The Himalayas Natural World

The Himalayas appear like a frozen fortress,

giving nothing,

not even enough air.

Yet there are animals here...

..miraculous and extraordinary,

nurtured by the mountains.

For people, too, the mountains shape their world.

The animals of the Himalayas teach us about the beauty and fragility of life,

and the power of the most inhospitable mountains on Earth.

The highest mountain range in the world forms

a two thousand-mile scar across Asia,

separating India from the Tibetan Plateau.

Our journey is from west to east, through the seasons.

We start in Pakistan in winter.

The Karakoram Range, at the western end of the Himalayas, is a world of

golden eagles, snow leopards, markhors, bears, jackals, and wolves.

The snow leopard stalks markhors, the wild mountain goats, using the falling snow as cover.

At this altitude, and in winter, nothing is easy.

Yet despite the cold and the thin air, there is more life within the Himalayas

than any other mountain range on Earth.

The snow leopard has a fully grown cub.

Families will stay together longer than any other cat.

It's tough up here to make it alone.

The difficulties of mountain life encourage companionship.

The wolves work together, searching for frozen bodies under the snow.

Himalayan wolves are from an old bloodline, relics of an early ancestor.

Maybe this was the wolf's first home.

The bonds within the pack, and the mountain toughness, perhaps, helped them to spread over half the world.

Domestic dogs came from Asian wolves, so perhaps they, too, are a gift from the Himalayas.

Is our companion on the hearthrug with us a consequence of an ancient lesson learnt in these mountains?

It's winter, and the higher villages and farms are deserted.

Life follows the seasons up and down the mountains.

Until recently, our presence hardly registered at all on the biggest scar on the planet's surface.

These mountains arose some 40 million years ago, when India,

pushing from the south, hit the rest of Asia.

The land had nowhere to go but up, and folds reached over five miles high.

The Himalayas are a massive crumple zone, reaching out of the air, towards space.

In winter, most life retreats to below the snowline.

They're relics of an ancient ancestor.

A snow leopard's nearest relatives could be lions, or even jaguars.

The family follow the antics of the markhors.

The markhors breed in winter. Males try to throw their rivals off cliffs.

As well as fighting, the dominant buck follows the girls around, with his tongue hanging out.

It's a distracting time for the does.

Perfect for the snow leopard.

The markhor disappears around the corner.

The snow leopard seems more puzzled than anything else.

If there were one place on Earth where we can see the power of raw nature,

and the fragility of life, it must be here.

Later, at night, the snow leopard revisits the place where the markhor leaped for freedom.

It's as if the mountains have taken back her prize,

perhaps saved the markhor's life,

and she needs to understand what happened.

In the bleak landscape we find curiosity, caring families, companionship, and hope.

The snow leopards and markhors will disappear higher into the mountains.

We, too, must look beyond the valleys to understand the extraordinary forces that rule the Himalayas.

This is the largest deposit of accumulated ice and compacted snow outside the poles.

Thousands of cubic miles of ice slide very slowly down the mountains, as glaciers.

The glaciers feed many of the greatest rivers in Asia.

Tiny changes up here can affect parts of India and China, thousands of miles away.

We are moving east, along Karakoram Range, over the border between Pakistan and India.

These peaks were carved during ice ages.

It's about time for another ice age, but instead,

the Himalayas are melting faster than seems possible naturally.

Nature appears disturbed, shifting angrily,

as though a delicate balance was being lost.

As the glaciers descend and melt, water pours into crevasses, and carves tunnels inside the ice.

We are now in India, at Gaumukh,

"the cow's mouth",

one of the several holy sources of the Ganges.

Pilgrims take a ritual bath in its freezing milky waters.

The river, "Mother Ganges", is revered as a goddess, influencing millions of lives.

During March and April, temples shed their winter isolation, and villagers and farmers return.

Images of animals are everywhere, emerging from an isolated frozen winter, into spring.

The mountains themselves are sacred.

There's a legend of a holy peak, a perfect four-sided pyramid.

From each face, according to the stories, a great river flows.

Each river carries life to the four corners of the Earth.

The mythical mountain is the axis mundi, the centre of the world.

As we journey east along the Himalayas, we find a mountain to match the myth.

Its meltwater flows to the Indus in Pakistan, and south into the Ganges.

Streams form the Yarlung and head to Bangladesh.

Three of Asia's greatest rivers can trace their source to this one mountain.

It's Mount Kailash, which means "crystal mountain".

Buddhists, Hindus and Jains make pilgrimages here.

Priests, monks, musicians and holy men all compete in a riot of religious cultures.

HORNS BLARE

Giant prayer poles are raised, also reaching up to heaven.

Paper prayers called wind horses flutter up towards the peak,

where the gods of different faiths are believed to reside.

The summit is so sacred, it has never been climbed.

Our path continues east, from the Karakorams in Pakistan, into India and towards Nepal.

Spring is climbing the mountain, and upland forests are returning to life.

It's a surprise to find monkey mountaineers, but the Himalayas have many.

In April, flowers and buds feed langur monkeys.

They winter in the valleys, and follow the snowline up the mountains in spring.

There is something about mountain life,

the hardship, perhaps, the fragility, that actually changes the character of the animals that live here.

Himalayan langurs are distinct from their lowland cousins.

Up here is a more friendly society.

Further down the mountain, the males fight for the control of a harem.

But here, they all live together in one group.

Warm clouds work their way up alpine valleys.

The snow leopards go deeper into the mountains, impossible to follow.

The Himalayas are still largely inaccessible and unexplored.

By May, bees have come out of hibernation, or joined others coming up from the valleys below.

Giant cliff bees build three-foot combs that are a rippling wall of bodies.

Waving their abdomens in unison is a defensive warning to keep clear.

The bees' efforts are in vain.

Human honey-hunters scale the cliffs.

The bees are the biggest in the world and amongst the most dangerous.

They cut out the honey storage cells with 15-foot poles, into a relay of baskets.

Even the best protective clothes, and a screen of smoke, is not enough,

and the honey-hunter retreats to savour perhaps the most delicious and dangerous honey in the world.

People have searched for magical ingredients here for thousands of years, and discovered

a powerful human aphrodisiac.

A little solitary deer produces a musky resin from a small gland on its stomach.

The musk deer has influenced love and fashion across the world.

The most famous perfumes are based on his scent.

From Cleopatra onwards, kings and queens wooed with musk.

Muslims maintain it is the smell of heaven, and they added it to the mortar of the mosques,

so that the temples smelt of paradise.

Affecting religion and history,

or giving us Chanel and Dior, is not the musk deer's intention.

All he wants is to be noticed by a female musk deer.

While we may want to smell like Himalayan animals,

wanting to look like them is rarer, but it does happen.

The monal pheasant, high above India and Pakistan, is all flash, all show.

Males compete in a dance of crests and colours.

Curiously, in the shadow of the mountains, the guards on the India and Pakistan border

do an irresistibly similar dance.

The crest, even the posturing walk, perhaps, echo the bird display,

but the contest of thumbs seems more like the markhor stag, all horns and tongues.

India and Pakistan are feuding neighbours.

How much better if all conflicts could be fought out in this way?

Below mountain borders, following glacial meltwater in streams and rivers,

is a watery plain, the Ganges basin.

Here, cranes have their own dances.

This is the lowest we go. From here, we will return to the highest peaks.

Many birds are hemmed in by the Himalayas, like these sarus cranes.

But to bar-headed geese, the mountains are no obstacle.

From the base of the Himalayas in India, we head to Nepal and Bhutan,

mountain kingdoms on the top of the world.

The Himalayas are made of range upon range of mountains, building height.

The air becomes dangerously thin.

Bar-headed geese are the highest flying birds in the world.

The higher they go, the faster the jet-stream.

A 100 mile-an-hour tailwind catapults them over the Himalayas.

Bar-headed geese fly higher than Everest.

Their blood is different, with special haemoglobin,

and they can breathe faster and deeper, many gulps for each wing beat.

They suffer severe hypoxia, way beyond any human athlete, pushing the boundaries of pain.

Bar-headed geese are not alone.

Some cranes, less well adapted, gawky compared to the geese, attempt the journey.

Demoiselle cranes find ways through high mountain passes, mothers leading their young.

The cranes use rising currents of air to gain height, to battle over ridges,

then descend into valleys to recover.

There, waiting for them, are golden eagles.

The eagles try to separate young cranes from the flock.

The predators hunt cooperatively, like so many others here.

The young crane escapes one, and is caught by another.

There is nothing the rest of the flock can do.

The demoiselle cranes battle on, but ahead are the largest obstacles in the world.

And the biggest of all, Everest.

One animal has learnt to survive, briefly, at the top.

We don't need to conquer these mountains,

there's no breeding site to get to, and no adaptation to help us.

Yet every year, hundreds of people push their physiology

for medical research, or more often, for themselves.

The top is called the "death zone",

a combination of the best view in the world

and being in no state to enjoy it.

Winds average hurricane force, temperatures 50 below zero,

and a calm day can quickly change.

Over 200 people have died here, many abandoned on the mountain.

About 10% of climbers attempting the summit lose their lives, and many more are injured.

In this harsh world of rock, ice and courage, lives a little spider.

Its Latin name means "standing above everything",

and it's been found at 22,000 feet.

It's supposedly the highest living animal in the world.

But it can't be the only one up here,

since spiders need other insects to feed on.

Sure enough, tiny flies and springtails also manage at amazing altitudes.

But it's got another trick.

It's a jumping spider.

Like all good mountaineers, it will secure a line.

Springtails are primitive insects that feed on anything

blown up from lower altitudes.

This community of plants and animals depend on airborne sustenance.

Hence the name

an Aeolian Biome,

life brought on the wind.

Very occasionally, snow leopards are seen at high altitudes,

following goats, or maybe scavenging our rubbish ever higher.

Wolves, too, are being seen up here,

in this case filmed close to Everest base camp.

It's not clear if climate change is opening up new areas for them

or if there's some other reason.

Scientists say it's warming and melting here

faster than anywhere else outside the poles.

Beyond Nepal and Bhutan, following the cranes and geese over the Himalayas, instead of finding

lush plains at sea level, we discover a high, cold, dry plateau,

hardly lower than the peaks themselves.

It is Tibet.

Glacial rivers thread through a desiccated landscape the size of France,

but higher than anything in the Alps or the Rockies.

The Himalayan peaks are just the jagged edge, the ramparts of a wall

with the Tibetan Plateau hidden behind.

The animals cope with extreme altitude, thin air and a tough life.

The snow leopards look the same, but there are also new characters.

This is a brown bear, a grizzly in all but name and tufted ears.

He's rare, timid and hardly ever filmed.

The Tibetan fox hunts a rodent called a pika.

Pikas live in dens, like ground squirrels or rabbits, and eat the tough grass.

Pikas are the staple food of any predator.

He's the most wonderful-looking fox.

Square-jawed, eyes of cunning, and a twisted, knowing smile.

The fox and the bear go around as a team.

More high altitude cooperation, perhaps, or maybe the wily fox

just follows the bear around, hoping to nab a pika from under the bear's nose.

It's mid-summer now, but the ground is usually frozen,

and only the bear has the strength to dig out the pikas.

If the bear is digging up one end of a burrow,

the fox is ready for the pikas to emerge at the other end in a panic.

PIKAS CALL

The bear missed out. The fox eats some and buries the rest.

The deep permafrost will help keep it fresh.

The Tibetan Plateau is so high that despite being the same latitude

as North Africa, even in late spring, the temperature is icy.

At 15,000 feet live chiru, Tibetan antelopes.

The chiru puff like steam engines in the cold, thin air.

A male guards his harem, breathing clouds of misty condensation.

There are other males eyeing up his females.

A neighbour might come charging in to kidnap one for his own.

In these arctic conditions it's very surprising to find...

a small snake.

In places, hot springs are a sign of volcanic activity below.

The snake survived its home being pushed

almost three miles straight up, by holding out in this natural sauna.

The hot spring snake is a lost relic.

Their nearest cousins are across the world in America.

The streams flow into lakes,

now home to the bar-headed geese after their epic journey over the Himalayas.

One of the prettiest birds chooses the roof of the world to have up to ten beautiful goslings.

The goslings have to feed themselves right from the start.

Bar-headed geese always nest by water, for food,

but also to escape the hardy Tibetan wolf.

HORNS PLAYING

Novice monks are practising their Tibetan horns.

Buddhism was born on the other side of the Himalayas, overlooking India,

but its mountain philosophy soon spread to Tibet.

A love of nature and animals is one of its teachings.

Cranes are symbols of a long life and a faithful partnership.

CRANES CALL

Buddhists believe in reincarnation

and that every animal has a spirit that one day will become a person

and that every person has lived as an animal.

So wildlife is looked after carefully,

and, like this crane with a wounded wing,

fed and nursed back to health.

It's another example of how the Himalayas affect people and animals alike

and increase sensitivity and co-operation.

For those who live in the shadow of the Himalayas, a little can be given back

in the most extraordinary and extreme way possible.

A sky burial is the ultimate homage to the mountain.

After you die, you are taken up a revered peak and left to feed the vultures.

Buddhists believe that all life is connected,

each animal depends on another, even BECOMES another.

It's an idea born in these mountains

from an understanding of the power of nature and the complexity of life.

The Buddhists look to the mountains particularly for reliable water in calm streams.

But flowing east are massive and changeable rivers -

the lifeblood of a billion people.

The Yangtze, the Yellow River,

the Yarlung and the Mekong are all are born here on the Tibetan Plateau.

To the north runs the Yellow River, so-called because of the huge amount

of glacial soil it brings to China.

They call the Yellow River the mother of Chinese civilization.

It has another name too - China's Sorrow.

The floods have killed millions of people down the generations.

As the climate changes, the river will change and China's Sorrow may take on a new meaning.

Thousands of dams battle

to harness and control the gifts of the Himalayas for ourselves.

Another of Tibet's massive rivers continues our journey east.

Then it turns south and cuts straight through the Himalayas.

The Yarlung Brahmaputra, from Mount Kailash, and the Nujiang,

the Yangtze and the giant Mekong all slice through the mountains, creating the most extraordinary place yet.

Some of the gorges are double the depth of the Grand Canyon - the rivers, the wildest in the world.

It makes getting around difficult, and tests the ingenuity of the Yunnan people.

Cable crossings of rattan rope had been in use for hundreds of years

before steel was introduced.

This is the main route to market.

Getting around may be harder, but these deep fissures draw warm wet air in from the tropics.

The valleys act like the pipes of a central heating system and create tropical paradises

high in the mountains, like the mythical Shangri-La.

To the Chinese particularly, this is heaven, hidden beyond the clouds.

Tropical monkeys like bear macaques live on rainforest fruit at 8,000 feet.

Each Garden of Eden has unique animals and plants,

walled in by mountains, pockets of exceptional biodiversity.

The mountain chains running into China are a sanctuary from the plains below.

Elephants and leopards are fleeing from farmers and loggers.

These high tropical forests are a miraculous paradise.

Sunbirds drink nectar from epiphytes,

musk deer provide the fragrance of heaven.

While in a private corner is another love story.

A pheasant plays peek-a-boo with a prospective mate.

The Temminck's tragopan hopes his bright wattle

and dance will show he'll be a worthwhile husband.

She seems less than convinced, and moves away.

He follows, displaying on the move, ever hopeful.

But by midsummer, it's too late, and he tucks his wattle away for another year.

Above the warmer valleys, another world...

..steep woods filled with lichen.

The Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys feed almost entirely on the lichen,

and so are trapped at the high altitude that it grows.

At 14,000 feet, they are the highest primates in the world, except for a few of us.

Large troops are formed of many families, each with a Buddha-like male and several wives.

Last year's young help with the babies.

They are curious looking, some like little elves

and some like plastic surgery gone too far.

At the height of summer, a strange cooling brings snow to the mountains.

The snub-nosed monkeys feel the change in the weather.

Each July, the snow comes in and the monkeys shiver.

The monsoon has begun.

The cold mountains draw tropical air from the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away.

Clouds pile up, and from July to September deliver most of the annual snow and rain.

Without the Himalayas driving the monsoon, Southern Asia would be a desert.

Soil and mud, ground up by glaciers,

pour off the mountains.

The monsoon can bring life

or destruction and sorrow.

Life depends on the mountains, the character of which is unpredictable.

It's not just a religious belief, but a scientific fact as well.

In places, we shape the mountain to our will to provide more food.

Rice paddies are some of the oldest human structures on Earth.

The cultures that understand the Himalayas say we must give something back.

They say all life is connected,

and each animal depends on another,

even BECOMES another.

It is as if the mountains are trying to teach us something else, too,

a very old lesson about the power of nature

and the fragility of our lives.

It's not just the animals that makes the Himalayas so extraordinary.

It's also the plants.

In fact, the floral wealth of this region has had an enormous impact on the lives of all of us.

It all began in the early 19th century,

when a new wave of adventurers risked their lives to collect exotic plants from across the world.

The Himalayas was one of the most promising and tempting regions of all.

This rugged land was still largely unknown to the outside world.

Here, surely, there were new plant species to be found.

That quest led to a special connection with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Well, in the 19th century in particular,

there was a lot of collecting of plants throughout the world,

particularly well-to-do people liked to build up collections of specimens

just as they liked to collect stuffed animals and this type of thing.

Joseph Dalton Hooker was one such well-to-do explorer

and lucky for him, his father was Director of Kew.

As Western high society became gripped by a gardening craze,

William Hooker sent his son in search of new plants.

In 1847, Joseph set off on a three-year expedition into the Himalayas.

Single-minded and determined, he endured great hardships.

He suffered with altitude sickness,

his journey was sabotaged by local people,

he was even imprisoned.

Nevertheless, he walked for eight hours a day,

collecting plants and documenting every detail of his travels.

He was the first European to collect in the region

and his discoveries made him one of the greatest botanists of the 19th century, a key scientist of his age.

He returned from the Himalayas with a wealth of new flowers,

including 28 new species of rhododendron.

We've got some examples here of specimens that were collected by Hooker.

One example here is Rhododendron arborium, which in fact is the national flower of Nepal.

But there are a large number of these specimens collected by Hooker

of this species from Nepal, and we do have specimens that have got

Hooker's name on them, so here we've got a specimen that was collected in 1848.

Simply by bringing these new species back, it would have had a great impact, because lots of these things

would never have been seen before, so a lot of new things introduced into cultivation.

So these plants would have had the real sort of wow factor for gardeners at the time.

Gardeners across the nation competed for the boldest and brightest specimens,

bringing a little bit of the Himalayas into everyone's garden.

In fact, a quarter of the plants in our gardens today came originally from the Himalayas...

from azaleas to euphorbias,

gentians to irises...

and peonies to primulas.

But Joseph Hooker also recognised the value of plants to science and medicine.

Today, the Herbarium makes Kew one of the most important botanical institutions in the world.

It's a vast database housing over seven million specimens

and representing 98% of the world's plant species.

Succeeding his father as Director, Joseph also opened the Jodrell Laboratory

and firmly established Kew as a scientific institution.

This laboratory does a lot of work

on the biological activity of plants.

We have an emphasis on looking for medicinal uses of plants,

and that could be what we term

over-the-counter medicines - things like coughs and colds - but also looking for drugs

that could be used to treat things like Alzheimer's, TB and cancer.

The Himalayan region is estimated to have about

between 18,000 and maybe 20,000, 21,000 different species of plants,

and of those, there's documentary evidence

on uses of about 2,000 of those for medicinal uses.

So one of the things that we are doing at Kew is partly capturing the traditional uses,

but also looking at the traits that plants have in different areas that they have evolved

to protect themselves, that can help us design drugs for the future.

People living in the remote valleys of the Himalayas

have always relied on plants for their medical remedies, but so do we.

Around a quarter of all our pharmaceuticals contain substances derived from plants.

Plants that we may take for granted in our gardens could be miniature medicine chests.

Some of the plants that we've been working on, some of them are quite famous to the areas,

because they're not only medicinal plants, but they're in the culture of the people,

and that would be rhododendrons.

Every bit of the rhododendron plant has a traditional use,

from the flowers to the leaves, to the bark, to the roots is used.

Now, the other plant is peony.

Now, we know it for its beautiful flowers, but within the Himalayas

it's often the root bark that is used as a medicine, and I've had

quite a few trips actually looking for samples of this because it is a plant that has been over-exploited.

But in the Himalayas there is a real issue with the continuing growth and over-exploitation by man.

And therefore we could be losing things that we haven't yet studied.

At the start of the 19th century, almost nothing was known about Himalayan plants.

Now, we are methodically examining them all to see how they might be of use to us.

As so few people live up here, it was once thought

that the high altitude plants were safe from exploitation.

But today, there is a much greater threat.

As the climate warms, glaciers are receding and the land no longer suits the plants that evolved here.

But there is nowhere else for them to grow.

With climatic changes threatening thousands of plant species worldwide,

Kew has embarked on the most ambitious of all plant conservation projects.

The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place,

Kew's base in West Sussex, holds more than a million seeds.

We know, as seed bank people,

that you don't have to lose plants, you don't have to lose them.

We can use seed banks

to make sure that these plants don't go extinct.

Here, seeds arrive from plant-hunters working all around the world, to be catalogued and bar-coded.

Each batch is carefully sifted and cleaned.

Then they are X-rayed to ensure that there's no contamination by insects that might harm them.

Only after everything has been checked are they banked for the future.

In an underground vault, they are kept dormant at minus 20 degrees.

Essentially what seeds are, are they're little time capsules.

Plants can survive for centuries using their seed

and we accentuate that ability

and we've learnt a lot about seeds such that we can actually spin that process out.

We know that we can keep seeds alive for 1,000 years.

The Millennium Seed Bank has already ensured that 54,000 species of plants

are safe from extinction.

'The seed bank is just the first step, because we have to make sure

'that we can turn them back into plants.

'There's no good having 1.6 billion seeds sitting in a fridge downstairs,'

but it's our first stepping stone to them turning those species back into real plants.

Each seed is valuable.

As plants continue to provide food, fresh air, habitat stability,

even medicines,

we know we need them for our future.

Their time capsules may even hold the key to problems that we have yet to face.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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