BBC Video brings you an exciting new series of award-winning wildlife films narrated by
David Attenborough.
Birds of the Sun God features the accomplishments of that most colourful group of birds, the
hummingbirds.
The reddish hermit has been weighed at 1.8 grams, which means two of these tiny birds
weigh the same as one new penny coin.
The birds are literally two a penny.
And in the same video, In Flight Movie uses state-of-the-art filming techniques to explore
the miracle of bird flight as never seen before.
As it reaches the slope where the wind hits the hillside, it feels an updraft.
The buzzard's flight is now effortless.
Its broad wings are built for slow soaring, and by altering their shape, it can fine-tune
the amount of lift they provide.
One of Britain's most appealing birds, the blue tit, is the star of titbits, a revealing
and intimate study.
Back in the nest box, great excitement.
The first egg has hatched.
At hatching, the chick is blind and naked.
It's also unable to regulate its own temperature, so its mother manoeuvres it into a position
where it can be warmly brooded.
And with titbits comes Nightlife, an atmospheric portrait in images and sound of the wildlife
during one night in an English village.
Another video brings together two films of Africa by award-winning cameraman Hugh Miles.
Ambush at Maasai Mara follows a group of lions for a day in one of Kenya's magnificent wildlife
reserves.
The close harmony of pride life is essential for survival.
Mock combat helps strengthen muscles, which one day will be used in earnest.
Hugh Miles himself narrates Leopard, a Darkness in the Grass, his study of one of Africa's
most elusive big cats.
Male impala are seldom on the menu of female leopards, for they're rather too large, and
the horn's potentially dangerous.
But female impala are often hunted, and this one, not knowing that the leopard was hidden
in the grass, was running straight towards it.
BBC Wildlife Specials, filmed by some of the world's top cameramen.
Each video with two spectacular films.
No bigger
than the tassel on a lion's tail, a meerkat stands tall.
In a league of sociability, meerkats head the First Division, for theirs is a tale of
teamwork.
In the vast stadium of the Kalahari Desert, the meerkat team prepares to take the field.
They've been safe in their burrows overnight, but once they venture outside, it's different.
Only by working as a team can they play on the hostile pitch of the southern African
Desert.
The grey meerkat isn't a cat at all, but a mongoose.
Like players in a football team, each meerkat has his role.
Some have special skills, others are jacks of all trades.
Together, they will defend their five square kilometres against all comers.
A ground squirrel.
Meerkats tolerate them as den mates, perhaps because they help excavate the burrows.
The ground squirrels benefit too, from the protection of extra numbers, but the alliance
is an uneasy one.
As the day warms up, the meerkat team sets out to hunt.
Meerkats are carnivores.
They'll eat grubs, insects, reptiles, even small mammals such as mice.
But each meerkat faces a dilemma.
On the one hand, finding food means heads down, bottom up and digging.
On the other hand, it has to keep an eye open for danger and bobs upright to scan the surroundings.
The meerkat's dilemma is to be both predator and prey.
Every crevice is explored in the search for food, and that sometimes can be a dangerous
business.
A scorpion.
Its venom is quite powerful enough to kill a child.
The meerkat must disarm the scorpion by biting off its poisonous sting.
But the odds are loaded against the scorpion.
The meerkat is immune to the worst effects of its venom.
A sting would be painful, but not fatal.
In this barren desert, a scorpion's a feast.
Finding even the smallest meal in the sand takes time.
Time that would be lost by bobbing up and down.
So often the team members take turns to stand guard.
Reassuring peeps tell the rest of the group it's safe to keep on foraging.
Someone's on lookout duty.
In this group, two males specialize as guards.
Between them they take on more than half the sentry duty.
Each shift can last as long as an hour, in temperatures that make the sand too hot for
human beings to touch.
So long as someone's on guard, the rest of the group can keep their heads down and carry
on hunting.
The highest vantage point gives the guard the best view.
His concentration is unwavering, his balance almost perfect.
And at once there's a substitution.
With its keen eyesight, the guard can spot a bird of prey when it's still a mere speck
on the horizon.
A peep of consternation.
But this battler eagle is too clumsy to pose a real threat.
During the heat of the day, the team retreats to the shade, but they continue to hunt.
An animal may shift several times its own weight of sand to find just one tiny grub.
Others take advantage of the meerkat's massive shifting of earth.
Dossy starlings pounce on any insects the diggers may have missed.
But not all the digging is for food.
Working together now, the meerkats clear out a bolt hole.
The guard's alarm brings the whole team to attention.
The jackal, one of the meerkats' greatest enemies.
But he's lost the element of surprise.
He's no hope of a successful hunt now, but the gang, led by the senior male, continue
to scold him until he's out of sight.
Secure underground, one of the females has been excused normal duties to give birth.
Baby meerkats are usually born in litters of four.
For the next few months, the whole team will take care of them, each adult doing its share
of the nursery chores.
The infants are so precocious that after just 14 days they'll follow an adult above ground.
The meerkat team tolerates the cape foxes that have a den nearby, but the foxes could
easily take an unprotected baby.
So as the group sets out to feed for the day, someone, though never the mother, is left
behind to babysit.
In this group, five individuals do most of the babysitting, each one an eager volunteer
and a tender guardian.
Nursery duties don't give the childminder time to feed, but far from the burrow, the
rest of the group is having a hard time too.
It hasn't rained for months.
Insects have burrowed deep in search of moisture, and the meerkats must accept less palatable
food.
A millipede.
The noxious secretion makes it taste horrible, but the meerkats are really hungry.
It
may taste nasty, but at least it's food.
A chir from the sentinel.
He's seen another team of meerkats in the distance.
Just a glimpse of another gang is enough to trigger a clash.
The home team gather around their captain.
Then with a leaping war dance, they go into attack.
Meerkats united, they survey the opposition.
The away team stares back, and then push forward.
Food and shelter are of paramount importance to every individual, and they work as a team
to defend their rights.
The opponents withdraw.
The home team reassemble in victory.
A marshal eagle, most dangerous of the aerial predators.
A solitary male meerkat has become separated from the rest of the group.
Alone he faces the meerkat's eternal dilemma.
Head down or head up.
There's no sentinel to share guard duty here.
Next time, the eagle may be luckier.
Half a kilometer away, the babies are exploring their surroundings.
The babysitter's had nothing to eat all day, but she's still alert.
The lone male returns to the burrow, and the babies greet him enthusiastically.
The Cape fox has noticed a straying infant.
Taking no chances, the babysitters retrieve him.
Their attentiveness is all the more remarkable, given that the infant is not their own, and
indeed may be totally unrelated.
The babies are usually born at the beginning of the meager desert rains, often heralded
by hot winds and swirling dust storms.
TheComeback
Rain overnight has brought water to the dry riverbeds,
and a jackal takes his first drink for several months.
But the meerkats never drink.
For them, the water is the means to an end.
It brings their prey towards the surface.
But these are rejected.
Red spider mites.
Too small to be of interest to the meerkats.
The meerkats are the only species that can survive in the wet.
One meerkat's industry provides his teammates with a cool sandy shower.
Only when there is plenty of food will the meerkats take time out for a long midday rest.
Vigilance increases as the babies, now six weeks old, join the rest of the team to forage.
Each one is apprenticed to an adult from which it learns where and how to find and handle food.
Coaching is a duty taken on by all group members.
Each baby has its favourite and it'll drive off any brother or sister that tries to join in the lesson.
Once the competition's seen off, the lesson resumes.
A meerkat can excavate more than twice its own weight of sand in just a few minutes, if the reward's worthwhile.
This one's a bit more than twice the weight of sand.
This one's after a gecko, but the gecko leaves by another hole.
If it keeps perfectly still, the meerkat may not see it.
But it moves.
The hunter gets his prey, but not for long.
Even this most valuable prize is handed to a young apprentice.
If the babies are to fend for themselves, the meerkat will be able to find food.
If the babies are to fend for themselves, they must learn how to tackle more dangerous prey, so the tutors hand over scorpions alive.
The meerkat will be able to find food.
If the babies are to fend for themselves, they must learn how to tackle more dangerous prey, so the tutors hand over scorpions alive.
If the babies are to fend for themselves, they must learn how to tackle more dangerous prey, so the tutors hand over scorpions alive.
If the babies are to fend for themselves, they must learn how to tackle more dangerous prey, so the tutors hand over scorpions alive.
An ant's nest means food too, but again with a sting in the tail.
The adults pick out cocoons and try to avoid the biting and stinging ants.
But the babies still have a lot to learn.
The ant's nest also means food.
The ant's nest also means food.
The ant's nest also means food.
Always looking for a soft option, the babies will suckle if their mother stands up for long enough, but it's with their tutors that they now find most of their food.
With tails erect, the furry forward line are once more on the attack.
A yellow cobra. Its venom can kill a man in minutes.
Why the meerkats take on such a deadly adversary is a mystery.
They could easily avoid the cobra, yet they torment it relentlessly with apparently gratuitous belligerence.
Perhaps by mobbing the snake and driving it away, they may avoid a more dangerous encounter underground.
In the ferocious sun, the sand tempering of the
In the ferocious sun, the sand temperature has risen to 60 degrees Celsius.
The group stops foraging and retires to the shade of a termite mound.
In one morning, each will have excavated 400 holes, shifted 50 times its weight of sand
and travelled over a kilometre of desert, an impressive record for such a tiny creature.
Yet even as the group rests, one of the team will be on guard in a roasting midday vigil.
Siesta over, the babies are now very playful, teasing squirrels and tumbling with teammates.
Eagle-eyed, the sentry scans the dunes.
The Marshall Eagle is back.
It's large enough to take a monkey, but a meerkat would make a very acceptable snack.
The meerkat team is saved by the sentinels alarm, but a ground squirrel is not swift
enough to escape.
With danger past, the team emerge from their bolt holes, though warily at first.
After the rigours of the day, evening is a time for friendship and relaxation.
The meerkat work ethic is put aside.
In this classless society, youngest hugs oldest, strongest grooms weakest, they all embrace.
This is the team where it's one for all and all for one.
Comrades United!
Imagine you're a chick.
You've been trying to break out of the egg for many hours.
And at last, your first view of the outside world, your brothers and sisters.
And the other eggs, about 40 of them.
But where are your parents?
And what kind of creatures are they?
Yes, you're an ostrich chick, destined to become the world's largest living bird.
But a bird that can't fly.
Those weird feet and legs will make up for it though, for you'll be able to run at 70
kilometres an hour.
You are in fact going to become one of the strangest of all members of the bird world.
Today, it's an excellent runner, but the ostrich is descended from ancestors that flew.
Fossil remains, 50 million years old, have been found showing that ostriches lived in
Asia, Europe, as well as throughout Africa.
Now they're found mainly in East Africa, in various kinds of country, including dry
lake beds and the deserts where they're supposed to bury their heads in the sand.
But do they?
Well, the private life of this strange unbird-like bird is full of surprises.
Our story starts on the glassy savanna of East Africa, not far from Nairobi.
A male in breeding colours feeds enthusiastically, building up the grass into a ball inside that
long neck before he swallows it.
He's going to need a great deal of strength and energy in the next few months if he's
to breed successfully.
For about five months, he will have to defend the territory, patrolling it, displaying at
rival males and driving them away if they're persistent.
Competition for land is high and many males won't get any.
Those that fail won't be able to breed.
The female in plain brown has a large home range which includes the territories of several
cockbirds.
She's searching for her mate of last season, for ostriches may pair for many years.
The cock has now staked out his territory and announces the fact with its queer song.
The hen seems quite eager.
Her quivering wings are a sure sign of interest.
But the cock will have many hens laying in his nest.
Yes, it's he who makes it and he's very selective about who he mates with.
Two females have come visiting.
This is the cantal display.
His head thumps his back in his fervour.
This spectacular performance is easily seen by other ostriches and it stimulates them
to begin their courtship and that's going to be very important.
But the beginning of the breeding season is a hit and miss time and she doesn't seem to
have been too impressed by all that action.
However she's still interested, her posture tells him so, and he needs no further encouragement.
She now becomes his major hen again this year.
But they won't remain together all the time.
The cock is kept busy mating with many extra hens, the minor hens, who may later lay in
his nest.
But she is the major hen, she is in charge and she will herself chase off competing hens.
The bond between the pair is now established and the cock is searching for a nest site
in his territory.
He selects the spot and the major hen comes to look.
At first the cock makes a simple scrape with his great claw, which serves as a mark for
the hen so she can return later to the exact spot for laying.
The raised tail is the sign that an egg is being laid.
This major hen has already laid two eggs, but minor hens with no permanent mate lay
in the nest of an established pair.
The major hen doesn't seem to mind for the extra eggs will help protect hers.
If predators take one there's less chance it'll belong to her.
Here two females compete to lay in the same nest.
A communal nest may contain as many as a hundred eggs.
Normally for these birds about ten hens lay a total of about forty eggs in the one nest,
and that's a lot of potential food for vultures that circle patiently during the six weeks
of the incubation.
The chicks have already been calling inside the egg, telling each other and their parents
that they'll soon be out.
Unlike most birds, ostrich chicks lack an egg tooth for breaking through the thick shell.
Instead they push with their head and neck and their strong legs, slowly rotating within.
The parents take turns at the nest.
They take full advantage of their colours.
The brown camouflage female sitting during the day, the black male at night.
But he does most of the work and also sometimes takes a shift during the day.
The chicks move aside as he rearranges the hatching eggs.
He is very fussy.
Because she started to lay first, the major hen has more eggs in the nest than any other
hen.
It's only possible to cover and incubate about twenty, so the rest she pushes out of the
nest where they will perish.
She incubates her own, but she also has room for some laid by the minor hens.
The male has problems with so many hens about, but if he's been energetic enough, most of
the eggs he incubates he will have fertilised.
Soon the brood will be complete.
In the meantime he doses.
A special membrane cleans the huge eyeballs, but as he gets sleepier his eyelids close.
Crows, one of the many threats to ostrich chicks.
Crows, crows, crows, crows.
Although all the chicks survive that attack, some are sure to die soon, even in the nest.
By the end of the year maybe only fifteen percent will be left alive.
The chicks peck instinctively within minutes of leaving the shell.
It takes them several days however to do it effectively.
In the meantime they still have enough egg yolk within them to sustain them for three
or four days.
And now it's time to go.
The cock takes the lead.
Sometimes an experienced pair will hatch all twenty of their incubated eggs, but the average
is only half that.
The Egyptian vulture hasn't waited in vain.
But the problem is how to get into the egg.
They're so strong that a man can stand on one without breaking it.
The solution is a stone.
It seems that just the sight of the egg stimulates the stone throwing action.
Most rather vaguely, but then more accurately.
The extra eggs pushed outside the nest have served a good purpose.
They're often the first eggs to be taken by a predator if the nest is left briefly unguarded.
Now with the sitting parents gone the predators clean them up and cheetahs are also interested,
though they don't know about throwing stones.
Now the chicks from various families scattered across the savanna are out in the wide world.
They're learning what and how they should eat from their parents.
They pick the best, the greenest leaves, the buds and flowers, the seed and the fruit,
unlike wildebeest or zebra which mow indiscriminately.
They travel slowly across the savanna moving at the speed of the slowest chick.
But they can run very fast if necessary at about fifty kilometres an hour when they're
about a month old.
As well as eating a large variety of plants they take pea-sized pebbles which serve as
teeth in their gizzards, grinding their food.
And the parched ground of the dry season provides a dust bath for clearing the feathers of parasites.
Ostriches sometimes rest or hide with their necks stretched along the ground giving rise
to the story that they bury their heads in the sand.
In reality they react to their problems in a very positive way.
Another danger, a martial eagle, quite capable of taking a small antelope and certainly able
to make a meal of a young ostrich.
The chicks bunch.
The eagle understands the adult's threat and stays away, this time.
But there are predators everywhere, by day and particularly by night.
During the first few weeks when they're so small the chicks are picked off almost daily
by cheetahs, jackals and even lions.
The parents use their huge eyes, the largest incidentally of any land animal, and all their
height to keep watch over their chicks.
Soon the heavy rainy season starts and that brings new hazards.
Young chicks can die if they get wet and chilled.
She knows what to do and so do the chicks.
Ostrich feathers have their uses, mostly for threat and other signals between individual
birds, but they're not particularly good protection against rain, for the filaments don't cling
together and the ostrich has no oil gland for waterproofing like other birds have.
Nonetheless they do have some value as a kind of thatch and the chicks take full advantage
of it.
With the rains comes the green grass, especially where the savanna has been burnt in the dry
season.
The breeding cycle of the ostrich is geared to this and the synchronised hatchings have
produced family groups of almost the same age all over the sprouting landscape.
The fresh grass is delectable food and the land is suddenly thick with all kinds of grazing
animals.
The ostrich's food ball stays at the top of its throat, slowly being added to until
it's finally pushed down the neck by muscular action on its long journey to the stomach.
Warthogs get down to it on their knees.
The ostrich family meets a herd of eland.
There's an atmosphere of calm, warm sun and ample food, but for the ostriches the stage
is now set for a most dramatic event.
As the ostrich families come together from their various nests scattered over the savannas,
something very remarkable begins to happen.
It's called creshing.
It starts when an adult escort from one brood comes across in a very determined way to inspect
another brood.
Then the process is reversed.
The adult from this side goes over to check the other's brood.
And then there's a row.
In spite of their tremendous excitement, the adults don't forget their charges and deftly
jump over the frightened huddled chicks.
The dominant parents chase off the subordinate parents and the chicks remain together.
Soon the chicks of the two broods will see each other and run together to form a creche.
Together they have a better chance against the army of predators that faces them, but
that means that some of the parents must give up their chicks.
And now two creches merge into one huge flock.
The chicks here are of different sizes because some hatched a week or so earlier than the
others.
The forsaken adults have no more parental responsibilities.
Their families are now in the sole charge of one dominant adult.
Ostrich young grow at a prodigious rate.
At nine months they're almost as big and fully as fast as their parents.
Many, perhaps most of those hatched have been killed already, but the survivors are now
quite capable and are on their own.
After a bath they preen.
These are the real survivors, the total production from say 60 square kilometres.
They operate as a single entity, 60 pairs of eyes on the lookout for predators, her
most valuable defence in a hostile environment.
They're now large enough to be challenged by an adult cock who's staking out his territory
for the next season.
He's already coming into his red breeding colour.
He's feeding up for another busy season, for once again he will have to fight to get and
keep a territory.
Many males won't make the grade.
Those that do will get many hens, but so many eggs that they can't all be incubated.
But by putting their eggs and later their chicks together, the dominant ostriches have
found a way of ensuring that the maximum number of their own particular chicks, so small and
flightless and vulnerable, will survive in the dangerous world of the open African plains.