Wild Islands Deadly on a Mission: Pole to Pole

My name's Steve Backshall!

Whoa! Ha-ha!

'And I'm on a mission, searching for...'

deadly places... deadly adventurers...

and deadly animals.

Oi-oi-oi...

And you're coming with me, every step of the way!

Argh!

An expedition that began high in the Arctic Circle has journeyed down

through North and South America and now lunges away from the continents.

To explore the wild islands that lead south

towards our final destination of Antarctica.

'I'll challenge a gang of local villains...'

Walkies!

'..head beneath the turbulent seas...'

I really don't want to get stuck down here!

'..and we take a journey from hell...

'..to a mystical land.

'To discover prehistoric predators...'

It really is like some kind of flapping dinosaur.

'..and meet a winged giant.'

Almost 10,000 miles from our starting point,

we've arrived in the Falkland Islands.

This isolated, untamed archipelago

is surrounded by some of the roughest seas in the world.

Hostile to humans, but heaven for hardy hunters.

Only the toughest and the cleverest can survive here.

We've come to find and film them.

And we begin with a lovable yet resilient predator.

Quite often with wildlife filming, you can spend days

and days of searching, just trying to find your target animal.

But here I don't think that's going to be a problem.

Amazing!

Oh!

Almost as intense as the sight of

over 1,000 birds crammed in tight together is the smell.

The wind's blowing in our direction at the moment.

And it is totally, totally overpowering.

But that is a breeding colony of perhaps 1,000 rockhopper penguins.

Pretty impressive!

Rockhoppers are birds of the open ocean,

but at this time of year, they gather on land

in huge colonies to breed and raise their young.

And this gives me the perfect opportunity to see that

there's more to these little penguins than meets the eye.

Rockhoppers are one of the most unusual-looking of all penguins.

They've got bright red eyes and then those absolutely crazy eyebrows.

Kind of stern-looking, but then with the bizarre crest behind the eyes.

Small and dumpy - one of the smallest of all penguin species -

but that doesn't mean they're not tough.

They have to be, as these breeding colonies

come under constant attack from predators

waiting to snatch a chick.

But rockhopper parents risk life and limb to raise their young,

and will protect their investment with determination.

Nesting in a colony means strength in numbers.

Despite their size, they're one pugnacious penguin.

But every part of the penguins' life has elements of the extreme.

To show you this, you need to live a day in the life of a rockhopper.

'First off, how they get their name.'

The rockhopper name is a really good one.

Most penguins, as they walk, just waddle from side to side

in a really comical fashion.

But rockhoppers, when they're ascending up to their nesting sites,

bound, and they will leap and climb up even vertical cliff faces.

If they slip, they'll just bounce.

You'll see them going donk, donk, donk all the way down the cliff.

Like a rugby ball that's had half the air let out of it.

Their insulating layer of fat

and feathers can also be used to protect their bones and bodies.

Parent birds have to make daily fishing trips

to provide for their chicks.

They're master hunters,

diving over 100 metres down

in pursuit of fish and krill.

For such expert fishermen, catching prey is the easy part.

The real challenge is returning to land.

Look at this! There's about 50 penguins all just came ashore

with one wave, and they're now frantically hopping to try to

get up onto dry land before another wave sweeps them back out to sea.

The shore has totally changed in character.

The waves are much, much bigger now.

And you're getting a sense of quite how difficult

it must be for life for these tiny but tough little penguins.

Where the land meets the sea

is where rockhoppers really show how robust they are.

For a taste of their toughness, I'm going to head in and join them.

Well, it's turned into an absolutely miserable day.

But that's not going to bother the penguins. So I guess I've just

got to toughen up and make sure it doesn't bother me either.

While I'm battered by the waves, their streamlined bodies

and flipper-like wings allow the penguins to drive through

the choppy surf effortlessly.

They can spend days out at sea on foraging trips.

And with that thick layer of blubber to keep them insulated,

even in these icy cold waters, they're in their element.

Which is more than can be said for me.

Well, that was thoroughly unpleasant.

After having spent just a couple of hours in there,

the penguins' world, I can't feel my face

and I'm completely frozen solid.

It is utterly miserable.

But these little penguins manage to make it their home.

And for that reason, rockhoppers are deadly.

Can I have a cup of tea now, please?

THEY LAUGH

'Any animal that stalks these seas needs to be hardy.

'But the Southern Seas are so stocked with fish,

'squid and krill that, if you can survive, you can thrive.'

Today we're going out on a search for one of the most exciting animals

that hunts these Southern Seas.

An animal with a skull that looks like this.

It's a creature of vast size, weight and strength.

'To find one, I need to drop in to its turbulent underwater world.'

It's very tricky, trying to hold my position in amongst the swell.

I'm getting tossed around like a rag doll.

'But then, appearing from the murky swell, southern sea lions.'

Extraordinary!

They're so big!

Underwater, these sea lions are effortless, totally at ease.

This group of curious females dance around our heads

with high-speed twists and turns.

These sea lions...

may be graceful and elegant, but they're also fearsome predators.

Using a lethal combination of agility, senses and speed,

these sea lions are able to catch even the fastest of fish.

Capable of speeds of over 20mph,

and able to dive to depths well over 200 metres,

they can travel vast distances in search of fine feeding grounds.

Their hunting trips can last for 30 hours.

But, like all seals and sea lions,

it's their senses that give them the edge.

These animals have the classic sea lion shape.

A long, thin, torpedo-shaped body

and very big, dark eyes that suck in light.

For hunting in gloomy waters,

but perhaps the most important part of their senses is the whiskers.

Using these ultrasensitive whiskers,

they're able to detect the slightest vibration

from the wake passing prey leave behind.

The sea lions are utterly at home in these thick kelp forests.

But the weather's closing in, and for me, beneath the surface,

things are getting a little hairy.

I really don't want to get stuck down here!

That would be very dangerous indeed.

This is really sketchy. We should head back to the boat.

We're going to get ourselves trapped in here.

Well, I think we can safely say that southern sea lions

handle this stuff an awful lot better than we do.

In amongst the kelp and the waves, we are utterly hopeless.

And it just brings out quite how clumsy we really are.

By contrast, the sea lions' speed and agility underwater

make them dynamic and undeniably deadly.

As so often on these expeditions,

it's the unexpected moments that provide the highlights.

Oh-ho-ho! Fantastic!

These are Peel's dolphins.

They're much smaller than bottlenose, about half the size,

and the dorsal fin is really, really sharply curved.

It's almost more like a shark's dorsal fin

than one you'd expect to see on a dolphin.

They look like they're having so much fun,

I can't resist trying to join them.

Wow!

The water is teeming with them.

They're very, very quick.

They just come zooming in towards you like little torpedoes,

and then just zoom away at the last second,

as if to show you quite how fast they are

and quite how much better in the water they are than you.

It's tempting to stay and play,

but we have an appointment with another island resident.

A flying fiend with a mind for mischief.

The Falklands is best known for its sea birds,

but there are birds of prey here

and, in particular, one species that is an absolute menace.

The bird in question is the striated caracara -

fierce, destructive and exceptionally intelligent.

These birds have earned themselves a pretty bad reputation.

And here in this part of the Falklands, they're certainly bold.

Working together, these thugs stalk the bird colonies

for weak or vulnerable chicks.

And with strength in numbers,

they can even take on large prey like this seal pup.

A sinister and unsettling presence, watching for weakness.

Living in such a harsh environment,

these bullyboys have to take advantage

of every single opportunity.

Their intelligence and problem solving is unmatched

by almost any other bird of prey on earth.

'And to figure out just how smart they are...'

Walkies!

'..we've come up with a Deadly experiment.'

So, I have an expectant audience of curious and hungry-looking caracara,

and this puzzle, which is, I guess, a sort of intelligence test.

What I'm going to do is put a little bit of meat,

food, into the top here, and in order for them to get to it

they're going to have to pull out each one of these slides.

They've never seen this puzzle before,

so we've absolutely no idea how they might react to their new toy.

OK, first thing they're going to try and do is to go in through the top.

That's the most obvious way.

But hopefully we've set the meat just far enough down

that it won't be able to reach it.

Oh!

That's cheating!

So, they're clearly cleverer than we thought.

They figured out they can go straight in through the top

to get the piece of meat. This time round, I'm going to put it down

straight to the second slide, where they can't reach it.

Right, round two.

Yes, yes, go on, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull!

Nearly there. Don't give up!

Go on...oh, no! The string came off!

Disaster.

But undeterred, with each new attempt,

these birds are not only quicker, but more creative.

And there's no doubt that already they are learning.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

OK, so that's the first time that that's happened straight away.

Will they finally figure out our puzzle?

Now what happens?

Same bird, the same one, dominant bird,

always has to be the one in to give it a good pull.

Will it figure out that it has to pull?

Yeah. OK, that's one more gone.

There is just one last piece of the puzzle to unravel.

Can it do it?

Yes! Oh, no!

He figured the whole thing out,

and then had the food stolen from right under its nose!

That is so unfair!

Having sat here and watched these birds,

it's no wonder that they manage to survive

and succeed here in this harsh, barren, remote landscape.

They do it by just experimenting all the time.

They're inquisitive, they're curious,

they're destructive, and they're deadly.

The Falkland Islands is just the start of our adventure.

Where we're going, it just gets wilder.

We're heading south, down to Bird Island,

on this boat, the Hans Hansson.

We're going to be at sea for a month in the roughest seas on the planet.

Everything we'll need has to be stashed on board.

We'll be cut off from the outside world,

a sole, vulnerable, disconcertingly small boat,

alone on the Southern Ocean.

Once we leave this dock, we'll have to fend for ourselves.

Only 600 miles from the Falklands,

Bird Island is a long way from anywhere.

Remote, rugged, it's rarely visited by humans.

But during the summer months,

this tiny speck of land has more wildlife crammed onto it

than just about anywhere else on the planet...

..with a bird or seal for nearly every square metre of land.

The shoreline becomes packed with

some of the most bad-tempered animals you'll ever meet,

all jostling for the best spot on the beach.

But to get to it, we had to endure four days of hard sailing

with waves as big as houses,

storm force winds and constant swell.

MUSIC: "Best Day Of My Life" by American Authors

# This is gonna be the best day of my life

# My li-i-i-i-i-ife

# This is gonna be the best day of my life

# My li-i-i-i-i-ife

# Just don't wake me now... #

Oh, this is like hell on earth.

But thankfully, an end to the constant rocking

and rolling is in sight.

We finally got our first sighting of land.

It looks really sinister.

It looks like a land that time forgot,

but this is one of the finest spots for wildlife on the entire planet.

Although incredibly remote, Bird Island is not uninhabited.

Since the 1950s, there has been a permanent base here

'for the British Antarctic Survey.'

Hello, hello!

'The wildlife here is highly cherished,

'and bio-security is strict.

'So, after a thorough boot wash,

'we can begin to explore this extraordinary outpost.

'Immediately we are overwhelmed by the abundance of life.

'Open-ocean animals that right now gather on land to breed

'and raise their young.

'Penguins, sea birds and Antarctic fur seals

'in their tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands.'

It's hard to believe, when you see this amount of animals, that these

fur seals were almost hunted to extinction by human beings.

As many as 112,000 of them

were killed every single year for their fur,

but they have made a dramatic recovery,

and now these beaches, where they haul out ashore

and come to breed, are bawdy, noisy and they smell like a sewer.

As with anywhere that has this much life, there is

also, sadly, a fair amount of death as well.

Not all of the penguin chicks, the other birds

and the young fur seal pups are going to leave these beaches.

Some of them will die here, and something has to clean up the mess.

It's too cold here for there to be many insects,

and there are no vultures either,

so some other animals have to do the job.

And these street cleaners of the natural world include

a prehistoric-looking bird.

By far the most impressive bird here at the carcass is this

massive creature. The giant petrel.

Most modern palaeontologists agree that birds

that are around today share a common ancestor with the dinosaurs,

and it is when you are this close to a giant petrel

that that is very obviously true.

I mean, it has this reptilian bluey-green eye,

and then that massive, huge beak.

Their sense of smell is much more potent than most birds,

and they can find a dead, decaying, rotting carcass like this

from miles away.

And it's unbelievably grotesque in the way it plunges its head

into that carcass, getting caked with dried blood.

It's easy to turn your nose up at scavengers,

to look at them as being, I guess,

the ugly undertakers of the bird world,

but they serve an incredibly important purpose.

Without them, carcasses like this would litter the landscape

and spread diseases.

These are actually some of the most important creatures

you will ever see.

But these scavenging scoundrels and not our main target.

We are here to find a marvel of the natural world.

A lonesome ancient mariner that spends its days alone,

blown by polar hurricanes,

and only returns to land for mere months of its long life.

As you look around the tusset grass,

you can see these intense little white dots.

Well, they LOOK little from a distance.

But when you get up close they are not small at all.

We are in the presence of giants.

This is the wandering albatross.

The largest of the sea birds and one that makes us

forget the hardship of getting here.

Bird Island is one of their few true breeding strongholds.

It is only when they turn front on, like that,

and spread those wings that you get any sense of scale.

This is the biggest wingspan of any bird.

It can be 3½ metres - that's double my height.

There are special mechanisms in these wings that mean

when they are out, fully extended, they lock in place

and they can't come above the height of their shoulders.

It means that they can soar

and glide over the waves without any expenditure of energy.

The wings are just locked there in place.

Using a technique known as dynamic soaring,

the birds swoop up and down over the waves,

using differences in wind speeds at different heights to propel them.

As the titanic winds of the south hit the waves,

they're driven upwards, carrying the soaring albatross aloft

for hour after hour, day after day, with scarcely a wing beat.

Albatross spend their lives out at sea, hunting.

The majority of their diet is made up of things like squid and krill.

And it's all caught with that massive mighty beak.

Because of the size of their wings, albatrosses are not great divers.

It's very difficult for them to get under the water,

so they can't swim down in search of prey.

Instead, they just have to stick that long neck and beak down

and snatch squid and krill from below the surface.

It's during these feeding trips that albatross come across

their biggest threat -

getting caught up with the hooks of the long-line fishing industry.

Sadly, only around 6,000 breeding pairs of wandering albatross

are left on the planet, with numbers continuing to decline.

These birds endure a life so extreme that, until recently,

little was known about these long-distance gliders.

Over the last few decades,

scientists have started applying satellite transmitters to particular

individual birds, and some of the journeys are just insane.

This here is one feeding journey of an adult bird.

It left here in Bird Island, and it's gone all the way up the coast

of South America, as far as Brazil,

and then done an enormous, great big loop, all the way back,

to land at exactly the same place, on Bird Island.

In this movie here, you can see several different birds -

each one of these has a colour -

and you can see the journeys they are undertaking.

Individual birds have been tracked travelling 5,000 miles in a week,

and they could circumnavigate the entire globe in a month.

That would have to be one of the greatest journeys

undertaken by any animal on earth.

But, having been on the wing for so long, when they DO return to land

to breed, they perform the most extraordinary and beautiful duet.

This is called sky pointing.

It's one of the most joyous sights

and sounds you will hear from any bird.

And I think essentially it's just saying, "I'm pleased to see you."

SQUAWKING AND WHISTLING

Albatross can live for 60 years, and will pair for life.

One pair are known to have been together over 18 years,

returning to the same island year after year,

to successfully raise over six chicks.

On land, they build a nest out of mud, grass and moss,

into which they lay a single leg.

After two months,

this hatches, and the parents take it in turns to feed the chick.

Feeding trips may last days or a few weeks,

in which time the adult bird could span an entire ocean.

The chick remains on the nest through the cold winter,

not fledging until around eight months after it hatched.

By the time they are ready to take to the air, they weigh

more than their parents, which makes for a tricky first flight.

But, once up and away, they'll not return to land for five years

or even more.

They live their lives in one of the most extreme, inhospitable, hostile

of all environments, out in the waves and the seas,

constantly blown by the gales of Antarctica.

But these birds are more than just beauties,

they are true emperors of the skies.

Wandering albatross are deadly.

'Our time here on Bird Island may be done.

'But our exploration of the chilly south is only just beginning.

'Join me next time,

'as our planet-spanning expedition finally reaches Antarctica,

'where I meet an old friend...'

Oh! My goodness!

'..and dare to dive with the ultimate polar predator.'

Wow!