Enduring the Drought Wild Brazil

Brazil. The beating heart of South America.

Vast landscapes, carved by the irresistible forces of nature.

More animals live here than in any other nation on Earth.

This is the story of three of them.

SQUEAKING

As the seasons change,

animal families face extreme challenges.

THUNDER ROARS

Immense floods.

Brutal drought.

Surviving and raising young.

LOUD SQUEALS

Through the good times and the bad...

SCREECHING

..this is an intimate journey

to the heart of a spectacular country.

The monsoon floods are over and the land is drying out fast.

CAPUCHIN SQUEAKS

The baby tufted capuchin has found his place in his group's

complex society.

The young coatis have worked out who's friend and who's foe.

And the otter kits have learned to swim in Brazil's most

dangerous waters.

With the youngsters becoming independent,

their parents are thinking about the next generation.

But finding a mate won't be easy.

They're about to be faced with Brazil's harshest season...

..drought and fire.

INSECTS BUZZ

This is the hottest, driest part of Brazil - northeast Piaui.

The temperature here exceeds 40 degrees centigrade.

It hasn't rained for months.

PERSISTENT STONE CRACKING

CRACKING CONTINUES

These canyons are home to a group of tufted capuchin monkeys.

SCREECHING

The young ones are growing up fast.

This female no longer has a baby to look after,

and her biological clock has started ticking again.

CHIRPING

In her eyes, her perfect partner is the dominant male.

He's strong and healthy,

and he's been head of this troop for five years.

Soon she'll be ready to mate, but she's chosen

just about the toughest time of year to start courting him.

It's not easy living here at any time of year,

but in the dry season, finding food is incredibly hard.

The only reason these monkeys can survive here at all is

because they've worked out how to use tools.

Even so, they must spend a lot of their time foraging.

It takes a lot of practice.

Capuchin females need to give birth when there's more food around,

in the wet season.

To do that, she needs to mate now.

Timing is everything.

Unfortunately, he doesn't share her enthusiasm.

Female capuchins have to be persistent.

She tries to seduce him.

But he's playing hard to get.

CHIRPING

FEMALE CAPUCHIN SQUEAKS

MALE CAPUCHIN HISSES

MALE HISSES

He's got all the time in the world.

She doesn't.

She'll have to do more to impress him, and soon.

Meanwhile,

her world grows hotter

and drier.

Hundreds of miles to the southwest,

whole landscapes are changing dramatically.

A few months ago,

vast floods covered Brazil's Vazantes.

Now the land is turning to dust.

BIRDS CALL

Pools are becoming desperately scarce.

This tiny water hole is now the only one for miles around.

It's a lifeline for many creatures,

including this family of coatis.

They survived the flood by taking refuge in the trees.

Now they face a long trek, every day, just to get a drink.

This group's largest coati

is a dark male.

But he's just a guest in this all-female group.

He's come here to find a mate.

Their youngsters are almost fully grown.

So this male knows that the females will soon be ready to breed.

Just like the capuchins, for the coatis,

the dry season is all about courtship.

The females must conceive now,

so their babies are born with the rains.

But right now they don't seem to be in any hurry.

And even the male seems happy enough to wait.

But there's trouble ahead.

A rival male.

He's not attached to any group at the moment, but he'd like to be.

If the dark male wants to stay here,

he may have to fight for it.

He sizes up his rival.

Male coatis pack a serious set of teeth.

And the intruder makes himself bigger by bristling up his fur.

He means business.

HE has nothing to lose.

The dark male has a simple choice,

stay and fight or walk away.

He's lost his females.

If he wants to be a father this year, he'll have to win them back.

And soon he'll be out of time.

The dry season is almost at its peak.

The tropical sun bakes the land.

What few clouds remain offer no chance of rain.

And with no rain to feed the rivers,

the Pantanal,

the largest freshwater wetland on the planet, is starting to dry out.

The flood season seems like a distant memory.

At this time of year, keeping cool is a real problem.

At over 100 kilos, almost as big as a lion,

this male jaguar feels the heat more than most.

In the coming weeks, he too must find a mate.

But for now, he can't even find a bit of peace in the shade.

OTTERS CRY

This giant otter family are noisy neighbours

and fiercely protective of their favourite sandbanks.

Unlike jaguars, the parents of this young otter

aren't thinking about mating,

they've still got some more parenting to do.

Soon it'll be time for this one

to learn how to catch her own fish.

Her mother's milk is running dry.

So now, when the rest of the family bring fish back to the holt,

she's determined to grab a piece for herself.

Getting fish from the adults is easy.

Keeping it from her siblings is much trickier.

THEY SQUEAL

Fights like this aren't just about food.

Giant otters live in large families.

This will help establish their position

in the group's pecking order.

Oh, dear.

Mother's milk won't be enough for much longer.

The sooner she can catch her own fish, the better.

The dropping water levels

mean fishing should become easier for the otters.

But for the jaguars,

it makes life harder.

This male is now searching for a mate.

Scent marks tell him if any receptive females have been here.

What he can't tell is where to find them.

A female's territory can stretch for 50 square kilometres.

And the falling water levels mean that with every passing day,

he has to cover more and more ground to try and find her.

As the dry season wears on,

some of the rivers stop flowing altogether.

Most of the fish trapped in this pool were snapped up long ago.

It's a challenging time for caiman.

This one must have been desperate

to tackle a porcupine.

For the animals that live here,

the pressure is intense.

But for one creature, this is their moment.

During the wet season,

millions of caterpillars grew fat on an abundance of leaves.

Now they've emerged as hawk moths.

They'll mate and lay eggs in just a few days.

But first they must drink,

and there are very few places left to do that safely.

More and more moths emerge from the surrounding trees.

Hatching all together

means that enough of them will survive to find a mate.

The females will lay eggs ready to hatch

when there's plenty of greenery

for a new generation of caterpillars.

In the dry canyons of Serra da Capivara,

all the capuchins are feeling the heat.

For this female capuchin, things have become even more urgent.

She has come into oestrus.

She must mate in the next four days if she wants to have a baby.

She's now so obsessed,

that she's barely eating,

or even drinking.

That's got to be tough in this heat.

For the troop's youngest member,

just finding food is a struggle.

Even the adults find it hard.

But these monkeys aren't after food,

they're after minerals.

And they get those by licking or even inhaling this dust.

No-one knows why they do it.

But this group are probably the smartest monkeys in the world

and they may be using this for medicinal purposes.

Quite how they learned to do this is a mystery.

But capuchins learn by example.

One monkey starts...

..and soon they're all doing it.

But despite their obvious intelligence,

this male seems incapable of taking a hint.

Males of most species rarely need to be asked more than once.

But no matter what she tries,

she just can't get his attention.

She has just days to change his mind.

Drought tightens its grip across the country.

The Pantanal's rivers shrink further in the baking sun.

Silt from the last floods dries into dust.

The sand is almost too hot to walk on.

Even the caiman take cover in the shade.

This male jaguar can't rest.

He has too much ground to cover in his search for a mate.

With so little water left,

the chances are that any females will be somewhere along this river.

And although he doesn't realise it,

there is a female,

just a few miles away.

She too has a one-track mind,

but food is what she's after.

Like many of the Pantanal's jaguars,

she specialises in hunting caiman

which is why adults will flee at the first sight of a jaguar.

But baby caiman have yet to learn this.

At this time of year

they're hiding in the nooks and crannies of the exposed banks.

Easy pickings, IF she can dig one out.

They may not be much of a meal, but they're easier to catch

and she needs all the food she can get.

That's a lot of work for a little caiman.

She'll need plenty more if she's to breed successfully.

The lower water level should make our baby otters' lives easier.

After all, less water should make fish easier to catch.

But less water means more mud.

And that makes fish hard to see.

She must learn to use her whiskers instead.

It could take a while to get the hang of it.

The adults make it look easy.

But the days of free hand-outs are over.

Perhaps temptation will encourage her to hunt.

There are over 200 species of fish in these rivers,

she just needs to catch one of them.

Her mother keeps a close eye.

Success.

It's an important moment -

one of her final steps towards adulthood.

Her parents' duties are almost done.

Soon her mother will turn her attentions back to her partner

and will look to expand the family once more.

For now, the drought intensifies.

In the Vazantes, all the water holes have dried up.

Life for many animals would be impossible

were it not for one special tree.

Even in the toughest drought,

acuri palms produce an abundance of fruit.

And it's not just coatis enjoying the feast.

But this male coati isn't interested in food.

He really wants to mate.

Having lost a fight to a rival,

he's no longer allowed anywhere near the females.

The chances of him breeding at all this year are getting slimmer.

For the intruder, things look very different.

He now has access to lots of females.

But for them, mating can be a painful affair.

And if the male's too rough, he's swiftly punished.

The females have pushed the intruder away.

This could be the chance the dark male has been waiting for.

Now HE's the one who has nothing to lose.

But if he thought his rival would just give up, he's mistaken.

A standoff,

again.

With everything to play for.

The fight has cost the dark male a nasty cut on his nose.

But he's won back the affection of his females,

and the chance to father a new generation.

As the days pass, the temperature rises further.

In some places, the land is now becoming dangerously dry.

Almost a quarter of this vast country is covered in savanna.

Two million square kilometres of grassland, the Brazilian Cerrado.

It's one of the oldest and most diverse

tropical ecosystems on the planet.

A third of all Brazilian species live here.

Drought has dried these grasses to a crisp.

Now this entire landscape is a tinderbox.

All of the animals here

are adapted to survive in these harsh conditions.

But there's one force of nature that no creature can survive.

Thunderstorms can create lightning without rain.

One strike is all it takes.

At the height of the dry season,

hundreds of fires a day may burn across Brazil.

Once they've started,

these fires can take on a momentum all of their own.

Slowly, the animals return.

But their home has been turned to ash.

They've survived the fire,

but how long can they survive now?

At the height of the fire season,

much of Brazil wakes to blood-red skies.

Landscapes hundreds of kilometres away are bathed in eerie light.

The Pantanal has escaped the flames,

but here most of the rivers are now barely recognisable.

It's at this toughest time of the year

that the female jaguar is ready for mating.

Finally, the male's search is over.

They'll mate repeatedly over the next few days.

Until recently, jaguars were thought of as solitary,

only ever getting together briefly.

But the jaguars in the Pantanal

are now revealing a different side to these cats.

This pair may stay together for weeks,

or even months.

In the canyon lands, the drought has reached its height.

It's been four days

since this female first set eyes on the object of her desire.

She's been pursuing him relentlessly

and he's stubbornly ignored her.

Today, her world has changed.

At last, he's allowed her to groom him.

And for the first time,

her affections are returned.

They move away from the rest of the troop.

It's time for a little privacy.

She is exhausted.

And he is a changed male.

This little one won't be the troop's youngest for much longer.

All of our animal families

have survived this season of drought and fire.

Drawing on their resilience, ingenuity

and teamwork.

Soon the rains will return

and with the harsh days of drought over,

Brazil will burst into life once more.

This land of extremes has swung from flood to fire,

and these animals have done more than just survive here.

They've flourished.

They've nurtured.

They've grown.

And now, a new generation is on its way.

They too will have to find their way in this extraordinary country.

Of all Brazil's animal families,

one in particular captured the hearts of the Wild Brazil team.

They'd been amazed by the ingenuity of the tufted capuchins.

But what would happen

when their intelligence was really put to the test?

Cameraman Ted Giffords was following the monkey family

in Serra da Capivara National Park.

They're usually rather difficult to find.

So we're driving to find the monkeys and one's just ran across the road.

That's really funny, so...

Oh, that's Chica. That's Chica.

You can recognise her because she has got an amazing quiff.

Soon everyone followed Chica to explore Ted's car.

I think this car must be a very strange object to them

because it's completely smooth and slippery.

It's fascinating watching their thought process

because they are sliding around on it and tapping it,

thinking, "Well, what is this?"

But they know it contains something worth having.

It's this amazing curiosity towards anything new in their environment

that primatologist Camila Coelho is using to test

how capuchins learn new behaviours.

This is the first time a study like this

has been tried with wild capuchins anywhere in the world.

But how would Chica and her family do?

Chica is trying to get the experiment started

before we're ready.

So we have to distract her off somewhere,

so that I can get it all set and the cameras rolling.

It's actually quite good

because it means we have always a keen participant.

Now at the peak of the dry season,

the smell of the mango juice in the tubes

was definitely getting their attention.

But how would they adapt their foraging techniques to get to it?

First a "tail drinking" method

that they use to get water

hidden deep inside tree holes.

Teeth that work so well on bark are also great on plastic.

And the stone tools that crack seeds work even better here.

But one monkey was inventing a completely new approach.

She undoes tube number three

and carries it away.

Trust Chica to come in and literally steal the show.

Well, it's a solution.

Not the one we were hoping for, but...

They could clearly adapt their behaviour to get new resources.

But could they learn completely new skills?

To really getting them thinking,

Camila had devised something a bit more taxing.

Enter the monkey-proof box.

A simple pull of the latch would release the food inside,

but the capuchins had never seen anything like this before.

Ted was there to see if they could crack it.

Rather like investigating Ted's car,

at first, a quick feel to figure out what it's made of.

But how to get at what's inside?

Clever tool use wasn't cracking it.

The dominant males muscled in.

Brute force didn't seem to work either.

No-one could figure it out.

But one monkey had other ideas.

Making sure she had the box just to herself,

Chica tried her own investigation.

Success at last.

It wasn't any more difficult

than what she's used to,

just different, and that's the point -

Chica had learnt something new.

Much to her amazement,

a lift of the latch delivered the nuts again and again.

The question now was would she share

the secret with the others?

Because she definitely wasn't sharing the nuts.

As she moved back to the box,

one youngster was taking a keen interest.

Chica appeared happy enough

to reveal the technique to this onlooker.

He watched carefully and learned.

The secret was out.

And then it spread like a craze throughout the group.

Even the old dogs learnt the new trick.

It's actually quite funny, how frantic they are.

They take their handfuls and they run away with handfuls.

They're like naughty school children running away with food.

The experiment had worked.

Camila had seen how new ideas spread throughout the entire group.

It's all down to the capuchins' winning formula

of insatiable curiosity and their ability to learn from each other.

By getting really close to each animal family

and using the insights of Brazil's top scientists,

the team were able to give us a truly unique

and intimate view of life in Wild Brazil.