Episode 3 Big Cats

Cats.

One family...

..40 different faces.

They captivate us, like no other animal.

But surprisingly little is known about these remarkable predators.

Right now, across the planet,

passionate people are devoting themselves

to learning more about cats...

Oh, here we go, we're downloading collar 7-5-0.

..going to extraordinary lengths to get closer than ever before...

-Holy mackerel.

-YOWLS

He's a loose cannon.

..making new discoveries...

-There you go.

-There we go.

-Good job, Ginny.

..that reveal the intimate secrets of their lives.

There it is, just in front of us.

-Oh, that's very special.

-HE LAUGHS

At a time when all cats face an uncertain future...

If we get complacent, we could see tigers go extinct.

YOWLS

..this is an amazing age of discovery...

..that's revolutionising...

-There!

-..how we view the cats.

GROWLS

Cheetahs are the world's fastest land animal.

It's said they can accelerate faster than a Ferrari.

But no-one knows for sure what they're really capable of.

Professor Alan Wilson has spent the last five years trying to find out.

Cheetahs are amazing. They're so much faster than anything else.

We've got an animal that has got four times the acceleration

of Usain Bolt and more than twice the top speed.

How can they not be fascinating to study?

Alan wants to find the cheetahs' top speed when it really counts -

during a hunt.

He's developed hi-tech collars to record the cheetahs' speed, position

and G-force while they're hunting.

The cheetahs soon disappear -

they cover hundreds of miles in search of their prey.

That makes getting any information back from the collars a real challenge.

Alan's solution?

He's built his own plane...from scratch...

..learnt how to fly it

and then filled it to the brim with the latest technology.

We have a tracking antenna on the wing.

We have a three-dimensional laser scanner. We have a video camera on a gimbal.

That's a missile guidance system.

OK, let's go find some cheetah.

Coming into the air is just such a revolution for wildlife research.

OK, cheetahs on the left wing tip.

The cheetahs' collars record details of their movements

300 times a second.

As the plane flies over, it locks on to each collar and downloads the data.

There we go, we're downloading collar 7-5-0.

Each of those files represents one hunt.

After recording over 500 hunts,

Alan clocked a cheetah's top speed of 58mph.

Impressive.

But what surprised him was that most hunts were much slower,

only half their potential top speed.

It turns out, for a cheetah, hunting is not all about the sprint.

So what are they relying on to catch their dinner?

To investigate, Alan has enlisted three volunteers...

..and a rag on a string.

These hand-reared cheetah love chasing a moving lure...

..replicating how cheetahs behave when hunting.

Prey animals don't run in a straight line for long.

To follow their prey, cheetahs must also weave and change direction.

This manoeuvring inevitably slows them down...

..but it's also where their real strength lies.

The accelerations and decelerations,

the G-forces they're pulling in the turns, are very high.

The force going through their legs would be enough to break a human leg bone.

The lure's just taken the corner and the cheetah's banking,

and see how it's using its tail here,

which is helping control the roll of its body

and helping stabilise it, and it slowed down to turn,

then it's accelerating again out of shot towards the lure.

Rather than speed,

the key to the cheetahs' hunting success...

..is their agility.

We started believing that cheetahs are the elite sprinter

and that was their main attribute.

What we've seen is that they're gymnasts -

they can accelerate, they can manoeuvre, they can turn. And that is

what they're good at. Almost the speed is a by-product of all that athleticism.

So they are remarkable athletes

but we shouldn't think of them as just a speed merchant,

there's much more to their repertoire than that.

Having challenged our idea of how cheetahs hunt,

Alan's now turning his attention to where they hunt.

It's long been thought that open grassland is their prime habitat

but even that may not be true.

What we're seeing is they're actually even more successful in trees,

in dense scrub and even in farmland.

And this makes sense.

Extraordinary manoeuvrability offers a huge advantage when twisting and turning

through a maze of trees and shrubs.

Here, cheetahs can more than match their prey.

Even with the most familiar cats...

..there's still so much to discover.

Lions.

GROWLS

Supreme hunters.

The strongest cat.

Could they also be the cleverest big cat?

Dr Natalia Borrego certainly thinks so,

and is on a mission to prove it...

..although it's not the easiest thing to test in any cat,

let alone a lion.

Her theory is all down to the fact that lions live together in prides.

So, cats are all solitary and effectively live on their own,

except for lions - they live in prides

and are very social. And we think of other social species -

elephants, dolphins, spotted hyenas, chimpanzees -

they're all very intelligent,

so, in theory, lions should be the smartest of the cats.

The idea that social animals are more intelligent is well established

but has never been proved for lions.

Cats are notoriously uncooperative.

What possible IQ test could you set a lion?

Natalia's travelled to South Africa

for the chance to test a slightly unusual pride.

Kevin Richardson has an unconventional approach to working with lions.

For ten years, he's lived alongside these rescued animals...

..becoming part of the pride.

Kevin can act as a go-between to the lions...

..giving Natalia a unique chance to run her experiments.

So here looks good.

Natalia has designed a puzzle for the cats to solve.

-Mind your fingers.

-Yeah.

The lion must work out how to open a door,

then reach its head inside to get a reward.

Good.

There's nothing like this in nature...

..so to Ginny, the lion, it's a Rubik's cube.

-And...

-Yeah.

-If the lions come, you just pop it down.

-I just pop it back down.

Ginny.

-HE WHISTLES

-Here.

Looka.

First, she must figure out how to pull the door with her paw.

Clever!

Aw, you're so clever.

You are so clever, my silly. Oh, but it slams, eh?

What did it do? I think she's more interested

in the box now than the food.

Here. Here.

Next, she needs to learn to stand back...

-There you go.

-..and allow the door to swing open...

Get your head out the way.

Get your head out the way.

-There we go.

-..before, finally,

-she can reach her head inside.

-Well done.

-That's not bad. I mean, that's...

-No, that's good.

-Clever.

-One more time?

-Yeah.

-Two more times?

-I think a couple more times.

-Couple more times.

-There, see, she got it.

-Ah.

It's taken Ginny 20 minutes to figure out...

-Good job, Ginny.

-..but now she's cracked it.

-There we go.

Yeah, she's getting her head out of the way now.

There we go. One more time. OK, OK, cool.

-There you go.

-Easy now she's got it.

-Well done.

-That deserves a round of applause.

Next comes the crucial part of the test.

Kevin has brought the lions into an enclosure

to allow pride mate Libby to watch Ginny's efforts.

The ability to learn by watching others

is considered a real sign of intelligence.

It would put lions in the company of the brainboxes of the natural world.

Good. Yeah, you slam that door. That's it, stay open. Good girl.

-No, there she goes.

-She can see what she's doing.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, I think she's got it

and it's time to let Libby out.

If lions can learn from each other,

Libby should solve the puzzle in seconds.

-If not...

-Let's see what she does.

..it's going to take her another 20 minutes.

Now she goes to the right side.

THEY BOTH LAUGH

-Oh, wow!

-There, I think... I don't think

-you can get any clearer than that.

-No, that was very good.

-That was amazing.

-Yeah, here we go, my girl.

-Here, here, here, here.

-Good job, Libby.

It's the very first time anyone has shown that lions can learn from each other.

She knows that that's the one there.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Natalia has tested leopards and tigers.

Lions outperform them both.

-It looks like Natalia's right...

-Now she doesn't even bother.

..lions are the smartest big cat.

So the experiments went really well, much better

than expected, and it really did show that lions can learn socially from each other.

Their intelligence and ability to learn from each other

allows lions to hunt like no other cat.

No cat is easy to study.

GROWLS

At least lions are relatively easy to find.

But most cats are so elusive...

..secretive...

..and well camouflaged...

..that they're rarely seen, let alone studied.

Learning more about these cats takes people whose dedication knows no bounds.

Someone like Dr Andrew Hearn.

Deep in the forests of Borneo,

a chance encounter set him off on his life's mission.

I was part of an expedition team to an uncharted area of Indonesian Borneo.

One morning, I went along a trail just to go and sit down and relax

and see what wildlife I could see.

And I was sat there quietly

and a small little red cat walked out of the side

of the forest, walked across the trail,

paused about 20 metres in front of me.

I grabbed my notebook, started to sketch it, but I had no idea what it was.

It was only when I returned back to the camp later that day,

spoke to some of the Indonesian staff

and said, "Do you know this... Do you know this cat?"

So it was only then that I learned that this was this, um, the Borneo bay cat,

and it quickly became apparent that nothing was known about this animal.

The bay cat is one of the world's least known cats...

..and Andrew has devoted every year since to finding out anything about them.

But the chance of him seeing another one would be like winning the lottery, twice!

So how do you study something you can't see?

Camera traps.

Combining a sensitive motion sensor with a high-resolution camera,

Andrew and his team deploy dozens of these through the forest...

..and spend months trekking through the jungle checking them.

Back at base, there are thousands of hours of footage to plough through.

Most contain no cats whatsoever...

..and, when cats do show up, they may not be a bay cat...

but still.

Oh, clouded leopard. Fantastic.

Oh, look at that, having a little yawn, and you can see

how exceptionally long canines these cats have.

In proportion to their skull size, they're the largest of any other cat.

Ooh, so that is a marbled cat.

Now, these guys, I mean, we know nothing about these cats,

other than they probably spend much of their time up in the trees.

So as they walk along, they hold this exceptionally long tail

almost horizontally

and that probably gives them balance while moving through the canopy.

Ah, the leopard cat.

So this is really quite rare for us to record this guy.

After scrolling through countless videos, Andrew finally filmed a bay cat...

..almost.

So this is the first-ever video of the bay cat in the world.

It's not the finest video, it's not the, er, the most exciting

but to us that was just spectacular.

We were absolutely blown away when this thing

appeared on the camera traps in front of us.

This is the fruit of 12 years' labour...

..yet to this day only two videos of wild bay cats exist...

..Andrew's,

and this one, more recently captured.

No wonder we know so little about these cats...

..and now it's a race against time.

Borneo has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

To protect some space for the bay cat,

Andrew wants to find out what kind of forest they need.

He has managed to capture photographs which help shed some light.

In - what is it? - 12-odd years, we've only got something like 60 photos.

They're so rare, they're so hard to come by.

Each photograph of the bay cat is worth its weight in gold.

It helps to piece together the ecology and the conservation needs of these cats.

Much of the forest clearance in Borneo is to make space for palm oil plantations.

While some cats can survive in these plantations, bay cats disappear.

When the forest changes to palm oil,

they no longer seem to use those areas,

so this shows us that palm oil really is one of the greatest threats

to these cats on Borneo.

For the bay cat to survive, some forest must be protected.

Andrew's determined to uncover whatever else he can

about the mysterious bay cat...

..even if it takes another 12 years.

Camera traps are revolutionising

our understanding of the entire cat family.

Deploying them in the remotest corners of the planet for months at a time

allows a unique insight into the private life of cats.

In China, two cats that wouldn't normally cross paths -

a leopard and a snow leopard - are filmed on the same camera just days apart.

In Costa Rica, a margay fights an angry possum.

And in the dunes of the Western Sahara...

..camera traps record the first-ever shots of wild sand cat kittens.

One pioneering study has taken the use of camera traps to another level.

Mountain lions, also known as cougars or pumas,

famed for leading lonely, solitary lives.

Camera traps are now challenging what we know about this American icon.

She's here.

It all started with Dr Mark Elbroch's passion for these charismatic cats.

Here she is, running across. Look at the size of the footprint.

I live mountain lions.

I track them, I watch videos of them,

I go to sleep at night and I dream about mountain lions.

This guy's a... He's a loose cannon.

This is the part where you try not to get bit.

In the Teton mountains of Wyoming,

Mark and his team want to learn more about mountain lion hunting

and feeding behaviour.

Using GPS collars to track the animals, they identify cat hot spots.

-..Quite a bit, which is good.

-Yeah.

So we should get in there and set some cameras.

Sounds good.

Mark expected an insight into the solitary life of lone cats...

..but the more he watched,

the more he began to realise something else was going on.

Here comes a nine-year-old resident female,

and she comes round and she turns

and here comes a six-year-old female.

She's doing mild hissing and, in the beginning we thought,

"Gosh, all that hissing, it's the... the pre-runner to violence,

"it's super aggressive."

No, hissing seems pretty normal,

now that we've seen it over and over and over again. So what happened next?

They spent two days together and this is what they did.

They shared a meal.

It blew me away.

That wasn't his only surprising discovery.

It's thought that males are normally aggressive towards females,

even capable of killing them, but the cameras show that's not true either.

Every time we've seen a male approach a female, outside courtship,

this is exactly what they do - they slink in.

Notice how low he's holding his body to the ground,

his ears are to the side and almost sagging.

They minimise their profile, they try to look smaller.

It is completely non-aggressive.

He clearly just wants to share a meal

and you can see, as he comes in, there's no hissing, there's nothing.

She just watches and it's the kitten that does all the hissing.

HISSES

There they are, massive resident adult male feeding on the carcass...

..three-month-old kitten and mother falling asleep in the background.

Rather than always being aggressive,

males become positively meek when they want to share a meal.

After analysing 13 years of data and thousands of videos,

Mark has discovered these social interactions follow a pattern.

Mountain lions remember each other

and they're much more likely to share their dinner

with a cat that has been generous with them in the past.

We're beginning to describe a species that has some sort of social system,

that is interacting with a frequency that challenges this idea

that they are solitary animals,

and it's just opening our eyes

and completely turning everything on its head

on what we thought were the social lives of mountain lions.

GROWLS

SNARLS SHARPLY

Cats never fail to surprise us.

Covering 8,000 hectares...

..and employing 20,000 people...

..Secunda CTL is the biggest industrial complex in Africa.

An unlikely place for a cat...

..but ecologist Daan Loock made an amazing discovery here.

It all started with reports of strange creatures prowling the site after dark.

There's...there's some eyes there.

I just can't make out what it is.

Hopefully, it crosses here

but I don't think so.

There's a lot of thickets just to our left-hand side.

I think it will... There it is!

Just in front of us! There it is!

-Oh, that's very special.

-HE LAUGHS

The strange creature is a serval.

That's something you won't see every day.

You know, these elusive cats are so difficult to see

and we're so privileged to see this.

There it goes. I'm very excited, I must say.

Having covered the site in camera traps,

to Daan's surprise, these cats were popping up everywhere.

The average serval population is 10 to 15 animals per 100 square kilometres.

Our serval population is 76 animals per 100 square kilometres.

That's phenomenal. It's very, very high.

That's six times more than the most pristine wilderness.

Servals are not merely surviving here - this is the densest population known.

Well, the next step after discovering this population

was the need to understand what's so special about this place.

Why are there so many serval here?

Servals are found across Africa

and specialise in hunting rodents and small birds.

They have the biggest ears of any cat to help pinpoint their prey.

RUSTLES, BUZZING

And with spring-like legs, they pounce over three metres.

They're normally found in much lower numbers and need large territories.

Daan set out to discover why there are so many here.

A specialist team of vets carefully capture and anaesthetise a male.

Ya, I must say it's very nice. You know, we've captured about 30, 30 to 40 animals

and it's every time very exciting to see them up close.

It's a unique opportunity to learn as much as possible about such a rarely seen cat.

What's the weight here, Mike?

-13.88, so he's...

-Spot-on.

..he's about spot-on, yeah, for a big male.

Each serval is fitted with a collar, allowing Daan to track their movements.

It's helping him build up a picture of the cats' lives.

This map is a map of the total study area

and each of these dots indicates a GPS position

of some of the serval that's been collared in the past.

This just goes to show how many serval are on site.

Most importantly, Daan's map reveals the servals are concentrated

in particular areas around water.

Ponds and streams used to cool the heavy industry

create the perfect habitat for rodents...

..abundant food for the servals.

Another reason for their success is the lack of other big predators here.

You know, normally, the main causes of death of serval

would be other predators like lion and hyena, perhaps some leopard also.

On this site, there is no competition, they are the apex predators.

As apex predators with no competition, the servals have run riot.

All across the planet, cats are adapting to urban habitats.

In response, people often need to learn how to live alongside cats.

Mumbai, India...

..one of the world's largest cities, home to over 20 million people.

Mumbai is also home...

..to the world's highest density of leopards.

In the dead of night, they creep into the city from the surrounding forests.

Krishna Tiwari grew up in Mumbai.

He's now dedicated his life to studying the city's urban leopards.

CONVERSATION IN OWN LANGUAGE

He saw a leopard the day before yesterday

and, when the leopard saw him, he just ran away to the other side of the wall.

The story is the same all across the city.

CONVERSATION IN OWN LANGUAGE

People encounter leopards on a regular basis.

She came out at around 8.30 to wash clothes here and, when she put up a torch,

she saw a leopard sitting on the rocks and as soon as, you know,

there was light on the leopard, he just got up, and she was so afraid

that, you know, she came back to the house and called her husband.

The outcome of these encounters isn't always so peaceful.

After all, the leopards are coming into the city to hunt.

Livestock are abundant and unprotected.

Stealth is the leopard's most effective weapon.

SQUEALING

BARKING

Dogs often provide an early warning...

BARKING CONTINUES

..but drawing attention from a leopard isn't a good idea.

Dogs are also on the menu.

BARKING

SQUEALING

GRUNTS

And, sadly, it doesn't stop there.

From 1990 to 2013, 176 people were attacked by leopards in Mumbai.

GROWLING, BARKING

In just one month during 2004, ten people were killed.

Something had to be done.

Krishna and the authorities took a bold approach.

Pioneering an education programme,

Krishna wanted to teach people how to live safely alongside leopards.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Simple measures like staying in groups at night, locking up livestock

and not running from leopards

made a huge difference.

20,000 people have attended the meetings.

The awareness programme has been a great success

as the last four years have seen no leopard attacks

and I think it's a good and long-term solution

to reduce the human-leopard conflicts in Mumbai.

Unfortunately, educating the local dogs has proved trickier.

They provide a vital early warning but are still being taken.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Raj has lost three dogs to leopard attacks.

He then hit on an idea which might help protect his current pet.

He thinks that the dog, the leopard will think that it is also a leopard...

..even, you know, it's being protected by other dogs, so I think it's a good idea.

The jury's still out on whether this even works...

..and, anyway, what self-respecting dog wants to be dressed up as a cat?

WHIMPERS He's certainly not convinced.

Krishna's mission to spread tolerance is working...

..and Mumbai's leopard population is thriving...

..but it's a rare example of people accepting their presence

and making space for cats.

Elsewhere, it's a very different story.

Nearly half of all wild cats are threatened with extinction.

As top predators, they need a lot of food and space...

..and, with an ever-growing human population,

competition for that space is rising.

In the last 20 years, leopards have been wiped out from 40% of their range.

Cheetahs have become extinct in 25 countries.

Not even lions are spared. Numbers have fallen by nearly half in two decades.

The king of beasts could go extinct in the wild.

The driving passion people feel for cats is now their greatest hope for survival...

-Holy mackerel.

-YOWLS

..especially for the animal that's long been the face of cat conservation.

Dr Krithi Karanth's love of tigers started at a very young age.

I first saw a tiger when I was two years old

with my father and my grandfather in Nagarhole National Park.

I was amazed and in awe.

There is nothing like seeing a tiger in the wild.

Years on, and now a world-renowned tiger conservationist,

Krithi's just as enthralled.

There are no words that can really capture the emotion of seeing a tiger.

Every single time I've seen a tiger in the wild,

I've been either left speechless or giggling silly or crying.

I mean, it's a range of emotions, but you never forget.

To me, tigers are truly one of the most spectacular cats on the planet.

But like so many of the cats, survival of the tiger is on a knife edge.

We see images and stories about tigers all the time -

could give us the impression that they're not endangered but they absolutely are.

They're one of the most threatened big cats in the world today.

Over the last century, 95% of wild tigers have vanished.

There are now more tigers in captivity in the United States alone than in the wild.

It is impossible for me to imagine a world without wild tigers...

..but, if we get complacent, we could see tigers go extinct.

-WHISPERS:

-Sorry.

I couldn't... I couldn't imagine a world without tigers.

Krithi's spent her life raising awareness and funding to save the tiger.

She's set up a project that helps villagers get compensation

when tigers attack their livestock.

It's helping ease some of the conflict with local people.

Here in India, the greatest challenge

is giving tigers the space they so desperately need.

One solution is to help villagers who currently live within the national parks

to relocate.

Krithi is part of a team

that assist those who choose to make a new home beyond the park boundaries.

Once you move people out, the vegetation comes back,

the prey numbers rebound and then tiger numbers come back,

so ecological recovery takes time but I think nature knows how to heal itself.

There's been a lot of time, money and effort but the tide may be turning.

After a long time, we're seeing wild tigers come back,

populations stabilise and recover in many tiger reserves.

It shows that we can change the future for cats

if there is the will to protect them.

Maasai warriors now study and conserve the lions they once hunted.

Huge safe havens are being created for Scottish wildcats,

the UK's only native cat.

Scientists brave freezing conditions...

-STATIC CRACKLES

-It's working.

..to help the endangered Siberian tiger.

And one pioneering project

is attempting to rescue a cat from the very edge of extinction.

Just a century ago, thousands of Iberian lynx

roamed the ancient woodlands of Spain and Portugal.

A combination of habitat loss, hunting and lack of prey

caused their numbers to collapse.

By 2002, fewer than 100 were left.

The Iberian lynx was declared the rarest cat on the planet.

Today, an international team of scientists and conservationists

are working to bring these cats back from the brink.

The team began an intensive breeding programme

on a scale never attempted before.

Vicky Ascensio is a vet dedicated to the project.

She works at the newest of the breeding centres.

Spread across Spain and Portugal, these multimillion-pound facilities

are built to meet a lynx's every need...

..to ensure they can produce as many cubs as possible

for release back into the wild.

It's also designed so Vicky can keep a close eye

on each and every precious cub.

In total, we have 116 cameras.

We try to see the animals 24 hours.

This hands-off approach is vital so the cubs never meet a human.

They are all day very quiet, very calm

and they don't see that we are always looking at them.

It's very important for us, especially when we have cubs.

The Iberian lynx has become a species in intensive care.

The breeding centres are just one piece of the jigsaw.

The team are also working hard to improve the natural habitat

so young lynx can be released into ideal conditions.

Today, Vicky is running some crucial health checks.

One-year-old cubs Navio and Noa are scheduled for release.

We are checking that all the animal is healthy

and also we take some samples

to see that he has not any infectious diseases or something like that.

Our goal always is to release the animals.

It's our most important goal.

CONVERSATION IN SPANISH

The cubs are ready.

A release is big news around here.

Crowds gather to catch a glimpse of this iconic Spanish cat.

This is a very special moment for me because it's an animal

that was born in the centre and now you are giving him the freedom.

It's very emotional for us.

Navio and Noa are given their freedom, running wild for the first time.

INAUDIBLE

This ambitious project has become one of the most successful reintroductions

on the planet - nearly 500 cats once again roam these ancient woodlands.

The more we learn about cats, the more they surprise and amaze us.

Only by understanding their needs can we help safeguard their future.

YOWLS

There's a lot of work to do but across the globe

people are putting their heart and soul into finding answers

and making sure the future always has a place...

MEWS ..for the cats...

..big...

..and small.