Meat Eaters The Life of Mammals

DOG BARKS

Meat - the muscles of mammals -

is the richest, most energy-packed food you can get,

and we human beings have set aside great areas of the countryside just in order to produce it.

In this case - mutton.

And there is other meat to be had here too -

rabbits.

We sometimes eat these as well, but today rabbits are more in danger from another hunter...

..a stoat

It's tiny - less than a foot long.

But nonetheless, it's a skilled and determined killer.

Its fangs, stabbed into the rabbit's neck, have crushed the back of its skull.

The rabbit weighs ten times as much as the stoat

but the stoat prefers to eat in privacy.

It's those daggers at the front of the jaw that killed the rabbit.

Now triangular blades farther back, like secateurs,

help the stoat to cut meat away from bone.

Those two kinds of teeth are the hallmark of all meat-eaters - small

and large.

There are two great tribes of carnivores.

There are the cats...

..and there are the dogs.

Both are skilled in the art of stalking.

And both have a lethal pounce.

The serval is so athletic,

it can sometimes bring down birds.

It's one of the smallest of the cats.

And this is the biggest - the Siberian tiger,

ten feet long from nose to tail.

The earliest fossils of meat-eating mammals, about 50 million years old,

have been found in North America.

It seems that they lived up in the trees, hunting birds.

One of their descendants, the marten, still does.

Its claws are long but they can be partly retracted,

which helps to keep them sharp,

and they give it a superb grip.

But other prey sometimes tempts it down from the trees.

And it's on the ground that most meat-eaters today go hunting.

Dogs - descendants of those North American tree-dwellers -

soon spread round the world and, as they did, so their bodies changed

to suit their new homes.

This is the Sahara.

The dog that lives here is the smallest of all the foxes - the fennec.

Its huge ears help it to avoid overheating.

Here, it's so dry that moisture is very precious

and the fennec doesn't waste it on sweat.

Instead it cools its blood by circulating it through capillaries

close to the surface of its immense ears which act like car radiators.

But these enormous ears also help it detect the tiniest sounds -

even faint scrabblings in the sand.

The larva of a beetle is full of juice -

just what the fennec needs, for it's seldom able to drink.

The desert viper is very small, as snakes go,

but it's a bigger meal than the beetle grub.

It's also a much more dangerous one.

First, those poison fangs

must be put out of action.

The snake's venom will only kill if it gets into the bloodstream,

so, providing the fennec has no cut in its mouth,

the poison in its meal will cause it no harm.

Dogs in a COLD climate have a rather different shape.

Long ears would get frostbitten, so the Arctic fox has very short ones.

Its fur is particularly long with a dense under-layer that keeps it warm even in the worst Arctic weather.

It's also white - good camouflage.

In summer, it changes its coat to a thinner, darker one. FOX CALLS

Summer is breeding time and this pair's cubs are already half-grown.

There's no shortage of food at this time of year.

In fact, there's a glut. Sea birds are nesting on the cliffs in thousands.

The guillemots, high up on their ledges, are, for the most part,

beyond the foxes' reach.

But the foxes know that the chicks can't stay perched up there for ever.

They have to fly down to the sea.

But this is their first flight

and the sea is a long way away.

Some don't get that far.

Food for the cubs.

And STILL they come.

There's far more food now than the foxes and their cubs can eat.

Indeed, there's sometimes even more than they can carry.

But these good times won't last for ever.

So now the Arctic fox does what many dogs do -

it buries the surplus.

And in this cold climate, the meat will stay tolerably fresh for months.

Birds are not the only sea-going animals that come to land to breed

and assemble in great numbers.

On the south-western shores of Africa, in Namibia,

there are huge breeding colonies of sea mammals.

You might think that these fur seals

would be particularly sensitive to danger that comes from the sea.

But, in fact, they are most easily alarmed

if you approach them from the land,

and, since I don't want to scare them, I have to move with great care.

(Their pups are just up here.)

(And they STILL haven't seen me.)

These little pups

are only a day, or maybe two days, old.

It's so hot that their mothers have gone to sea to cool off,

so their babies are now unprotected.

But I had better retreat before someone raises the alarm!

From here, I've got a splendid view

of almost the entire colony,

so, if attackers come from the land,

they'll come down there.

All I have to do now is wait.

It's a brown hyena.

Hyenas, most of the time, feed on carrion -

but they will certainly take a defenceless seal pup.

PUP CRIES

SEALS CALL

The carcass is brought back to be shared with the family.

All dogs communicate by smell

but none do so more eloquently than hyenas.

Their scent comes from a pouch beneath the tail

and proclaims WHO they are and HOW they are.

They also use scent to post notices around their territory.

An individual will put one up every quarter of a mile or so.

And this is one of their message posts.

The smear at the top there

comes from the anal gland

of one of the hyena family.

And that smell fades very rapidly

and is a message to other members of the group,

saying, "I was here half an hour ago, or quarter of an hour ago,

"so there's no point in searching THIS patch for food."

But beneath it, there's a second one

which was milky white when it was first pasted on.

Its smell is long-lasting

and it's intended to be a message to other clans of hyenas, saying,

"Keep out. This land is ours."

So their noses enable the hyenas to divide up the desert

between their clans and so ensure that no source of food is neglected.

These dogs crop their territory in a very different way -

racing along special paths through the undergrowth.

They live in the forests of the Amazon and run in a strict order -

the females in front, headed by the most senior, the males behind.

They prefer wet country around the banks of the numerous rivers.

But they are not common anywhere.

These are the most mysterious, the least known of ALL dogs -

the South American bush dog.

The leading females sprinkle their scent as high as they can.

The males do no more than cock a leg.

Their bodies are also adapted to their environment.

Short legs make it easy to run through the undergrowth,

and they have skin between their toes which helps them swim.

They're the only dogs with webbed feet.

The rodents whose paths through the bush they often use

are also their prey. But they'll pounce on water-living creatures as well, if and when they find them.

The trouble with that

is that very few water-living animals have any scent.

When THESE dogs hunt, they must use their eyes as much as their noses.

And if you want to look for things underwater,

you have to be prepared to get your face wet.

The pack may accept rules about their running order,

but at meal times, it's a free-for-all.

DOGS GROWL AND SQUEAL

The luxuriant Amazonian forest may appear to be full of food,

but, in fact, meat here is hard to come by.

Not so on the open plains of Africa.

Here, there is more meat than anywhere else in the world,

so, not surprisingly, there are dogs here too -

hunting dogs.

But wildebeest are BIG animals.

To bring one down, these dogs have to hunt together as a team - sometimes as many as 50 of them.

They're the most successful of all hunters.

80% of their chases will end in a kill.

Once they've selected the victim, they work together to bring it down.

They have only their teeth to get a grip on their prey.

They don't have swivelling wrists with a sideways grip.

Their claws, unlike cats', are not retractile, so they're blunted as a result of so much running.

They kill in silence.

Too much noise would attract the attention of lions, who are big enough to drive them off a kill.

That's also why they bolt down as much meat as they can as quickly as possible.

Their bellies full, they return

to the pups and the females back at the dens, maybe several miles away.

The pups can hardly wait.

PUPS SQUEAL

They beg for food by frantically licking the mouths of the adults.

All these pups are the offspring of the senior pair - the alpha male and female.

Normally, no others will breed.

So the returning hunters are either the pups' uncles and aunts or brothers and sisters.

They squabble among themselves - as youngsters do.

But they also give food to one another -

as they will do throughout their lives.

The adults share domestic duties,

the young females helping their mother - the alpha female -

to look after her latest litter of pups.

So dogs, by and large, are sociable animals,

a fact that people who live up here in the north of North America

have taken advantage of since early times,

training them to pull their sledges as a team.

And up here, too, lives the biggest of all the dog family.

And it, too, lives in packs.

If animals are to work in a team,

they need to be able to communicate with one another.

And sometimes it's possible for YOU to communicate with THEM.

HE HOWLS

HE HOWLS AGAIN

DISTANT HOWLS

IT HOWLS

RESPONDING HOWL

Wolves howl to warn neighbouring packs to keep their distance.

But they also do so to reunite their own pack if it's got scattered after a long hunt.

And as they assemble again,

they visibly delight in one another's company.

This pack, too, like that of African hunting dogs, is ruled by an alpha pair who are the only ones to breed.

But there's also a strict hierarchy among the other members - one for males and one for females.

This is reinforced daily by mouth-licking, crawling and mounting.

These rituals become intense just before the pack leaves on a hunt.

It's a bonding session that reminds each hunter of its place in the team.

Invaluable in the struggle to come.

And off they go.

Those distant dots are their targets...

..elk - the North American equivalent of the European red deer.

Snow drifts will make the chase difficult.

A wolf's pads are particularly broad but in really deep snow, the elks' long legs give them the advantage.

In such country, there is little chance of taking them by surprise.

So the chase is likely to be a long and exhausting one.

One of the stags is flagging

and the pack have managed to separate it from the herd.

Another sprints past close by and confuses things.

Most of the wolves stick to their original quarry.

They have, after all, been harrying it for some time and it may be tiring.

But it's got away.

Another wolf is chasing the stag that ran by them earlier.

But that escapes too.

Only one in ten wolf hunts is successful.

The weather worsens.

It's a week since the wolves fed. They're getting desperate.

They have no alternative but to continue to follow the herd.

Now they have a real chance. A female has become isolated and is close to the end of her strength.

She can go no further.

But even now, TWO wolves are not strong enough to bring her down.

But then the rest of the pack arrive.

Now she has no chance.

The herd moves on.

The herds of North America are rivalled in size by those in Africa.

And it's here in the Old World that the other great group of hunters first appeared.

This is the original home of the cats.

There's no problem at all in finding the hunters that dominate THESE hunting grounds...

..lions.

With all this meat walking around, they're taking no notice whatsoever.

The fact of the matter is most lions do most of their hunting at night.

The daytime's a bad time.

It's very hot. Now it's near the middle of the day and the lions have found a nice cool place to rest.

And during the day, too, it's so bright,

their prey can see them - hunting is very difficult.

Much better to hunt during the darkness of the night.

Their eyes are more sensitive than ours, but neither they nor I can see THESE lights.

They're infra-red and visible only to our special cameras.

WHISPERS: Lions hardly ever roar in the day.

It's very much a night-time thing.

And now in the darkness,

there are a number of them roaring

just around here.

There are two, I know, within three or four yards of where I am now.

And there's a third

perhaps 20 yards over there,

though it's difficult to tell because it's pitch black except for just faint moonlight.

Three of them belong to the same pride and they are communicating,

telling one another where they are.

LIONS ROAR

Those are not aggressive roars. They are communication roars.

But they are quite enough to chill the blood

in the blackness of the night...

LIONS ROAR

..especially when you know that the lions making them are within a few yards of you

but you can't see them!

A hunt is beginning.

The shine in their eyes comes from our infra-red lights

reflected by a mirror-like membrane at the back of their eyes.

That, and pupils that open far wider than ours, enables them to see eight times better at night than we can.

The big male is going too.

The cubs are bringing up the rear.

The slightest noise could stampede the zebras.

ZEBRA CRIES

LIONS GROWL

The lioness's jaws are clamped in the zebra's throat.

They're throttling it.

Now there is food for all -

so much, in fact, that there's very little squabbling.

Dawn - and the pride are still lounging around with full bellies.

The zebra know that - for the moment, at least - there's no danger.

Considering how powerful and aggressive lions can be,

life within the pride is remarkably peaceful and harmonious.

Just as they hunt together, so they also help one another in bringing up the young.

A nursing mother will allow cubs belonging to others to take her milk.

The lionesses in a pride are nearly always sisters,

but, even so, such co-operation and tolerance is remarkable

and very unusual indeed among cats.

Most cats are solitaries,

living and hunting by themselves

These are the cubs of a single mother - a cheetah.

She has a heavy responsibility. Neither her sisters nor the cubs' father help in bringing them up.

Finding food for them - and for herself - is not easy.

She moves off...

and they follow.

But they're likely to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Impala are grazing nearby.

They move away as she approaches but they don't panic.

Unless a cheetah is within 30 yards, they can outrun her.

She knows that too and doesn't want to waste her energy.

She won't charge unless she gets really close.

The cubs seem to realise that an attack is imminent and settle down to watch.

Is she close enough?

They're beginning to drift away.

She starts her sprint.

Now she's running flat out.

She's bounding so swiftly that her feet are off the ground for almost half the time. She's almost flying.

The race is over.

The slowest will not compete again.

Cheetahs are the fastest thing on four legs.

Their backbones are so supple

that their hind legs can reach forward on either side of the front.

She's so slim and agile,

she can rival a gazelle in dodging and swerving.

Unusually, another has come to share her prize.

It's probably a grown-up cub from last year's litter.

She wouldn't tolerate anyone else.

Her slim athletic build is now a liability -

heavier animals like lions could push her off her kill.

So she and her cubs eat fast.

All big cats are widely distributed, but one is particularly adaptable.

It lives in tropical rain forests from the Congo to Vietnam,

in deserts from Algeria to Iran

and here in the rocky hills of northern India.

Prey is scarce here.

By far the most abundant are the domestic animals

that those other great meat-eaters - human beings - keep to consume themselves.

GOATS BLEAT

The villagers know that this cat usually hunts at night,

so every evening they drive the goats into this thorn-walled enclosure to keep them safe.

Even a BIG cat won't be able to cross THIS.

It's now absolutely dark

and all I have to help me is a torch.

Beyond its beam, there is absolute blackness.

So I feel pretty vulnerable,

because this big cat can move at night in total darkness.

It could be anywhere.

But we DO have infra-red cameras in this village

so if it does come, we will see it.

And this thatched hut is our technical operations control centre!

We've got three cameras stationed around the village, each with its own monitor,

so whichever way the raider comes, we should see it.

I can scan each one of them.

There it is - a silent, moving shadow.

It's a leopard -

a female - and she's moving down the main path through the village.

That's our hut!

She's just beyond the curtain across the doorway - within a few yards of me.

But I'm not what she's looking for.

She's leaving.

The flock has survived without loss for another night.

Of all the big cats,

the leopard is perhaps the best stalker - and the least seen.

In Africa, it hunts gazelles.

Each paw is placed with the utmost care.

IT SNORTS

SHORT, SHARP COUGHS

ALARM CALLS

No dog can equal the stealth with which cats can stalk,

nor the swift efficiency with which they dispatch their victims.

I'm in the frozen north and this is the trail

of the biggest of the cats - the tiger -

and the biggest of the tigers -

a Siberian tiger -

surely the most formidable hunter of all.

Until human beings devised weapons for themselves,

this was the most powerful killer on Earth - the top predator.

Few creatures could escape it. Nothing could threaten it.

But that has now changed.

Hunting animals need hunting grounds,

and that, inevitably, brings them in conflict with humanity.

Once, there were tigers all over Asia -

from Sumatra and Bali in the south,

India in the west, up to Siberia in the north.

But sadly, over much of those areas,

the tiger has disappeared.

And even THIS one

is in captivity.

Big cats like the same sort of meat as human beings -

as well as eating human beings!

So it's scarcely surprising that the two don't co-exist very easily.

But once, these magnificent meat-eaters

were the lords of the land...

..the ultimate in lethal grace and beauty.

I don't really know why it is that lions don't jump into a Land Rover with no doors on its sides

and take out the people who are sitting in there.

But they don't, and that's the thought you want to hang on to

if you have no doors to your Land Rover and lions all around you!

Most big cats are nocturnal hunters

so, until now, we've only witnessed a fraction of their lives.

Scientific studies and daylight filming have pieced together evidence of the night action

but our understanding of the nocturnal life of all the big cats has been, at best, tantalising.

The leopard is a stealthy, solitary hunter.

It's rare for an individual to kill by day and rarer still for us to be able to film it.

The leopard's territory may cover 25 square kilometres

and, even with the cover of darkness, it's thought that less than 5% of hunts are successful.

We can only try to interpret the evidence left in the morning.

But there ARE people very practised in this particular art.

For many years, field biologist Philip Stander

has worked with the Ju'hoan bushmen to study the leopards of Namibia.

This leopard can be within five metres, perhaps behind that bush,

and in this habitat, we will never see it.

But with the bushmen's skill, we learn much from the tracks.

We know that it's an adult male.

There's a vast amount we can learn on the animals, just from tracking.

More than 100 kills have been interpreted in this way.

The bushmen can read the prints so accurately that they can follow the leopard's approach to its prey -

even see how he dug his paws into the sand before his final pounce.

The tiger, too, is a nocturnal ambush hunter with a large territory.

But in the Indian forest, there is even less chance of finding footprints in sand

or evidence of a nocturnal attack.

Once again, ANY film of a tiger hunt in daylight is rare.

Ullas Karanth is a tiger expert who follows the animals in the forest

by combining modern technology and a traditional ally - the elephant.

Radio telemetry enables tracking of animals that are secretive

and which are active at night, and which use very dense cover.

The tiger does all these things.

The cover's very dense so you don't get much visual observation.

Radio tracking has revealed

how tigers use their territory, and guided researchers to kill sites.

The team has made a first step into the night. These photographic traps

provide a snapshot of the tiger's nocturnal movements, and stripe patterns identify individuals.

Yet, without more complex technology, we're still very much in the dark.

And what of lions?

We've observed and filmed daylight hunts for many years,

but always in the knowledge that most of their kills are at night.

Only after decades of research has the strategy of lion hunts emerged.

It's less a form of team-work, as was once thought,

and more an exercise in individual risk analysis by each lioness.

This is how the pride spends most daylight hours.

Generally, hunting happens after the sun has set.

But to follow the action into the night,

we needed to see in the dark,

with cameras so sensitive that they could get pictures in moonlight or even starlight,

or sometimes to use a completely different light source - infrared.

The technology for doing that was developed by a very different kind of human hunter,

but film-makers, like Justine Evans, have now become expert in its use.

The technology to film animals at night

has all come from the military, and there is quite a lot of similarity

between the way we approach difficult, shy animals and the way the military operate.

You need to assess the area you're working in,

you need to think of tactics, how to get close to something that doesn't want you to get close to it.

It can be intense working at night. No-one gets used to the dark.

I think it's natural for all of us to feel quite fearful.

If I turn this infrared light out,

which is actually illuminating the picture that you're seeing,

and I turn on this tiny torch,

this is the sort of level of light I'd use to see the controls.

You're seeing more than I can see

because you've got an infrared camera which is sensitive to this.

Justine's experience of nocturnal filming

has been built up since 1996,

when she first went to Africa with the inventor of the low-light camera,

wildlife cameraman Martin Dohrn.

We assumed we'd be able to film most of it in natural moonlight

but we discovered that, on bright, moonlit nights, nothing happened.

The lions just slept, and so did their prey.

It wasn't until it got really dark and stormy and moonless

that things started happening.

The worse the weather, the more carnage.

This made the work even more demanding,

but the behaviour it revealed

was quite extraordinary.

I started filming a group of ten lions

that were all very young.

They had a specialisation - digging up warthog.

Because there were ten of them,

one would dig and the rest would sleep, and they'd take turns.

Eventually, they'd get to it,

and then ten mouths would just reach in

and this pig would disappear in ten directions!

That was a vulnerable situation.

What's now clear is that lions and other predators

have a quite different sense of purpose in the night.

What's very natural for them is equally unsettling for us humans.

It's a strange feeling if you sit down somewhere at night

and you don't have your back to something solid, like a tree,

you feel vulnerable from behind,

and you can feel unnerved by the sounds around you.

You can't see, and you think that other animals CAN see you.

Since Justine first filmed her lions with the Starlight camera,

infrared technology has evolved to take us deeper into the night.

In this series,

we've filmed nocturnal hunters and behaviour never seen before,

from jungle streams in Ecuador to bat caves of Texas.

And this is just the beginning.

As the technology develops,

and we gain more techniques and experience in working at night,

the behaviour that has until now been hidden will be revealed.

There's much more to discover in the nocturnal life of mammals.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd