Growing Up The Trials of Life

Few babies have such a compressed childhood as this young elephant seal,

born on a beach in Patagonia only a few days ago.

Its mother can't feed out of water, so she won't stay here for long,

and her pup must suck the milk it needs as quickly as it can.

LOUD GRUNTING

The milk contains 12 times more fat than cow's milk.

The mother produces it from her blubber and the pup converts most of it straight back to blubber.

The nursery is dangerously crowded and the pups can easily be crushed and killed by the huge bulls

as they quarrel among themselves and chase after the females.

In three weeks, the pup's weight has quadrupled.

But its mother is now starving and has to get back to the sea.

So now this pup is on its own.

It will remain here for another six to eight weeks

while it converts the fat that it took so urgently from its mother into flesh and bone

and gets strong enough to go out to sea.

And that task of gaining size and strength sufficient to survive unaided

is the main task of childhood.

And the main trial of childhood is to remain alive

during this difficult period when an animal is almost defenceless.

CHIRPING OF MANY CHICKS

Baby terns need fish, and their parents bring it to them several times a day.

Their nursery is crowded, too,

for all terns in the colony start laying almost simultaneously in late spring,

when there is more time to catch the quantities of fish the young need.

The nests are so tightly packed together

that returning parents inevitably invade their neighbours' airspace

and there's a lot of squabbling.

But the very density of the colony brings one great advantage.

Gulls, if given a chance, will snatch and swallow an egg or a chick.

A single tern has little chance of driving them off,

but a group can mount a much more formidable defence.

You may think that parental responsibility

would hardly trouble an insect.

Most DO abandon their eggs, but not the female lace-bug.

She protects her newly-hatched young with as much diligence and courage as any tern.

This is one of her many enemies - the larva of a lacewing.

It stabs the young lace-bug with its stiletto mouth-parts

and sucks it dry.

But in its death throes,

the infant bug raises the alarm - it discharges a smell

that summons the mother.

What weapons she has with which to fight such an enemy is difficult to see.

Nonetheless, she wins

and shepherds her charges away

to feed elsewhere.

But there is always danger...

A jumping spider.

Once again, back into battle.

Her hard wing-cases seem to give some protection from the spider's poison fangs,

but even so it is a brave display.

Even a spider, apparently, can be seen off

if you have the courage of motherhood.

In the Russian Arctic, at the start of the brief summer, snow geese babies are hatching.

Their thick down protects them from the cold

and they instinctively peck for morsels of food

almost as soon as they are free from their shells.

But they don't wander far from their parents,

for like all ducks, geese and many ground-living birds,

they become fixated on the image of the first large moving things they see.

These are nearly always the legs of their parents,

and they will follow them for the rest of their childhood.

So when mother and father move on, they ALL move on.

An Arctic fox.

GEESE HONK ANGRILY

When the geese started nesting last month, the coast was ice-bound.

But now the ice has melted and the family start off

on a long journey to the sea, where they can find food.

If they can, they float.

But most of the journey has to be done on foot,

for the young can't fly and their parents won't desert them.

And that is real devotion, for the coast is 30 miles away.

That imprinted compulsion to follow mother's legs will never be more important.

CONSTANT CHIRPING

And, of course, the parents must always be prepared to fight off enemies.

Once again, gulls.

A mother goose can produce as many as ten goslings because she lays eggs.

As one develops, she expels it from her body, wrapped in a shell.

No bird could retain a dozen chicks inside her body and still fly.

Mammals, of course, bear their young in a different way.

Their babies DO develop inside their mother's body and emerge alive, without shells.

Even so, some mammals produce huge litters.

Here in Florida, there lives one species which gives birth to its young in a quite unique way.

There's one in this tree here.

Most of its relatives are found in Australia.

It's an opossum.

A female opossum gives birth

when her babies are hardly as big as bees.

She may produce as many as 50.

They wriggle out and fasten on to her nipples.

But she has only about a dozen teats. First come, first served. The rest die.

The lucky ones stay attached, drinking away for the next 16 weeks.

Even when they can take solid food and are big enough to find it for themselves,

they are reluctant to leave mother.

She's attentive and affectionate, but they are a great encumbrance.

By now, she's been caring for them for four months. It's time they left.

And here in my shirt

is a baby.

The mother abandons ALL her babies when they get to about this stage,

and they creep about, quite defenceless,

so they can be easily picked up.

Kangaroos and wallabies also rear their babies in pouches.

But they only produce one at a time and they look after them for much longer.

A young wallaby doesn't leave the pouch at all for about five months.

Towards the end of that time,

it's so heavy that mother may tip it out so as not to be tripped up by it.

Even when the baby HAS emerged, it's still reluctant to leave - understandably so.

In the pouch it can get milk inside and vegetables outside.

Mammals of the northern hemisphere, like these Central Asian antelope, the saiga,

keep their young within them until they're very well developed.

A young saiga, within minutes of its arrival, is able to stagger to its feet...but only just.

BLEATING

And it MUST keep going.

Its mother must move with the herd to get her food, grass,

and the baby has to move with its mother to get its food, milk.

The young are born in May,

when the grass begins to sprout and the need for the herd to keep moving is least urgent.

If the calf is lucky, it may be allowed to spend a day or two in a scrape on the ground before moving.

But it may have to be up and running within hours.

A severe winter can decimate a herd,

but saiga can recover their numbers with extraordinary speed.

A female calf, born in the spring, can mate in the autumn and bear her first single baby the next spring.

The next year, when she is adult,

she usually produces twins.

So a herd that has been almost wiped out can be 100,000 strong again within a few years.

The steppe eagle is hardly big enough to take a young, vigorous saiga calf.

It's mostly a carrion feeder.

But if the baby saiga weakens,

the eagle will finish it off.

As the days warm, the herd moves north,

following the retreating snow and feeding on the new grass.

But within a few months the cold begins to return

and the herd treks back again.

By the time the young saiga is a year old, it may have walked as much as 4,000 miles.

Baby scorpions get a lift.

Their mother wanders over a wide range,

as most hunters must do.

As soon as they hatch, they clamber up on to the mother's back.

There is no safer place for them

than beneath the formidable sting on the end of her tail.

A mother shrew parks her babies,

hiding them in a safe place,

often under a stone.

Having herself fed on insects,

she returns to feed them on milk.

But if she suspects her chosen nursery has become unsafe,

she gives her young, whose eyesight is not very good, a command with an ultra-sonic squeak.

They obey immediately.

Among eider duck, looking after the young is a job for females, not the black and white males.

But the females share the load.

Mothers lead their newly-hatched ducklings down to the sea.

There, other females - aunties - take charge of them, allowing the mothers to go for a good meal.

These aunties are young females who haven't paired this season and who have no young of their own.

More and more families come down to the water,

until the creche may have as many as 500 ducklings in it.

The young ducklings are able to feed themselves, but they are completely defenceless.

And once again, there are enemies around.

The gull assesses the defences of the creche,

and finds that aunties can be just as brave as any parent.

Even though the gull is driven off and gets nothing, there are inevitably casualties.

This is a mara, a Patagonian relative of the guinea pig,

and it, too, uses a creche.

A dozen or so females give birth to their babies in the same place,

so there may be as many as 40 young maras in one nursery hole.

There are nearly always one or two parents around,

for mammals can't abandon their babies for days, as eider ducks do.

Each mother has to return every day

to give her babies milk.

She aims to feed only HER babies -

usually twins - who she recognises largely by their smell.

But that doesn't stop the others in the nursery from trying their luck.

Sometimes the whole creche pester a mother so vigorously

that she may just give up and let all of them take her milk.

Some bats also use a creche system.

All these are females -

free-tailed bats that flew up to this cave in Texas from Mexico a few weeks ago,

leaving their mates to their own devices.

The cave's a perfect maternity ward.

It's warm and dry, and the surrounding countryside is rich in insects to feed on.

A million mothers chose this cave, and now there are a million new-born babes here as well.

In the late afternoon, the mothers leave to feed.

The departure starts before it is properly dark,

for it takes a long time

for a million bats to stream out of the relatively small cave mouth.

The babies they leave behind are massed in one huge creche.

They cluster together in order to keep warm.

Even now, when they are just beginning to grow their fur, staying together saves energy.

But imagine trying to find your baby among this lot!

Throughout the night, mothers visit the creche to give their babies a feed of milk.

LOUD FLUTTERING OF WINGS

This mother knows the cave layout well enough to land quite close to where she last left her baby.

But a lot of jostling goes on, so the baby may have moved a little.

As she searches, the other hungry youngsters struggle to reach the nipples in her armpits.

No luck. She gives up.

If a baby isn't fed at least once a night, it's likely to die.

So she returns and starts again.

On the edge of the creche, a baby waits for its mother,

who clearly hasn't returned for some time.

Below, scavengers wait for corpses that might fall.

The mother's main way of finding the baby is, astonishingly, by recognising its cry,

even in this pandemonium.

At last! This is her baby, and at last it feeds.

Vast nurseries like this can only exist if there is an abundance of food around.

Not far from Texas, in Florida, the situation is very different.

The white sand on which these scrubby pines grow

is so poor in nutrients that there is little to sustain adult animals, let alone their babies.

Even birds find it a hard place in which to live.

Food is hard to find and there aren't many places to build a nest,

but it's home to a bird that's been studied almost as intensively as any bird in the world.

And this is it - the Florida scrub jay.

Because every jay in this area has been banded for almost 20 years, we know who each one is.

This one, with three rings on her right leg, is a young female from the territory to the left.

This one, with bands on both legs, is the dominant male...

HE LAUGHS

..who has a nest in this territory.

Food is so scarce that more than two adults need to search for it if the chicks are to be fed.

This bird is not the parent of these nestlings.

It's one of last year's chicks, who stayed on to help raise this brood.

Young female helpers, after a year or two, usually leave to look for territories of their own.

But males may stay for up to seven years.

One may inherit the nesting site when the old breeding male dies,

but most will never father a brood.

They find their reproductive reward

in helping to raise their younger brothers and sisters.

Guarding the food supply is just as important as collecting it,

and some of the young helpers act as sentinels, keeping an eye out for thieves.

This trespasser from a neighbouring territory sneaks in to try to steal food.

That can't be allowed.

SCREECHING

Back to normal duties.

Another hungry intruder, an indigo snake.

The meal it is searching for could well be a jay chick.

So teamwork saves the nest.

As a result of studies here, we now know

that pairs with teams to help them are much more successful in rearing their young.

And such co-operation is quite widespread among birds.

Some species of woodpeckers and wrens use this form of co-operation, as, indeed, do some mammals.

Elephants, for example, collaborate to bring up their babies.

At least, the females do.

Adult males wander off and live more or less solitary lives away from the herd.

A new baby is the focus of great interest and affection,

not only from its mother, but from elder sisters, aunts,

and especially the old lady who leads the herd and who is almost certainly its grandmother.

Sometimes, indeed, everyone wants the privilege of being nanny.

This visiting bull is not used to infants.

Great consternation among sisters and aunts.

Childhood, of course, is a time for play,

and play is a way of finding out about your world and acquiring the skills you need in later life.

Playing in water is fun not only for infants but for adults.

It's a pleasure that elephants never seem to lose, no matter how old they are.

Still, it takes a bit of getting used to.

And how do you get your legs clean afterwards?

Elephants have a very long childhood.

It varies a lot, but most don't reach the age of puberty till they're 11 or 12 years old.

As they approach that time, they begin to try out some of the things that adults do.

An elephant doesn't need to be a fast learner.

It's a strict vegetarian, and its range of food is small.

It doesn't have to worry unduly about enemies - its great bulk is a protection in itself.

But if you live for 60 or 70 years, then there is no hurry to grow up and assume adult responsibilities.

It takes time to build a body that will eventually weigh five tons.

Chimpanzee childhood is more complicated.

Chimp youngsters must know what is good to eat and what isn't.

They have a complex social life,

so a young chimp must learn how to behave towards different individuals in the community.

And all kinds of physical skills have to be acquired.

Babies spend their first few months clinging to their mother,

and from this privileged and protected position

they have a grandstand view of how things are done.

These Ivory Coast chimps have a special skill all of their own.

They've learned how to crack nuts.

But when you're only nine months old, watching mother crack nuts loses its fascination after a bit.

The shells, on the other hand, have possibilities as toys.

ANGRY SCREECHING

You also have to learn quickly which adults are likely to be your friend

and who it might be safer to steer clear of.

This slightly older infant is beginning to follow the big boys and copy the way they behave,

so discovering what life is like among the grown-ups.

And mother is always there to provide comfort and protection

when things get a bit baffling and worrisome.

Nut-cracking is complicated,

involving some of the most advanced tool-using techniques practised by any animal.

It's no use just bashing a stick on the ground.

You have to have a decent anvil.

Nuts have to be collected and then carried to the place where they can be cracked.

The anvil is almost always the root of a tree.

Eventually the time comes when, at last, you get the hang of it.

For chimpanzees, acquiring adult skills is a gradual process.

But that is not the case for most animals.

For these youngsters - baby albatross on the Pacific Leeward Islands,

the ending of childhood is brutally abrupt.

Within the next few days, they must fly

and almost immediately become as accomplished in the air as their parents.

The best they can do by way of preparation

is to strengthen their breast muscles by beating their wings.

If they don't get it right first time, it could be catastrophic.

Dark shapes appear in the shallows.

Tiger sharks. Every year, at this precise time,

they appear from nowhere.

For the bats in Texas, too, childhood is coming to an end.

The babies are now a month old.

The time is coming for the mothers to fly back to the males in Mexico,

taking their babies with them.

For the past few days, many of the babies have been going on short practice flights within the cave.

But now some of them are accompanying the adult females as they fly out into the open sky.

But they're far from expert fliers.

Here's one that has crash-landed within a few yards of the cave.

In the cave, he was very safe - about one in a hundred babies die in there.

But out here he is surrounded by danger.

Of the million bats born in there, three-quarters will be dead before they are adult.

His trials of life really are just starting. Good luck to you.

Subtitles by BBC - 1990