Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Who are you calling a scaredy cat?
From lily-livered lions to a snake with eyes on the top of its head – part two of our exclusive series on BBC1’s stunning new Planet Earth
Grasslands, which cover a quarter of the world’ s landmass, might seem the most benign of habitats, with both food and water plentiful. They appear to be a paradise for animals – an all-you- can- eat buffet for both the vegetarian herbivores and the carnivorous predators that prey on them. That idyll, however, is shattered by violent changes in weather: floods, droughts, dust storms and flash fires can all turn the grasslands into the most dangerous places on earth.
There is prey almost without number in Botswana’s Okavango Delta when the river breaks its banks and floods the grassland. Up to 200,000 big grazing animals throng to the flood plain–elephants, buffalo, wildebeest and rhinos. And with them come the lions.
For months the prides have been going hungry: unlike grass- eaters, predators stick to their territory even when the herds have migrated away. They are thin, and desperate for food. But to reach it, they have to overcome their fear of water. Like domestic housecats, lions hate getting wet. Yet they must plunge into the swamp and wade across muddy plains as they hunt. It’s impossible for them to move quietly: instead, they rely on strength of numbers, and will fearlessly attack animals much bigger than themselves.
Chadden Hunter, who produced the Grasslands episode, followed them with a single cameraman, an experienced operator who insisted they could get up close by getting out of their canoe and wading through the chest-high water, pushing their gear ahead of them. ‘He told me to take my shoes off,’ says Chadden. ‘ If you’re barefoot, it’s much easier to tell when you’ve trodden on a crocodile – your toes feel the scales and you have a chance of getting your foot out of the way before it strikes.’ Their daring was rewarded with outstanding footage of lions attacking a bull buffalo and attempting to In Norfolk, a harvest mouse rests in its nest high among the reed stems bring it down. The fight that follows is one of the most breathtaking sequences ever shot for TV.
Another piece of dramatic footage was captured much closer to home, in Norfolk. The harvest mouse is Europe’s lightest rodent, weighing less than a 2p coin, and is able to climb stalks of grass to gather the seeds without bending the stem over. They live almost their whole lives off the ground, scampering from one stalk to the next. But this makes them prey to hawks and barn owls, which can swoop silently and pluck them up. To give itself a fighting chance, the harvest mouse has evolved a prehensile tail and is able to throw itself through the grass like a monkey swinging through the jungle – behaviour which the cameras were able to track in vivid detail.
Hunting for mice too, though not in Norfolk, are the serval – African savannah cats which use their huge ears like radar dishes. They can detect the faintest rustle that gives away the skittering feet of a rodent in the grass, before pouncing with a leap that begins as a vertical takeoff and usually ends with dinner. They can jump 7ft into the air, and 6ft along the ground, in a single bound.
With a nose like a baby elephant’s, saiga antelope are among the strangest creatures on the planet. They roam the steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia in central Asia in herds of 300,000 or more, as they have done for tens of thou- sands of years. During the Ice Age they were the prey of sabre-toothed tigers. But they survived, while the tigers became extinct. Whether it’s summer in the grasslands they inhabit, when temperatures hit a blistering 45 º C, or winter when the mercury can fa l l to - 35 º C, the saiga herds battle on. And it is a battle.
From the moment they’re born, usually as pairs of twins, life is tough for the sa iga. Thei r mothers hide them in the long grass and leave them alone until they can walk unaided, usually around two days. Wolves are more likely to spot the defenceless youngsters if the females are hovering over them. One wolf can kill six calves in an hour.
But when Chadden and his team arrived to film, after a three- day trek by car across the Kazakh prairies, something far more terrible than wolves was killing the saiga. A virus was sweeping the herds, a sort of antelope ebola, that was wiping them out by the thousand. ‘It was gruesome,’ says Chadden. ‘ But the authorities didn’t want us to film that: in fact , they turned up in black helicopters one day, like something out of The X- Files, to inspect our recordings.’ Little is known about saiga behaviour and it is probable that epidemics are regular events, evolution’s way of ensuring the herds do not overpopulate the steppes. Chadden and the team took the decision that they were not there to record a newsworthy animal tra- gedy, but to study the way the saiga lived. Like nature itself, wildlife film crews must sometimes make difficult choices.
In the Kaziranga National Park in Assam, north- east India, elephant grass proliferates. It’s one of the world’s tallest grasses, growing to 13ft high, and for a baby Indian elephant that can be a problem, especially if one of the world’s most dangerous predators – the tiger – is lurking nearby. A baby elephant encountering this habitat for the first time could find itself in mortal danger if it dawdles and gets separated from the herd. For the grass provides perfect cover for a stealth hunter with the superb camouflage of a stripy coat.
Fortunately a baby elephant has one very handy defence mechanism: its voice. The loud distress call of a panicking youngster usually enables the mother to locate it and return it to the safety of the herd. That’s what you might call a trunk call!