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At the southern tip of South America, not far from Antarctica, is a land of extremes
and contradictions, Patagonia.
Glaciers and deserts, camels and penguins, this place combines the bizarre and the unlikely.
Strange looking giant hares called maras and herds of graceful camels known as guanacos
share the arid scrubland.
On the coast, a rich current nourishes fur seals, elephant seals and sea lions, while
killer whales patrol the shores waiting for the unwary.
Every year, on a remote coast in South America, penguins come ashore, not to a snowy world,
but to the edge of a parched wilderness.
A forgotten world, a world of marvels.
Strange creatures have lived in this isolated region for millions of years.
The last land before the frozen ice of Antarctica, Patagonia's shores seem like the end of the
earth.
Springtime is high season in Patagonia, when thousands of Magellanic penguins head for
the beach.
The males arrive first.
After reclaiming their nesting burrows, it's time for some spring cleaning.
Territorial fights break out as the males stake their claims.
Then they wait for the next wave of penguin society.
The females will arrive in a few weeks.
Inland, the full-time residents roam the arid hillsides.
The Guanacos, relatives of the camel, live side by side with penguins in this strange
land called Patagonia.
Patagonia lies between two oceans, a vast region that stretches across parts of Argentina
and Chile.
West and west are as different as night and day, due to nature's Great Wall, the Andes
Mountains.
These towering peaks steal moisture from the ocean's winds, leaving an arid desert to the
east.
A quarter of a million square miles.
These parched plains eventually meet the South Atlantic, nearly 2,000 miles long.
This rugged coastline is mostly uninhabited and undisturbed.
Its secluded gulfs welcome some of the largest animals on earth.
For six months, these shallow bays echo to the sound of whales.
Who knows how many dawns have passed since the southern right whales first found the
sanctuary.
These gigantic mammals use these peaceful inlets to breed.
The slow rituals of courtship and coupling reveal a delicate tenderness.
It's a mating of giants.
Another male has been attracted by the females' calls.
Males will try to mate with any available female.
Sometimes the females don't cooperate, but in this case, she changes partners.
This is the first human we see thatss.
welcomes other visitors to Patagonia's shores.
Southern elephant seals come here to breed and raise their young.
The massive bulls are remarkably agile for their size.
They can easily maneuver their 6,000 pounds of blubber.
The dominant males acquire harems, which they constantly guard from subordinate males.
Only five days after coming ashore, the females give birth.
Their milk is rich and fat, and the pups quickly put on an insulating layer of blubber.
The mother doesn't eat while nursing.
She can lose as much as 700 pounds, while the pups put on nearly 20 pounds every day.
The bulls have been ready to mate ever since they arrived.
A few weeks after giving birth, the cows are ready too.
But this female has lost so much weight, he has to approach matters very delicately.
After mating, he still has to prevent her from wandering off.
Fidelity is not part of elephant seal society.
The young males spend much of their time sunbathing.
On another shore, the female Magellanic penguins have begun to arrive, plump from a winter
spent feeding at sea.
Each female mates with the same male year after year.
But first, she must find him.
A raucous male fanfare greets the new arrivals.
Amazingly, she can tell which male is hers just by his call.
It's been perhaps six months since they've seen each other, and they must reestablish
the pair bond.
After getting reacquainted, they mate near the family burrow.
The neighbors are busy with their own preparations and take no notice of the mating pair.
United again, this pair will soon be incubating their eggs.
This mother already has a new addition.
One year after mating, she returned here to give birth.
Right whales are born huge, about 15 feet long.
This one begins its life in the quiet bays of Patagonia, but it will need to become seaworthy
soon before it returns with its mother to the cold Atlantic.
Once upon a time, the ocean reached far into Patagonia, but 20 million years ago, this
part of the continent began to rise.
Patagonia slowly lifted out of the sea.
A prehistoric Atlantic washed this beach.
Now only fossils remain.
It was the fossils of Patagonia, like this giant oyster shell, that led Darwin to ponder
why species come and go, and helped inspire his theories on evolution.
Huge creatures once lived here.
Now the inhabitants are smaller, but just as odd.
The mara looks like a cross between a hare and an antelope, but it's actually a rodent,
one of the largest and most unusual.
They feed on the short grasses of the dry scrub desert.
This mara was born 20 minutes ago.
Another is about to follow.
Mara's are monogamous, a rarity among mammals.
With their eyes open, they're on their feet soon after birth.
The mother will send them into a communal burrow, along with the young of several other
parents.
In this unusual system, the adults share the responsibility of protecting the young.
One couple usually remains near the burrow.
This couple is ready to feed its young.
After the new mother leaves, they announce lunch.
Often all the youngsters come out when they hear the call.
They will try to suckle from any mother, but only their own will let them.
This hungry youngster is persistent.
It tries the same trick again.
Only this time, he not only has the wrong parent, but the wrong sex.
The male pays no attention to this misdirected youth.
He tries once again, approaching another female with renewed hope.
Finally, he finds his mother and his lunch.
The Maras are adapted to a land whose main features are the absence of water and the
ever-present winds.
From the Andes to the Atlantic, the winds mold the land.
Powerful and persistent, they even stir the ocean, drawing up the riches from the deep.
Anchovies fatten on plankton.
Flocks of terns track the schools.
There's good fishing here, and many seabirds exploit the sea's productivity.
In October, imperial cormorants nest practically on top of each other and squabble incessantly.
The easiest way to collect nest material is to act quickly when a neighbor is looking
the other way.
This greedy thief has trouble carrying his ill-gotten gains.
In the penguin colony, the mood is much more subdued.
The adults need to stay put and incubate their eggs.
This female is taking the first shift while her mate feeds at sea.
At no time will the eggs be left unguarded.
The changing of the guard throughout the colony creates a continual procession between land
and sea.
Finding water to drink in this arid land is easy for the penguins.
They have a special gland to remove salt from seawater.
Thirst quenched and freshly laundered, they're ready to relieve their partners at the nest.
They leave the refreshing sea behind and take their turn in the wind and dust.
It wasn't always so parched and barren here.
Patagonia's streams, rivers, grassland and forests were once abundant.
Twenty million years ago, much of Patagonia looked like this, a wetter land, lush with
trees, and home to some of the oddest animals that ever lived.
It came to a cataclysmic end.
Volcanoes belched into the sky.
The Andes Mountains were born in fire.
The new mountains changed Patagonia forever.
These giants of earth and rock steal rain from the clouds, sucking them dry before they
reach the plains.
This rain-shadowed desert is Patagonia's cruel inheritance from the birth of the Andes.
The winds have uncovered Patagonia's past.
Petrified trees were once witnesses to a land of forests.
The harrier armadillo is a survivor of those days.
Powerful claws and an acute sense of smell help them find food in the dry soil.
They have the survival skills necessary for life in the desert.
Armadillos have never been fussy about their diet.
They'll eat anything.
This and their protective coat of armor enable them to make a home in this harsh scrubland.
Many species met their end as Patagonia changed, but the armadillo is still going strong.
Few animals can survive here except, as Darwin noted, the guanaco, which stood guard on
the hilltop, a watchful sentinel over its herd.
A species of llama, the guanacos live in groups, consisting of a male, several females, and
their young.
This group is enjoying a good dust bath, which helps remove insects from their thick coats.
There was not a tree, wrote Darwin, and scarcely an animal or a bird.
It's easy to see how he missed this one.
The burrowing owl uses holes abandoned by armadillos and maras.
Their mate left a lizard for the chicks in the burrow.
Her chicks are growing fast, and she needs to feed them often.
Only a few weeks from fledging, they use their leisure time to practice takeoffs.
It's mid-November, forty days have passed since the penguins laid their eggs.
Down at the shore, new life is heard in the colony.
The chicks are small and weak, but know instinctively how to get the nourishment they need from
the parent on duty.
Simply digested fish and squid will fatten them up quickly.
Both parents share the responsibility of caring for the young.
Their neighbor, the largest bird in the Americas, is also busy raising its chicks.
Parenthood for the rhea follows a very unusual path.
Several females laid eggs in this male's nest, but he alone incubates and cares for all of
them.
The young birds of various ages and sizes are quite a lot to handle.
He acts as their guardian and leader, and is fiercely protective of them.
This female is the mother of some of his flock, but he won't allow her to drink here until
the chicks are all finished.
The youngsters always keep an eye on the male.
They don't want to be left behind.
In Patagonia, at the bottom of the world, the seasons are opposite to those in the north.
December is summertime, the season of intense heat.
There's no shade, but the guanacos, like their camel relatives, are adapted to life in this
arid place.
Yearling males pushed out of their families by the dominant male form bachelor herds.
They practice the rituals required to secure territories.
In a few years, they'll try to obtain their own females.
The young guanacos, called chelengos, are graceful and agile, and naturally inquisitive.
And there is much in Patagonia to be curious about.
And when a chelengo first meets a mara, courage fails both.
Distant sounds hint at approaching rain, but that's only nature's tease.
Patagonia's wind blows steadily offshore, keeping the summer storms at sea.
The sea is bountiful, the shore is isolated, and the bays are tranquil.
Though whales and seals were once hunted here, they both return to this now safe haven every
year.
In December, the right whales move out to feed, and the sea lions move in to breed.
The southern sea lions are related to elephant seals, and have a similar social system.
A female attempts to join the other cows at the breeding site, but an eager male makes
it very difficult.
He tries to take possession of her even before she comes ashore.
The bulls and cows form a sort of lounging party, with no obvious boundaries between
the harems.
Even the newborn pups are squeezed in between them.
But the bulls know where one harem ends and the other begins.
This youngster is lost.
This female knows by his call that he isn't hers, and she sends him off to continue his
search.
Males without a harem become frustrated as they watch the bulls and cows from the sidelines.
One of them tries to get to the females and steal one away, but the resident male quickly
chases him off.
The young males eventually band together and make a concerted effort to gain access to
the females.
The joint assault causes confusion, enabling one of the raiders to pluck a female from
under the nose of the resident bull.
Teamwork has given some of the younger males the opportunity to breed.
She'll give birth to his pup a year from now.
Many of the bachelors will be unable to mate this year.
Some take out their frustration on those members of the colony they can boss around, the pups.
Some are carefully손ed under guard.
With luck, a kidnapped youngster can escape back into the colony, but this time the male
will not let up.
This pup will not survive such extreme aggression.
Away from the shore, Patagonia has other survival tests, other extremes of nature.
The curse of sterility is on the land, wrote Darwin.
This is a land ruled by drought, a drought caused by the imposing Wall of the Andes,
which locks Patagonia's water in snow and ice.
An ice cap smothers 9,000 square miles of the southern Andes.
Thousands of years of frozen rain stacked hundreds of feet deep.
Patagonia's glaciers are still advancing.
The heat waves of Viola's
Giant slabs turn the frigid waters below, creating waves of blue ice.
The slabs are a common water trapped by the Andes for millennia.
But only a few rivers carry it across the Patagonian wilderness.
Not enough to water the desert, but just enough to feed a few lakes along the way.
Chilean flamingos are drawn to such rare gifts from the Andes.
They travel long distances to reach these remote lakes, reliable oases in the vast desert.
Other birds are attracted to these lakes, like white-cheeked pentails and South American stilts.
Wilson fallow ropes work diligently to stir up insects with their feet.
It's midsummer, and the imperial cormorants are now ferrying fish to their growing chicks.
Each one tries to push the other away from the parent in order to be fed first.
The rich coastal waters of Patagonia seem most attractive to the penguins.
More than a million come here for the feast.
The chicks, now about three months old, require so much food that both parents are out fishing.
This one is trying to come ashore, but it's tired and full of fish.
It does its best to waddle home.
Its progress is hampered by thousands of last year's young.
Their feathers are not yet fully waterproof, so they try to stay out of the cold water.
They've gathered on a platform of soggy seaweed, where there seems to be at least one penguin too many.
Giant petrels stalk the colony, intent on stampeding the penguins into the water.
This enables the hungry petrels to watch for stragglers, the weak, the sick, or the injured.
Also, by clearing the beach, dead penguins are revealed.
The penguins settle down once the quarrelsome scavengers are at work.
A kelp gull is also in the scrap business.
It's looking for a parent feeding its chick.
The penguin knows there's a thief around and tries to keep the food in the family.
But the gull is quick as a pickpocket.
Though it will never fly, wing-flapping is important preparation for swimming, the next stage of penguin childhood.
It's February and the chicks are starting out on a 1,500-mile journey north to the warm waters of Brazil.
The beach is full of bullies. Last year's young give the smaller birds the same rough send-off they got the year before.
There's no turning back once he decides to take the plunge.
The majority of the chicks won't reach their destination. Starvation is the biggest killer, but some are taken by predators like the giant petrels.
This one is in the clear. He'll spend the next six months on the Atlantic swell before returning to dry land.
In a few weeks, as winter creeps into Patagonia, the adults will also venture north, and the penguin exodus will be complete.
Sea lion pups also take their first dips at this time of the year.
At low tide, a distant reef protects them from the dangers of the open sea. At high tide, orcas, killer whales, can now cross the reef and approach the shore.
But for the playful sea lions, high tide means surfs up. They seem oblivious to the dark fin of a deadly enemy approaching in the distance.
The sea nation makes for great
subsistences to make for sure – but the sea spoon has spread throughout.
Death comes disguised as a harmless wave.
Orcas are not the only predators that seem to toy with their prey before eating it, but they are rarely caught in the act.
This behavior might be one way an adult teaches a calf how to capture and kill sea lions.
Death comes disguised as a harmless wave.
Patagonia is a hard place, a foreboding land.
Darwin wrote, all was stillness and desolation.
Yet such a place is full of mystery and marvels.
Like all who are lucky enough to stand here,
Darwin was awestruck and excited by its grandness.
This is one of the few truly wild places left on Earth.
It is sometimes harsh and unyielding,
but always humbling to the human spirit.
Nature is made possible by the financial support
of viewers like you, and by Siemens,
engineering solutions in electronic components
and medical systems, telecommunications, energy,
and automation, Siemens, and by Canon, quality and innovation
for the way we work and live, and by the gas industry,
helping provide cleaner air with clean gas energy.
This is PBS.