Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Mummy knows best
Nowhere on Earth is it tougher to survive than the desert, where food and drink is in very short supply. And the need for sustenance is more pressing in elephants than it is for most desert dwellers. A mother elephant has to consume up to 200 litres of water a day if she’s to provide enough milk for herself and a calf, and she cannot go more than four days without drinking.
That means the elephants of the Namib Desert in south-west Africa are constantly on the move. ‘What amazed us was just how far ele - phants move,’ says Ed Charles, producer of the Planet Earth Deserts episode. ‘The entire herd we followed marched for up to 30 miles a day, moving up and down a dry riverbed in search of food and water.’
Ed and his crew managed to film the herd – complete with a newborn calf – thanks to an organisat ion called Elephant Human Relations Aid ( EHRA). ‘ It’s almost impossible to determine whether an elephant is pregnant,’ says Ed, ‘but as soon as the call came from EHRA that one had given birth we scrambled a guy called Mike Holding in Botswana who has his own plane and was able to fly down to film the calf within days of its arrival.’
A desert is defined as an area of land with less than 10in of average rainfall a year, and they cover around a third of the world’s land surface, but relatively few animals are able to make their homes in a habitat where temperatures can peak at a staggering 58° C, before dropping to below freezing at night.
One nocturnal hunter is the desert long- eared bat, which preys on one of the world’s deadliest scorpions, the deathstalker scorpion, in Israel’s Negev Desert. The bat uses echolocation to find its prey, bouncing sound off objects and listening to the echoes in its huge ears. ‘The bat is blind, but once the scorpion has betrayed its exact position on the ground it has very little chance of survival,’ says Ed. ‘The bat will swoop down and grab it, shaking it vigorously in order to kill it. And somehow it’s immune to the scorpion’s venom – which can kill a human. It even eats the scorpion’s poison gland.’
Deadly creatures abound in the desert: Ed and his team needed to call in a specialist snake handler before they could film the Peringuey’s adder in the Namib Desert. A creature just a few inches long, it has eyes on the top of its head allowing it to see while submerged in the sand. It injects its prey – such as l izards and rodents – with venom and then holds it until it’s incapacitated and can be swallowed. ‘Finding the snakes was the easy part: the sand records their tracks very well and once you get to the end you know you’re going to find a snake,’ says Ed. ‘But their bite can be extremely painful.’
In Madagascar Ed and his team used a helicopter to track a swarm of locusts – or short-horned grasshoppers – and then filmed them from the chopper’s open door as well as on foot. Containing several billion individuals, these swarms are formed when there’s a population explosion because food is abundant, and they were mentioned in the Old Testament. A swarm this size can consume an estimated 40,000 tons of vegetation each day and cover hundreds of square miles. ‘This was one of the
biggest locust swarms ever recorded and the roar of billions and billions of wings, almost moving the air around us, was extraordinary,’ says Ed. ‘It was almost surreal, unlike any other experience I’ve ever had.
Ed’s team managed to capture the metamorphosis from juvenile locust to winged animal. ‘ We literally stumbled across it,’ he says. ‘ The change – that moment when their wings harden and then an hour later there’s a mass take-off – happened at the exact moment we were there and was caught by our cameras.’
There are desert lions too, in Namibia in south-west Africa, where
they hold territories between the river systems waiting for prey to come to drink. They, like the elephants, must cover large distances in order to find sustenance, and scientists have been putting radio collars on cubs to find out more about their desert lifestyle. One male was followed for two years, during which time he covered an area twice the size of Wales, and walked nearly 8,078 miles, almost the equivalent of wandering the length of Africa from north to south – and back!