and destroy the nests, the villagers rarely take any action

against the birds, for they believe that if you drive away

the weaver birds, you will drive away prosperity from the village.

And so the birds are left to strip the leaves from their tree,

tear them into long ribbons and sew and weave them

into their beautiful, intricate nests.

BIRDS CHIRP AND SQUEAK

Our first duty on arriving in the village

was to pay our respects to the chief.

If he gave us his official approval,

we could be sure of the help of the best hunters in the district.

The chief came out of his compound to meet us,

followed in procession by some of his many wives, for he's a Mohammedan.

We'd been told that he'd got over 60,

but he only brought a few dozen with him when he came to see us.

Everyone gathered round to see what he wanted

and we were the objects of a great deal of curiosity,

not entirely unmixed with fear, as far as the children were concerned.

Jack explained that we had come to collect all sorts of animals,

and as we didn't know the African names,

we carried pictures of the creatures we particularly wanted.

This, the emerald starling, the chief recognised,

though he would insist on turning it upside down.

But picathartes, right way up or upside down,

didn't mean anything at all to him.

But did we like snakes, he said?

For if we did, one of his people was a magician who danced with snakes

and who could show us some very extraordinary things.

Certainly, his snakes were extraordinary -

highly venomous black and white cobras,

nine feet long. They were the largest Jack had ever seen.

We immediately thought that they'd had their fangs removed,

so Jack gestured that he wanted to look inside their mouths.

The fangs were there, all right, and quite untouched.

Astonished, we retired, the drums began and the dance started.

RAPID DRUMMING AND CHANTING

And now comes the terrifying climax -

the fully fanged cobra repeatedly bites the dancer's forearm.

We could offer no certain explanation for this extraordinary performance.

Maybe the dancer had inoculated himself with some crude antidote.

Maybe he milked the snakes of most of their venom.

But one thing was certain - he was no worse at the end of the dance

and the knotted scars on his arms

show he'd been bitten many hundreds of times before.

A gaboon viper and just as deadly as the cobras

but, this time, it wasn't the property of a magician.

It was crawling only a few yards away from our hut.

It looks sluggish but it can strike like lightning.

Our boys had found it and, like most of us, they were terrified of it.

But when Jack heard of it, he was delighted and came running,

anxious to catch such a handsome snake

for his reptile house in the zoo.

The chief had obviously told everybody

that we were wanting animals because people started

bringing boxes and cages to us in great numbers.

They brought all sorts of things, from small frogs and lizards,

to forest deer and bush fowl.

In every case, we had to listen to an impassioned speech

about the great value and rarity of the particular animal in question,

as well as an account of the enormous hazards taken in catching it.

Some of the animals we wanted and bought, and some we didn't.

But the contents of this box we wanted very much indeed,

for sticking her fingers through the slats and scratching anyone

who came near was a very young, very frightened baby chimpanzee.

She was so wild and terrified

that at first she refused to eat any of the food we offered her.

But within four days, we had so won her confidence

that she would run to take milk from Jack's lap,

and from then on, Jane, as we christened her,

was the tamest and most affectionate animal in the collection.

She spent most of her time climbing about in the trees

nearest to whichever hut we happened to be staying in.

But we were interested in little animals as well as big ones

and one of the commonest insects in Africa is the termite.

There are, in fact,

over 400 different kinds of termite to be found

but we were looking for one of the varieties

which has the extraordinary habit of

planting and cultivating inside their nests gardens of minute mushrooms.

There's more than one sort of individual termite.

The most common are the small workers

but among them are the soldiers, with enormously enlarged heads,

armed with great jaws with which they can give a most painful bite.

Naturally, when the nest is disturbed

the soldiers are very much on the warpath

and so cutting a section of their nest

can become quite a painful business.

And here is a fungus garden being looked after by a worker.

The soil is composed of half-digested vegetable matter,

a sort of special compost.

And the mushroom crop is used for feeding the young termites.

The gardens are distributed near the walls of the nest

and here in the centre is the cell of the queen.

Inside, she's lying in the eternal darkness of the nest,

being waited upon and brought food by her attendant workers.

Many hundred times bigger than any other termite in the nest,

she's nothing but a vast egg-laying factory

and her lifetime, which may be several years, is devoted entirely

to the production of many millions of eggs at an enormous rate.

By exposing her in this way to the heat of the sun,

we cause great consternation among her attendants.

Her life is in danger, for unless she can get back into shade,

she will die. But she's so bloated, that she's almost incapable

of crawling by herself and if she's to get back into safety,

then her attendants will have to move her.

They gather round and feverishly try to push her forward.

Others at the front try and get a grip with their jaws and drag her.

Meanwhile, another section of workers are sealing the broken galleries

with small pellets of specially prepared building material

which they always carry in their stomachs

for such an emergency as this.

Each one comes up to the broken wall, deposits its pellet,

working it tightly in with the main body of the wall,

and then makes room for the next.

So a sticky wall will soon be built over the gaping galleries,

which will harden in the sun,

and the queen will once again be sealed in darkness.

But inquisitive human beings are not the only things

that disturb termite nests.

The pangolin is always doing so,

for the soft termite grubs are one of his favourite foods

and his long sticky tongue is admirably adapted

to scouring the galleries of a nest in search of them.

He's also fond of ants

and spends a great deal of his time climbing trees in search of a nest.

This is what he's after - tree ants.

As food, they're not perhaps everybody's taste,

for they sting hard and painfully,

but the pangolin has an armoured coat of scales

which gives him a certain degree of protection.

And he's found the nest and starts his meal.

But an infuriated nest of ants can make things rather painful,

even for a pangolin,

and the time comes when he has to leave in something of a hurry.

Pursuing our search for small creatures,

we found this little insect comic

playing a game with a fellow on a twig.

Their burlesque of a boxing match, however,

is training for a more serious business, for when they are adult,

they will become one of the most voracious animals

in the insect kingdom - the praying mantis.

Peering behind her folded arms, she's on the lookout for food.

And she finds a grasshopper, nonchalantly stroking its antenna.

Wings, apparently, are not good eating and have to be spat out.

After each meal, she meticulously cleans her wicked spiked forearms

ready for the next victim.

But there are animals larger than the mantis

which are not intimidated by her,

and even regard her as a delectable morsel -

the chameleon.

We turned our camera onto this striking-looking wasp,

quite unaware of what would happen in a few brief minutes.

The nest he's settled on isn't his.

It was made by the female wasp just emerging from the top cell.

But he's not concerned with Mother and lets her fly away.

He's waiting for one of her offspring,

a young virgin female in the lower cell,

just about to hatch and emerge to the world.

Other males have the same idea and have to be driven off.

Patiently, he waits for the last stages of hatching

to take place inside the cell, communicating now and then

with the young female by stroking feelers.

Once more, another male arrives.

Things are now getting tense.

The young female continues her struggles

and hauls herself to the mouth of the cell.

And now she's free, he seizes her and flies off.

Inside the top cell is a caterpillar,

which Mother has paralysed with her sting.

Now she comes back to lay an egg in it

so her young grub will have fresh food from the earliest moment.

But that egg was never destined to grow up into a wasp,

for a platoon of ants appear and burgle a cell

and drag out the caterpillar and, with it, the wasp egg.

Coordination doesn't seem so good here.

One party pull one way and one party pull another.

Finally, one party wins and, slowly and deliberately,

they carry it away, no doubt to feed on it at leisure

and without disturbance from an infuriated wasp.

These, too, are ants but they're the most frightening of their kind.

This innocent-looking line

is a column of the notorious driver ants.

Eternally on the move, marching through the bush

in columns miles long, they will devour every living thing

that remains in their path. Nothing can escape them.

Small insects and reptiles which can't move fast enough

to get out of their way are overwhelmed.

Even large animals like goats,

if they're tethered and unable to escape, will soon become

covered in a living blanket of biting ants, and are killed.

They dislike the sun and, if they cross an open space,

they build walls to give themselves shade and then roof them over.

Where the roof has not yet been made,

the soldiers themselves form a living arch to shade the column.

Because they are always on the move,

on the lookout for fresh hunting grounds,

they have to carry their great white grubs with them wherever they go.

And these are the most dangerous members of the column - the soldiers.

Totally blind, they grope around with their antennae

searching for anything that might blunder into their way.

Underneath this struggling pile are the remains of a grasshopper,

still alive, which the soldiers are cutting apart

in order to take it away piece by piece.

This millipede has not yet come within the path of the drive.

As I saw it, I thought that it too must be eaten alive

and I could imagine the drivers clinging onto its legs

and overwhelming it.

But, to our astonishment, instead of avoiding the ants,

it walked straight into their path.

And not only into their path but right along it.

It was only as it emerged unharmed on the other side, that we remembered

that it discharges formic acid, which obviously gives it some protection.

But here comes something very much more formidable -

a nine-inch imperial scorpion,

whose sting would put a man to bed for several days in great pain.

But the ants quickly find him, swarming all over him

and sinking their jaws into the soft flesh beneath his armour plating.

He flails his great sting,

frantically battling against his minute opponents,

but he can't find them.

Within ten minutes, he's dead.

No-one in the first village we stayed in

had recognised our picture of picathartes

and we decided to move on through the bush towards the interior.

There are few large animals in the West African forest

and the only one we have any chance of seeing is a monkey.

There's one, sitting hidden in the tree top, quietly feeding.

But as soon as it sees us, it's away.

It's a black-and-white colobus, quite a rare one,

and only found in the high forest where it feeds on leaves.

Because of this specialised diet,

they're difficult to keep in captivity,

so we didn't try and catch any

but were more than content simply to watch their miraculous gymnastics.

Our next village lay on the other side of a river,

which we had to cross by a hammock bridge,

made from lianas cut in the bush.

It's just about as rickety as it looks

and our guides mentioned when we were halfway across

that it only lasts a year

and is swept away each rainy season by the swollen river.

This one, they said, was due to go at any moment.

At last we reached the next village,

where the chief gave us a full ceremonial reception.

HORN BLOWS IN LOUD BLASTS

First to perform for us were the newly initiated girls

who had just passed through the rites of the bundu secret society.

And here, joining the girls in the dance, is the bundu devil,

who presides over the initiation ceremonies in the sacred bush.

A change of music.

These drums, we knew, were used in the dance of the Mjai society,

which we'd been told we were not allowed to see.

As they sounded, the Mjai devil itself came into the dance,

a very fearsome, magical devil

that has the gift of foretelling the future.

This old woman, smeared all over with clay,

is the chief priestess of the Mjai society.

I later rashly asked her

if it would be possible to examine the devil mask.

She laughed nastily and replied through an interpreter

that the only person allowed to touch it

was a member of the society.

Of course, if the white man

wished to pass through the initiation ceremonies,

then he too might be allowed to handle the mask.

We contented ourselves with just photographing it.

But we were able to produce some magic of our own,

for while the dance had been going on,

I had been recording the music on my tape recorder.

This, of course, was the object of a great deal of curiosity

and I always played the recording back

and let the singers listen to themselves on a little earphone.

Blank astonishment was always followed by huge grins of delight.

SPEECH INAUDIBLE UNDER PLAYBACK OF RECORDING

Meanwhile, Jack was talking to other members of the village

and showing our picture of picathartes to everybody he met.

Puhindi was the local agricultural instructor living in the village

and to our delight, he at last recognised the picture.

The birds, he said, were not common but he had seen them

in the thicker parts of the bush, up in the hills

at the back of the village.

The birds build nests of mud, he told us,

on the sides of enormous boulders, lying submerged in the forest

but it wouldn't be easy to get anyone to take us up there, he said,

because there's a tribal superstition that these birds

are the servants of a fearsome one-legged, one-eyed devil,

much taller than a man,

which lives inside the boulders on which the birds nest.

Anyone who interferes with the devil's servants

will obviously get into trouble from the devil himself,

with hideous but unspecified results.

And people were very unwilling to go there.

But Puhindi said that if he took his gun

and told the boys he would shoot any devil that appeared

and if we offered good payment,

then we might get someone to take the risk

and carry our equipment up to the nesting site.

So it was that the next day, under Puhindi's guidance,

we started off on the journey up the hill,

on our way at last to the nests of picathartes.

After an hour of cutting a path through the bush up the hill,

we at last began to get good views of the surrounding countryside.

And then we came across a great boulder.

Picathartes might well be nesting here.

We looked at its sides carefully and hopefully

but there were no signs of a nest.

Beneath this boulder face are mushroom-shaped termite nests

but there were no picathartes' nests on the sides.

We were beginning to get a bit worried

and then, as we came round one corner, there the nests were.

The first one was empty but complete -

maybe the site was deserted.

And then, in great excitement, we saw another one.

I lifted Jack up and he felt inside and came down, smiling in triumph.

The site was inhabited because inside were two warm eggs.

We must have arrived at the beginning of the nesting season.

We left the site almost immediately.

What we wanted was a young chick,

which would settle down in captivity more easily than an adult.

So rather than disturb the birds now by trying to film them,

we decided that it would be better to leave them alone

and return in a fortnight's time when the eggs would have hatched.

Meanwhile, we had promised the zoo aquarium that we would collect

some little fish they particularly wanted,

which were to be found in the mangrove swamps down in the coast.

Here, life is carried on in a very different way.

Villages are dotted by the side of creeks and lagoons

and each one is surrounded by groves of coconut palms.

The only way of getting about is in dugout canoes.

They are hollowed out from tree trunks

and are not always as well-balanced as one might hope for.

And the time came when we had to try our hand at navigating one.

Once we had mastered the technique, we were able to glide

silently and unobtrusively through the mangroves.

Above us soared a fish eagle.

But the fish we were looking for should be down somewhere

amongst the roots of the mangroves.

And here they are.

Mudskippers, the famous fish which hauls itself out of water

and spends most of its time on dry land.

They have two pairs of fins which they use in climbing.

The outside pair acts as legs and there's a pair underneath,

which are partly joined together into a suction cup to serve as a brake.

At night, the mangrove swamps are quite different places,

eerie and exciting, full of the noise of frogs and insects.

Crocodiles are common here and night is the best time to catch them.

You cast about with the beam of your torch

until suddenly you see in its light a pair of glowing red coals.

Those are the eyes of a crocodile reflecting the light back to you.

You can judge his size from the distance his eyes are apart.

If he's too big, then you leave him alone

but if you've found a little one, your job now is to keep

the beam of your torch shining steadily in his eyes

and wade slowly towards him, making as little noise as possible.

He lies there completely dazzled and lets you get very close.

Then all you have to do is to grab him by the scruff of the neck

and you've got him.

That, at any rate, is Jack's method.

Meanwhile, at our base,

Alf Woods, who came out from the zoo's bird house,

was looking after our rapidly growing collection.

This small section of it contains our sunbirds.

They live by sipping nectar from flowers but, in captivity,

they will feed and flourish on a mixture of honey and water,

which they sip from these little jars.

When a new one is first brought in,

it has to be shown that the jars contain something worth eating,

so Alf always held it in his hand,

dips its beak into the honey and he drinks,

his threadlike tongue flashing in and out at an enormous rate.

Young birds always had to be fed by hand.

This young owl demanded food every three hours.

Jane, the chimpanzee,

was always curious as to see what was going on

and insisted on inspecting each new addition to the collection

as it arrived. Like this little antelope.

But this young mongoose didn't appreciate her attentions at all

and gave her a sharp nip.

In between feeding the collection,

Jack would always be poking about in the bush near our hut,

turning over stones and logs

in search of insects for food and perhaps snakes.

And sometimes he was lucky.

This is a royal python,

which conveniently rolls itself up into a ball when it's disturbed.

Chimpanzees are said to have an instinctive horror of snakes

and this python, being non-poisonous, Jack let Jane see it.

Her reactions were not at all what we had expected.

We had a full complement of baby animals.

When this young spotted squirrel first arrived,

he was so hungry that he would tackle any edible thing put near him -

even such an enormous banana as this.

He was so young that, for the first few days,

I kept him in one of my pockets so that he was warm.

In this tin, we had two little African bush rats

which were even younger.

They were so small that they couldn't tackle solid foods,

so we fed them with milk from a pen filler.

A great difficulty with all these youngsters

is to keep them warm and, at first,

we always put little bottles of hot water inside their tins overnight.

This young ground squirrel, though very weak when he first arrived,

did well under this treatment and ate vast quantities of palm nuts.

In the northern part of the country where we were staying,

the villagers played a quite different type of music

from that which we'd found near the picathartes village.

Here, they used primitive xylophones, balangis.

But now it was time to return to the picathartes' nests

and, once more, we set off on the long climb up the hill.

Back at the site, our first task was to build a hide.

That wasn't difficult.

A huge rope-like liana hung down from one of the trees

and there were plenty of branches

with which to build a screen round it.

We took our places behind the hide and, from it, we had a clear view

of the boulder and the two nests stuck on it.

One at the bottom on the right,

which was empty on our first visit and now had two eggs,

and one at the top on the left which contained two chicks.

And now came the most tense moment of the expedition,

the moment for which we'd all waited so long.

Would we see the adult birds?

Or were they so frightened by our presence

that they wouldn't appear at all?

And then, suddenly, we saw one,

a few yards away in the twilight of the bush, preening itself.

This was enormous excitement.

Breathlessly, we waited to see if it would actually fly to its nest

and resume incubating.

Down it came onto the termite mushroom

at the bottom of the boulder

but it was obviously worried and disturbed.

Then up it fluttered onto the nest and, as it did so,

the other parent flew across and drove the first one away.

This was a great thrill for us, for as this happened,

we became the first Europeans ever to see

the white-necked picathartes on its nest.

But they still hadn't settled down.

We waited anxiously a few minutes longer

and then back the bird came to the termite mushroom.

Then up onto the nest again and, this time, it fed its young

and, as it perched on the rim of its nest,

we heard for the first time its extraordinary grunting call.

LOW RASP AMID THE CACOPHONY OF THE FOREST

Meanwhile, the parent of the other nest returned

and was settled brooding happily.

The first one settled too

and there in front of us were these two very rare mysterious birds

settled on their nest, quite oblivious of our presence.

We spent many days in the hide watching these birds

that we'd travelled so many thousands of miles to see and, eventually,

we secured a young fledgling.

But it caused us many anxious hours,

for at first it wouldn't feed properly.

We tried every type of food we could think of

but our precious little chick got weaker and weaker until,

finally, one day, in desperation, Jack offered it a little frog.

To our delight and relief,

it accepted it greedily and asked for more,

and we started on a frantic search for frogs

which was to last for over a week,

for young picathartes demanded at least 60 a day.

Fortunately, however,

Alf Woods weaned it from this rather inconvenient diet

onto a mixture of chopped meat and mealworms

and on that food it grew and flourished

and made the long voyage back to England.

Now it's settled and thriving in the London Zoo,

the first white-necked picathartes

ever to be brought out of Africa alive.