Madagascar (2011): Season 1, Episode 4 - Attenborough and the Giant Egg - full transcript

This is a story of
an ancient island, an extinct giant

and a mystery that I have been
puzzling over for half my life.

50 years ago, I came here
to the island of Madagascar

to make a series of programmes about
the island's remarkable wildlife.

That was way back in the early days
of television

when everything
was in black and white.

It was one of the first natural
history series that I had made.

Madagascar lies in the Indian ocean,
here,

and even on a globe this size,
it looks a tiny island,

perhaps because it is dwarfed
by this vast continent of Africa.

But in fact it is an immense island.



Over 1,000 miles long, it is bigger
than the British Isles.

I was astonished
by the animals I saw.

They were unlike
anything living elsewhere.

And while I was here,
much to my surprise,

I acquired an extraordinary object
that has been one of my most
treasured possessions ever since.

Down in the south of the island,
I found lying in the desert sand

pieces of what looked like
very thick eggshell.

I knew that a huge extinct bird
had once lived down here.

These must be bits of its eggs.

I asked the local people about them.

They were more than obliging.

The fragments were all small
and could give little idea

of the size of a complete egg, but
then a young boy brought in these.

At first I thought they were just a
collection of exceptionally big bits



that he had picked up
over some time,

but then
I noticed that two of them looked
as if they might fit together.

I had apparently got myself
a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

And they did fit,

so I joined them with the sticky
tape we used to seal our film cams.

Soon I had built up two halves.

This was a single immense egg

and it was virtually complete.

I reckoned it must have contained
as much as 140 chicken eggs.

The bird that laid it
must have been a giant indeed.

But this raised all kinds
of questions.

How old was this egg? When did this
bird die out?

And what does it tell us
about man's relationship
with the wildlife here?

Here is the egg, professionally
put together, almost as good as new.

It is to me at any rate
a wonderful object.

After all it is the largest egg
ever laid by anything.

But what particularly fascinates me

is the thought of the bird
that laid it.

What sort of a creature was it?

Well, stories about gigantic birds
have been circulating in Europe

since the 13th century
when Marco Polo, the great Venetian
traveller and explorer,

came back from the East
with stories of a huge bird,

"so big that its wings covered
an extent of 30 paces

"and its quills were 12 paces long,
and it's so strong

"that it will seize an elephant
in its talons

"and carry him high into the air
and drop him
so that he is smashed to pieces."

Stories of a bird so big
they could lift an elephant.

And that's what gave it the name
of elephant bird.

But after those rather unbelievable
stories,

there were other more concrete
stories too, in the 17th century.

This is an account of Madagascar
written by Flacourt

who was a French governor
of the island

and he lists all the animals that
he knows in the island of Madagascar
and he draws most of them,

but if you look through here,
there is no picture of a bird
that could be an elephant bird.

There's an egret, there's a heron,
but nothing bigger.

But he does say that there was
a big ostrich-type bird

in the south of the island.

So maybe he heard stories

of the elephant bird.

But was it alive then?

He doesn't say. Of course,

we know now
that the bird is certainly extinct,

but when did it disappear?

Since I collected this egg,
techniques have been developed

which enable us to date it,
so I've sent off a small fragment
of it for that to be done.

It will take a little time
for the results to come through

but after 50 years, I guess
I can wait a few weeks longer.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Madagascar
to have another look at
its wonderful animals

and see how things have changed
in the last 50 years.

Some species are thought to have
disappeared since I was last here

and new ones have
also been discovered.

Could the story of the elephant
bird, whatever it turns out to be,

help me to understand
what is going on there today?

50 years ago, Madagascar was
little known, certainly in Britain.

Until only a few years before,
it had been a French colony.

I really didn't know anything
about it when I started
to read about it

and the only illustrations I could
find were drawings or photographs

of stuffed specimens
in French publications.

So I thought, OK, that's great,
nobody else has filmed there,

and I don't really think
there had really been

any natural history film made
from Madagascar at all in 1960
that I could find.

It was just me and Geoff Mulligan
with his camera,
and we were there for four months.

Because the island has been cut off
for so long,

evolution has had a chance
to produce a whole range
of unique animals and plants.

But first,
what about the elephant bird?

Beyond the legends,
what more do we know about it?

The country's capital is
Antananarivo, or Tana,
as the locals call it,

and the place to go if you want to
find out about the island's natural
history is obviously its museum.

It had stuffed examples
of some of the animals
I already knew something about.

But I also found
a mounted skeleton of the huge bird
that interests me so much,

one of the very few that exists.

So how tall was the elephant bird?

Not an easy question to answer
because very few skeletons
are totally complete

and so many of the mounted specimens
have been put together

with a number bones
from different specimens,

and if you get overenthusiastic
maybe it's quite possible

that you stick in
one or two extra neck bones.

So we can't be sure
about the length of the neck,

nor can we be sure
about the posture, really.

This one looks to me rather
front heavy

and it could well be that in life
the animal was more upright,

in which case it stood very tall
indeed.

What - ten feet, 12 feet,
that sort of size -

in order to be able to reach the
leaves of trees on which it browsed.

But a more safe characteristic
is weight,

and you can be fairly sure
the estimate of that,

and it's reckoned that the elephant
bird weighed around half a tonne.

The extinct moas of New Zealand
might perhaps have been taller,

but this was certainly
the heaviest bird that ever existed

and, of course,
it was flightless, like an ostrich.

Most of its remains have been found
down in the dry, hot, southern end
of the island

where I had collected
my egg fragments,

so, on leaving Tana,
that's where we headed.

Sounds like forever,
50 years, to me,

but it's really the day before
yesterday, I reckon,

that I was here
doing that sort of stuff.

I can't believe that it's 50 years.

Southern Madagascar really is one
of the oddest places on the world,

if only because of its
bizarre vegetation.

I hadn't known
what the spiny forest was.

They showed me plants
like long fingers 20 feet high,

30 feet high, with spines all over
them and little leaves, you know.

Extraordinary.

This spiny forest was once
widespread in the south,

but now there are only
a few pockets of it left.

Big leaves would lose a lot of
precious water in a hot desert,

so these plants have very small
ones that are protected from
browsing animals by sharp spines.

But what browsers?

Presumably,
one was the elephant bird.

Some browsers, however,
are still around,

and 50 years ago,
we went to look for them.

The spines make this
a fairly uncomfortable place
to move around in.

But eventually
we found those browsers.

And they are still here.

Sifakas, a wonderful type of lemur.

They are feeding on bark,
stripping away the bark.

They are not particularly upset by
my presence any more than they were
when I first saw them 50 years ago.

What is astonishing about them
is the way they move
through the forest.

Very unlike monkeys.

Monkeys, when they leap,
leap hands first,

their torso more or less level,

but these marvellous creatures

jump upright because they land with
their feet first, which accounts for

why when they come down
to the ground very rarely

their legs are so long
they can't walk on all fours,

as many monkeys do, but have to
stand upright on their very long
legs and their rather short arms,

and that gives them
this lovely balletic movement

when they get around on the ground.

There are quite a number of
different species of these

and they differ mostly
in their colouration.

This one with its dark brown...cap.

And I think this is actually
one of the loveliest.

I can just hear them making
that slight...siffa, siffa noise,

which is a kind of, I think,
uneasy noise that they make

when they are just a little worried
and which gives them
their name of sifaka.

Their faces with that long snout
and moist nose,

really rather dog-like,

but it's when you see
their hands

that you realise that they are
related to monkeys and to us.

These grasping hands.

I've actually had a pet lemur
a long, long time ago

and it held onto my hand
in the most charming way.

On that first trip, I kept a journal
and reading it now reminds me

of how excited I was, seeing
these creatures for the first time.

"Before they started feeding, the
adult male and female treated us to
a captivating display of wrestling.

"The female was sitting
on her bottom on the branch,
her feet dangling,

"while the male came along
and put a half nelson on her.

"Then the match started.

"There was no question of sex
nor of aggression, for they
often broke off to look at us.

"It was pure play
and enchanting to watch."

I've got notes here
of what we filmed.

It's all 100-foot reels.

A 100-foot reel runs for two minutes
40, you know, two minutes 40,

and you've got to stop
and take the thing out as well,

and of course the lenses we had
were very poor

and we didn't have zooms either,

so now, if you see something up
there, you've got the wide shot

and then you zoom in quickly
and you've got it.

But if you did that then you'd have
to take that lens out and put on
another socking great lens.

I had never seen a living sifaka
until I came here to Madagascar.

It was such a shock and a thrill

to see them in the wild
for the first time.

And it's just about as great
a thrill right now.

They're bounding away on the ground.

Sifakas are well adapted to living
in this world of spines and thorns,

and so, doubtless,
was the elephant bird,

but adaptation is often
a two-way process.

This is the seed of
a particularly strange plant

that grows
in this arid, spiny forest.

It is armed
with a series of ferocious hooks

which would have caught on the legs
of the elephant bird

and so be distributed
throughout the forest.

Now, presumably, it's us
and our cattle who do the job.

As you go further south, it gets
drier and hotter until eventually

there's not enough moisture
to sustain even the spiny forest.

And here, once again,
I found egg fragments.

Lots of them.

50 years ago, I thought
I had been amazingly sharp eyed
to find a few bits

and I certainly was very lucky
to be brought enough
to reconstruct an egg.

But there were so many pieces here,

I think that I must have been
half blind before,

or in quite the wrong place.

Of course, these thick shells
don't turn to powder,

like say, chicken egg shells
would do over a few days,

but remain solid and
firm for a long time.

Even so there are
vast quantities of shells out there

so there must have been a very
substantial population of birds.

What happened to them?

Now, it's so arid
that it's difficult to imagine

huge flocks of giant
flightless birds living here,

but they must have done so.

How greatly has the climate
of Madagascar changed?

We can get clues from examining the
fossilised bones of other animals

that were around at the same time
as the elephant bird,

and there were certainly
some very extraordinary ones,

some quite tiny and some giants,
quite unlike anything around now.

This is the skull
of the biggest of all the lemurs.

It's got a head
much bigger than mine

and indeed it was probably
about the size of a young gorilla.

This animal lived in trees

and that's confirmed
by a look at its teeth.

These were the teeth
of a leaf-eating animal.

Not a grazer, not a meat eater,
but a leaf eater.

So this animal lived in trees
and probably hung around

rather like a koala,
only very, very much bigger,

and that tells us that where
this lived there was forest.

The rolling hills of the island
are now nearly all bare of trees,

yet bones of this giant lemur have
been found in many widely separated
places all over the island.

Strong evidence that once the whole
of Madagascar was forested.

When I was here 50 years ago,

I speculated that elephant birds
had disappeared because
their habitat had dried out

and I put that down
to a change in climate.

Now we know that, although
the climate here has indeed
become much drier,

that change took place
many thousands of years ago

and elephant birds living in the
spiny forest managed to survive it,

so climate change alone can't be
blamed for the bird's extinction.

Are there any other clues
that might suggest
an alternative explanation for that

and for the fact that the giant
lemur's forests have also gone?

Well, it's been discovered that
those giant lemurs all disappeared
over a very short space of time.

And that was when
human beings arrived.

Madagascar was one of
the last places on earth
to be reached by human beings.

They didn't get here
until around 2,000 years ago

and then, of course,
there were just a few hundred.

50 years ago,
there were around six million.

Today, there are 20 million.

Was it human beings who exterminated
much of the island's animals,

the elephant bird,
as well as the giant lemurs?

Did they perhaps hunt them for food?

One of the ways that you can tell
whether or not human beings

hunted an animal
is to look at the animal's bones.

This is the bone of an extinct lemur

that dates from
about 2,000 years ago

when human beings
first came to this island,

and when you look at it,
you can see at the top there,

cut marks.

So we know that this lemur
was killed,

or at least eaten, by human beings

who cut the flesh away from the bone
with some kind of knife.

But the interesting thing is,

although we also find
elephant bird bones,

hardly a one of the elephant bird
bones have cut marks,

so we can't really blame
the disappearance
of the elephant bird on hunters.

If it wasn't climate change
or hunting, what else
could it have been?

Although Madagascar is only
separated from Africa by
a relatively narrow stretch of sea,

many of the first settlers came
not from there

but from Southeast Asia,
thousands of miles away.

In fact, the people who live
in the centre part of Madagascar

originally came from right across
the other side of the Indian Ocean,

here in the Malayan region.

They must certainly have
hunted the animals,

but they also did something else
which in the long run

was far more devastating
for the island's wildlife.

They were farmers, and they cleared
the forest to grow rice

and provide grazing
for their cattle.

As the numbers of people increased

so more and more forest
was cut and burned.

It is a process
that is still going on.

So, all over the island,
the landscape began to change.

I am on my way to the west
of the island

where a few small patches of
that ancient forest still remain.

These strange, beautiful trees,

baobabs, are fire resistant
and too big to cut down

so in many places
they are the only remnants left

of the original forest
that once covered this land.

It would have been difficult
for a creature the size
of an elephant bird

to live without vegetation
of some kind,

and today
even the smallest of animals
are struggling to survive here.

One of those that have
managed to do so
is the tiniest of all known lemurs.

It's called Madame Berthe's
mouse lemur, and it was only
discovered ten years ago.

Melanie Dammhahn is part
of a team of scientists

who are studying the animal, trying
to work out how to protect it.

Ohh!

Tiny, tiny. Tiny, tiny.

Just only 30 gram body weight.

Yeah. Smallest primate in the world.
Smallest primate in the world.

Big eyes, small ears. Very big eyes.

Yeah. And a wet nose.

Yeah. Yeah.

'Melanie and her colleagues catch
these lemurs and tag them to build
up a picture of their behaviour,

'essential knowledge if they are
to be properly protected.'

And how long will he
have been in there now?

A few hours. Is that all?
So we collect him at night...

Yeah. ..and he stays in camp
and sleeps in there,
then we release him the next day.

And you have caught him
how many times? Maybe around 20.

So he's accustomed to it.
He's accustomed to it.

And do they travel very far?
They travel very far. Really?

They have three-hectare home range
so that is quite a bit for an animal
like that. Certainly is. Yes.

They might even run five kilometres
a night. Really?

Yeah. An animal like that. Amazing.
I think that is amazing, yeah.

OK, let's see him go.

He's coming.

Come on.

Come on, little one.

That's it. That's it.

Oh!

The work Melanie and her team
are doing is vital for the survival
of this little lemur.

It's also revealing just why it is
that this tiny creature lives here
and nowhere else.

This particular liana belongs
to a species that only grows
in this part of the forest

and on it, and on no other kind of
liana, lives this little insect.

It's a bug which feeds
by sticking its mouth parts

into the liana
and sucking out the sap.

It then digest what it wants
and excretes the rest as honeydew,
a sort of sugary liquid.

And it's that honeydew, that sugar,

that Madame Berthe's lemur needs
in its diet.

So Madame Berthe's lemur
is only found

in this particular part
of the forest

because of this insect
and this liana,

which just shows how complicated
ecological connections can be

and how much you have to
know about an animal

if you are really
going to conserve it.

It's more than likely that
the elephant bird was nowhere near
as fussy as a mouse lemur,

but it certainly needed
much greater quantities of food.

So, as more and more of
the forest was cleared,

there was less and less room
for animals of all kinds.

Elephant birds were among
the first victims of deforestation.

As people came in and cleared
the bush, in order to make space
for their own crops,

there was less and less foliage
for birds to browse on

and no leaves whatever
on the great trunks of the baobabs.

And if we know that,
unlike the giant lemurs,

the elephant bird didn't disappear
as soon as the people arrived.

Recent archaeological research
suggests that the birds lived

alongside human beings
for hundreds of years.

Perhaps they were
protected by something

that is still deeply rooted in
the lives of the Malagasy people -

fady - a belief about the intimate
way in which human beings are
connected with the natural world.

They believe, for example,
that many species of animal contain

the spirits of their ancestors
and must not therefore be killed.

When I was here making
the Zoo Quest programmes,
we watched a traditional ceremony

which centred around a fady
connected with Madagascar's
only surviving giant, the crocodile.

Here,
at the sacred lake of Anivorano,

they tell the story
of a wandering holy man
who appeared in the village.

No-one apart from one old woman
offered him refreshment.

After warning the old woman
to leave,

he then flooded the whole village,
drowning everyone in it except her.

The people here believe
that the crocodiles in this lake

are descendents of those
original villagers

and they come here to give them
sacrifices of meat

in return for their blessings.

Many animals in Madagascar have
some kind of fady attached to them.

This is a chameleon

and Madagascar is the home
of the chameleons.

There are more different kinds
of chameleons

and more spectacular chameleons here

than anywhere else in the world.

They are, of course,
very specialised lizards,

but local people are
very frightened of them.

They move in this odd way
and they have these bizarre eyes

and they think that one glance from
a chameleon is risking death

and to hold one would be disaster.

And when we were last here,

somebody broke into our car
with all our equipment in it

and broke the window
and so we couldn't lock the car.

So I took one of these
splendid chameleons
and put it on the steering wheel

and when anybody opened the car door
it sort of glowered at them

and nobody did...except us.

These beliefs in fady
are still very powerful

and widespread in Madagascar

and in some cases it's they
that have been responsible

for the very survival of a species.

This giant baobab is one of
the most famous individual trees

in the whole of Madagascar.

The people believe that it's
the home to the spirits of the dead

and they bring offerings
which they place around its base,

of rum and other things, to ask
the ancestors to bring them luck.

But the spirits will only remain

as long as the forest surrounds
the tree,

so, thanks to this tree
and that belief,

one of the best pieces of dry forest
in the whole of Madagascar
is still protected.

Many Malagasy communities have such
beliefs about the natural world.

Could it be that it was fady that
helped to protect the last dwindling
populations of elephant birds,

enabling them to survive longer
than they might otherwise have done?

It's easy to imagine that creatures
whose eggs were big enough
to start legends all over Europe

would be surrounded by feelings
of awe or even fear.

But that did not save
the elephant bird in the long run.

The territories they required
were just too big.

Madagascar has one of
the highest rates of forest loss
of anywhere in the world.

It's estimated that 80% of it
has now gone.

All the wetter parts of the island
were once covered by rainforest,

which, like rainforest everywhere,

was hugely rich in animals
and plant species.

And this being Madagascar, most were
species that existed nowhere else.

The changes here have been
particularly dramatic.

When I was here in 1960,

all this land was covered
in rainforest,

trees 100 feet high, with lemurs
and all kinds of birds and insects.

And then they built this sawmill

and for 25 years it operated,

consuming the forest
until the forest was all gone.

So then they left the sawmill
and the land has gone to waste.

They also started to
mine here for nickel.

Madagascar, in fact, has
some of the richest untapped
mineral deposits in the world.

Exploiting them requires
great corridors to be cut
through the forest.

Many animals that require
big territories won't cross
such corridors,

so, just like the elephant bird,

they are squeezed into smaller
and smaller patches

and ultimately they vanish,
just as the elephant bird did.

This patch of forest in Andasibe
on the eastern side of the island

is one of the largest remaining
fragments and it's the last home of
the biggest of all surviving lemurs,

the indri.

Joseph has lived here all his life.

In fact, he was here
when I was filming in 1960,
although we didn't meet.

Then, he was hunting the indri
for food.

At that time, I had an idea
that stories about the indri

might have given rise to myths
almost as fantastic

as those surrounding
the elephant bird.

Many people consider that this
strange creature is the origin

of the legend
of a dog-headed man.

Marco Polo wrote about
the dog-headed man

and this is an illustration
from a natural history book
published some 300 years ago.

Obviously we wanted to film this

and before we went to Madagascar

I visited a very distinguished
British naturalist

who had spent seven years there
and asked him about the indris.

He told me
that as far as he knew it had never
been photographed or filmed alive.

The animal which was the most
dramatic in the series by a long way

was the indri, which we had been the
first people to photograph alive.

It took us a hell of time
to find it, we were traipsing
through the forest

and nearly always, you heard a call
so you'd go through the bush

and look for it and then, as soon
as it saw you, whoof, it was gone,

bounding through the forest.
So all we got for days and days

was nothing but backsides of these
things sailing away from you.

Since people at that time, like
Joseph, were still hunting indris,

it was hardly surprising
that they were scared of us.

After several days of failure,
I had an idea.

I decided to record their
extraordinary calls and then
replay the sound in the hope

that the animals might call
in response and reveal themselves,
or even come closer.

SCREECHING

SCREECHING CONTINUES

And it worked.

Although we didn't get
as close as I might have wished,

we watched them for several days.

SCREECHING

"We never saw a group
of more than four.

"This I think is the source
of much of the charm of it.

"Monkeys living in troops
have a troop discipline,

'an order of seniority is savagely
maintained by battle,

"the males fighting one another
ferociously.

"Not so with indri.

"They live en famille. The old male
doesn't need to assert his rank

"by fighting, and consequently
the atmosphere is one of affection.

"Once we saw a young male
join a young female,

"sitting behind her, his legs
stretched out on either side of her.

"They licked and embraced
one another for half an hour,

"then suddenly a bird screeched..."
BIRD SCREECHES

"..loudly and startlingly.

"Immediately, the male put
a protective and reassuring
arm around her.

"It was most touching to see."

SCOFFS
Anthropomorphism run riot, but there
you are, that's what I wrote here.

Joseph, the one-time hunter, still
uses his skills to track the indri,

but no longer
in order to kill them.

Now he works as a forest guide.

What made you stop hunting them?

Have people's attitudes towards
the indri changed over the years?

Without Joseph to help us,
it would have been impossible
for us to get near the indri,

but this group is so used to him
that they are not frightened.

Indeed, it seemed to me that
they almost welcomed his company.

Thanks to him, I now had a chance,
for the very first time,

to get really close to them.

Oh.

They could easily collect these
leaves from the trees themselves

but they seem to choose to take
them from the hand of a human being.

Well,
that was an astonishing experience.

50 years ago

I spent days and days and days
searching the forests for these,

following the noise,

but now this group is so accustomed
to seeing people around

that I have been
right close up to them,

something I had never believed
could have been possible.

I thought these were
the most elusive, shy creatures,

it certainly took me
a long time to find them,

but that they can now
be so trusting

is a marvellous testament

to how people here now react
towards them and cherish them.

A heart-warming kind of realisation

that wild creatures like this
and human beings

can live alongside one another
in harmony.

And they are
such astonishing creatures.

I mean,
apart from being so beautiful,

they have these very staring eyes

looking straight at you,
straight through you,

and then they have
these very human-like hands,

just taking them.

When you look down at their feet,

huge great calliper feet,

when they decided
that they've had enough of you,

they simply flex
those enormous hind legs

and just with vast bound
of, what, I suppose...

three yards, four yards,
just whoo and they've gone.

It was wonderful
to see how the relationship

between the indri and the local
people living alongside them

has changed so much.

But then,
our attitudes have changed too.

When I came here 50 years ago, I was
asked to collect some animals alive

and bring them back to Britain.

That was how zoos operated
in those days,

believing, misguidedly, that
when one of their exhibits died,

you could always go out
and catch more to replace it.

And I did my best to assemble
a few animals I thought
might make interesting displays.

The Zoo Quest series started as
a collaboration with the London Zoo,

so I found myself
as an animal-catcher
as well as everything else.

One centetes,
one coracopsis, one roller.

24 foly, those are like sparrows.

Ten chameleons,
six assorted lizards, three boas,
a hundred myriapods!

Bonkers. And I had to feed
all these damn things.

Funny way to make television
programmes, I can tell you.

And I have collected some beautiful
myriapods... What did I say there?

I think a hundred or something.

They were lovely millipedes

the size of golf balls
when they were rolled up

and when they weren't, they
would run around like little trains,

red with black stripes on them.

And they got out in the middle
of the night in the hotel

and they were all over the corridor
and all of the rooms and madame
was not pleased, not at all pleased.

In rainforests like this,
you come across
all kinds of unexpected delights.

This rather large snake...

..is quite harmless, in fact,

but it's quite mysterious too,

because that,

you would think in Africa,
was a python,

and Africa is just over the way.

But in fact, it's a boa constrictor

and its nearest relatives

are right on the other side,
in South America.

It's one of the mysteries
of Madagascar's fauna.

The last time I was here,
there was a belief

that animals like this, this boa,

were the incarnations
of people's grandmothers.

I did have some inhibitions

about what people would think
if I caught one of those

and took away their grandmother,
so I never did.

This beautiful lemur
has now become a symbol

of the fight to conserve the forest

and save it from the fate

that overtook
so many of Madagascar's animals
in the recent past.

So, why did
the elephant bird disappear?

It could have been climate change
which turned much of its land
into desert.

It could have been that
people destroyed the forests
where it browsed.

I doubt
if it was hunted to extinction.

Anyone who's seen an ostrich
in a zoo

knows it's got a kick
that can open a man's stomach,

and an enraged elephant bird
many times the size of an ostrich

must have been
a truly formidable opponent.

I suspect it was these.

His egg.

They may not have been able
to tackle an adult bird

but they could take its eggs, which
were a huge source of nourishment.

And so I think it's probably these

are the reason why the
elephant bird is no longer here.

Even if the bird itself
was held in awe, or maybe fear,
by the people here,

they might not have had
too much trouble in robbing it
of its huge, nutritious eggs.

So, although
there were several factors
threatening the bird's survival,

it could have been
people eating the eggs who dealt
the species its final blow.

Today we've come to realise that
if you want to preserve a species,

you have to preserve the whole
community of plants and animals.

Some people here
are trying to tackle that problem.

Ryan manages
one such group in indri country.

I asked him
how much forest remained.

As we speak, it's very fragmented.

Unfortunately in this
particular area, we have almost no
continuous forest any more.

This is a fragment
of about 800 hectares.

One crucial issue for conservation

is to link these fragments
with each other

so that there could be
genetic exchange

between plant and animal species
that life there.

So if they remained as fragments,
really the inhabitants,
the animal habitants, are doomed?

Yes, that's pretty much the case,
and there are studies
concerning the indri, for instance,

saying that a minimum size
for a forest

in which the indri can survive
is about 1,000, 2,200 hectares.

You have to link them up. Exactly.
And how are you doing it?

One thing that we try to do is
actually re-establish the rainforest
in-between these fragments

by planting trees

that we actually raise
in this nursery here from the seeds
that we collect in the forest.

And how's it going?
How many are you replanting?

Well, we now have replanted an area
of about 1,000 hectares.

We ideally have at least 60 species
per hectare that you plant,

so this is kind of hard work.

How many trees to do you think
you have planted?

If you take 1,000 trees per hectare
as a rule of thumb

then this makes slightly more
than a million trees now.

A million trees in how many years?
That's in three years of planting.

Fantastic.
A million in three years.

That is a lot of trees.

This is just so heartening
and exciting.

How long do you think
you're going to be before
you can complete these corridors?

Well, I would say that probably
you would need 20 years or so

to be sure that the trees replanted

have actually re-grown to something
that you would call a forest.

So, we would actually look at
all these reforested areas

for the next two decades to come.

Projects like this
are wonderfully encouraging.

When I was here 50 years ago,
we had no idea how complex

forest systems were like this

and how difficult they would be
to reconstitute.

But plans like that can only work
if they have the support
of the local people.

South of Tana,
in the central highlands,

there's a new initiative
which is an inspiring example

of how a local community project
could help the future
of the country's wildlife.

The coordinator
of this project, Eugenie,

told me that the people here
have very little to live on

and that they need
their local forest to survive.

So, in order to provide work
for local people
which doesn't destroy the forest,

Eugenie has helped set up
a scheme to produce silk

which, by tradition, the Malagasy
use to weave a magnificent fabric.

First of all, the caterpillars
of a particular moth
are released into the forest.

When they change into cocoons,
they are collected.

Then the silk is unwound
from the cocoon

and spun into a thread
which is dyed and ultimately woven.

The scheme has created work
for all the women in the village,
including Marie.

This project has completely changed
people's attitude to their forest.

The villagers now have an incentive
to protect the trees

which provide them
with such a valuable income

and that, of course, in turn
protects the wildlife.

Initiatives like this silk project

bring hope
for the future of Madagascar.

For a young man, the Zoo Quest trip
was an exciting adventure

to what was then, in television
terms at least, an unexplored land.

Coming back after 50 years
has been really fascinating.

This time, I won't be returning
home with a collection of animals
for the London Zoo

but I will be coming back
with a greater understanding of how
and why Madagascar has changed.

I've seen a country
which has been heavily exploited

but I've also seen glimmers of hope
for the future of the wildlife here

and I've been thrilled to get
so close to some of Madagascar's
most wonderful species,

a reminder of just how special
this island is.

50 years ago, I found the egg
of what is surely among

the most spectacular
of all the animals to evolve here.

Now there is still one final detail
to fill in.

How old is my egg
and what might that tell us?

Here in the archaeological
department at Oxford University

there's a carbon-dating apparatus

which can accurately find
the age of ancient objects,
natural and man-made.

It's a complicated process
involving kinds of
very sophisticated techniques

but I've been told that
Thomas Higham, who took the sample
from my egg, has got a result.

You took a tiny bit of this,
I know...

A very small amount from the back.
A very small amount.

And tell me, come on,
what's the answer?

Well, our dates suggest that
this egg is 1,300 years old.

No! Yes.

Say it again. One thousand...
1,300 years old.
And that puts it at what date?

About 700... 600 to 700 AD.

And did that surprise you?

It was quite a lot younger
than I thought it would be, actually.
You thought it could be older?

I did, and I say that
because I checked back

on the other eggshell dates
that we've dated from Madagascar,

and the youngest date that
we've ever got is about 900 AD.

Here is 600 AD, 800 AD,

and your dates are these ones
that just sit in here,

and these are the youngest ones.

So, it's quite a recent one
in terms of... It is. Indeed.

So this, in fact, was one of
the last of the elephant birds.

I think within
100 to 200 years, perhaps.

Perhaps, yes. Ah.

The chick that came out of this
was one of the last.

Absolutely amazing.
When do you think it disappeared?

I think somewhere before 1000 AD
it was extinct,
largely extinct, yeah.

So, there we have it.

My egg is 1,300 years old

and one of the most recent eggs
of its kind

that the university has dated.

But that doesn't mean
that it was the last ever laid,

and it could be that some of these
astounding creatures lived on
until much more recently.

But what we have discovered is that
elephant birds and human beings

did manage to live alongside
one another for hundreds of years.

So, it wasn't the usual story
of finding a new species

and then exterminating it
within a few decades of finding it,

as happened with the dodo
in Mauritius, a much smaller island
not far away from Madagascar.

Nonetheless, the elephant bird
did ultimately disappear.

Another example of how human beings,
in their ever-increasing numbers,

can so easily have a lethal effect
on the animals around them.

For me, this egg
is a reminder of how easy it is

for species to disappear
and be exterminated

as human beings take over
more and more of the natural world.

But there is hope.

We understand more
about ecology and ecosystems,

more about what needs to be done
to protect the natural world.

And I hope, certainly, that we take
those lessons to heart in Madagascar

to safe its wonderful wildlife,

for it is indeed
an island of marvels.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd