Australia, a huge island that has
drifted by itself for 45 million years,
is a strange assortment of landscapes.
Until just a few generations ago,
they were lightly trodden by people.
This land, with all its curious wildlife,
was utterly unknown to western eyes.
But a little over two hundred years ago,
the british came to
this island continent...
and declared it theirs.
At first
it was just a place to dump criminals,
16,000 kilometres from home.
But this distant british outpost
would soon become a land of
opportunity for those that followed.
Now there's a population
of twenty million,
living in some of the most modern,
desirable cities in the world.
A whole nation has grown up fast
in a land of sun and space.
But how has the big old landscape
coped with this rapid transformation?
And now there are so many people here,
what has happened to the wildlife?
Australia's most famous animals have
had to come to terms with changes.
A koala is a creature of habit
and will doggedly follow the route
it knows between favourite feeding trees.
If there is a road in the way,
it will simply stroll across.
Koalas are good climbers,
so even if there's a fence
between it and a good feed,
it needn't be an obstacle.
If a koala knows there's something
to eat on the other side,
it will just clamber across
until it gets there.
It's slow, but you have to
give it full marks for style.
That's all very well in quiet areas.
But in australia, wildlife and humans
often want the same real estate.
When cities grow too fast,
and trees disappear under
the spread of suburbia,
koalas don't change their habits.
They hang on in there,
still following their familiar routes.
As long as there are
just enough trees left,
koalas will stay around
the most unlikely places.
Every time a koala comes to the ground,
it has to take its chances against
the hazards of urban living.
But australian animals have evolved
for millions of years in a tricky,
changeable environment,
and even in the face of city sprawl,
the toughest survive.
Australia's native wildlife has suddenly
been faced with a whole new world.
But sometimes it's
the animals that benefit.
Kangaroos eat grass -
and in this town near melbourne,
where a golf course has been built
alongside patches of natural bushland,
the local grey kangaroos
have hit the jackpot.
In a dry old country like australia,
all this fresh, green, well-watered grass
is like a banquet for these lucky roos.
It's a vast improvement on
what they'd usually get.
These are shy animals normally -
but not here.
There may be five hundred kangaroos here,
and some have lived all their lives
on the greens among the golfers -
eating grass, raising their families,
relaxing in the shade of the trees,
and generally behaving exactly
as they would in the bush.
In fact, it's the golfers
who have to play around them.
And an audience of kangaroos is enough
to put anyone off their stroke.
A rubbish dump might seem
a less salubrious place to dine out,
but this one, a few miles from brisbane,
has become a fast food
stop for sacred ibises,
and they thrive in great
numbers as a result.
They travel in from nearby swamps,
where they roost, arriving bang
on time when the dumpsters unload.
It's a reliable meal -
while they would naturally dig
about for crayfish and mussels,
here they can take their
pick of gourmet throwouts.
Urban living has its advantages,
if you've got the nerve.
And the minute the dump closes
at the end of the day,
the birds all disappear, regular as
clockwork, back to their swamp.
More than three-quarters of australia's
population lives on the coast,
and so that's where the relationship
between people and
wildlife is most obvious.
But the human effect hasn't
confined itself to the cities.
Beyond the coast is a whole new world,
and within fifty years
of british settlement,
some brave souls had taken on
the challenge of living inland.
The contrast between city and
outback living couldn't be stronger.
This is the most unpredictable
desert in the world.
In australia's interior,
the temperature can swing from
46 degrees centigrade to minus 8.
Some years 20cm of rain
may fall in a single day,
and in other years, there may hardly
be enough to wet the ground.
Australia's soils are
dry and impoverished -
on average the poorest in the world.
It's a hard place to farm,
and yet now there are 18 million
sheep here, and 30 million cows -
more than there are people.
One of the toughest challenges
was the lack of water.
But people discovered that
there was water here -
gigantic pools, millions of years old,
deep underground.
Pioneering farmers struggled
to bring it to the surface,
so that their sheep and cattle would
never be far from a reliable supply.
And for the native wildlife, these
man-made oases became very attractive.
These animals have had millions of years
to adapt to the times when no rain falls.
And suddenly, here was plenty of water.
In the old days, emus and
kangaroos would have stayed
close to whatever natural water
they could find in this arid landscape.
When droughts were long,
many would have died.
But nowadays, with all this water on tap,
no animal need be more than
10 kilometres away from a drink.
And alongside the cattle,
the natives have thrived as never before.
Now, there may be 10 million red kangaroos
in australia's arid lands.
It seems that wherever
people have struggled
to wrestle a living from the land,
the native wildlife is ready
to help itself to the proceeds.
For native birds that have
evolved on a diet of seeds,
what better place to feed
than a wheat store?
Little corellas flock to storage
bunkers in gangs thousands strong,
turning up in greatest numbers just
when the harvest is brought in.
They're not put off at all by
the heavy tarpaulin covers -
these parrots simply rip
through them and eat their fill.
Their beaks never stop growing
and these intelligent birds
use them like tin openers.
And being highly sociable,
they go around in big numbers.
It's pretty hard to stop
this avian smash-and-grab.
Farmers try to scare them
off by firing shots...
...but all they do is fly
round and land again.
They will finally disappear
en masse to their roosts -
but they'll be back again tomorrow.
Parrots have been up
to tricks like these ever
since the first settlers
began growing crops,
two centuries ago.
But not all australia's native
wildlife is quite so resilient.
There have been many changes since
the british first planted their flag here,
and some have had an impact that those
early colonists could not have foreseen.
At first, the land they found
had seemed like eden.
But viewed through homesick eyes,
it needed a few changes.
The countryside needed taming.
All those messy trees needed clearing,
to make room for farms.
And the place would surely benefit
from some superior animals.
And so those early colonists set about
turning australia into a little england.
Bit by bit, here was surrey
on the other side of the world -
faintly familiar, but not quite the same.
And the native animals were coming
face to face with strangers.
For fifty million years
this continent had nurtured
its own private set of wildlife -
and now it was beginning to fill up
with a parade of animals
that didn't belong here at all.
And some foreign invaders began
to cause serious problems.
When the earliest
british colonists arrived,
they brought with them
domestic animals from home,
but they didn't keep them fenced.
Plenty wandered off,
and the toughest prospered.
Nowadays, wild pigs,
descendants from those early porkers,
are rampaging through some of
australia's most pristine landscapes.
Pigs need water to keep cool,
and wetlands are where
they do their worst damage.
With their sharp feet
and incessant wallowing,
they destroy vegetation and
damage waterholes far better
suited to more delicate feet.
They will eat virtually anything,
and are especially partial to the eggs
of native waterbirds and reptiles.
They spread nasty diseases,
and with a population
that can double in a year,
there are now millions of them.
But pigs were just the beginning.
And some incomers have a shameful history.
1858 - rabbits are brought from england
to give the colonists
something to shoot at.
They begin to multiply alarmingly fast -
one farmer has 36 million
on his property alone.
They eat all the grass, and push small
native animals out of their homes.
And they're still not under control.
1840 - camels are brought
from asia as beasts of burden,
but later abandoned in favour of lorries.
Half a million descendants
now roam the outback,
too many for
a drought-prone land to support.
1935 - the south american cane toad,
poisonous species,
is brought in to eat pest beetles.
The plan fails, but the toads
themselves thrive out of control,
poisoning native animals
that try to eat them.
Even the most innocent seeming
foreigners can be trouble.
In 1822, settlers brought their
european honeybees to australia,
and put their hives
where the most flowers grew.
They could then produce abundant honey.
But it was bad news for the bees
that lived there already.
In the tropical
rainforest of the northeast,
the native bees feed on pollen and nectar,
and some of the flowers need to be
vibrated, to release their pollen reward.
It's a relationship that has
grown up over millions of years.
But european honeybees
can't do this buzz pollination -
they just can't shake
their bodies in the right way.
Their method is to steal the pollen
that the native bees have
just set on the flowers.
And they have even
more aggressive tactics.
They beat up the native bees,
stealing the pollen from their backs,
and driving them away from the flowers.
Without proper pollination,
the flowers, and the native animals
that rely on them, are at risk.
But of all the invaders that
came from the old country,
there is one that
has really outdone the rest.
Foxes were deliberately brought
to australia from england
a hundred and fifty years ago,
so that homesick british gentlemen
could hunt, just as they'd always done.
But those foxes that didn't get caught,
started to thrive.
From an original few dozen released,
there are now millions
of foxes in australia.
Superbly adaptable, they have spread
almost everywhere, even in deserts.
Two hundred years ago, australia
was full of strange little animals,
all flourishing in a landscape
where there were few big predators.
But now they all became the perfect,
fox-sized meal.
They had no idea how to react
to this new enemy.
And suddenly they began to vanish.
A disaster had begun.
Australia's native animals
were being hit from all sides.
They were being devoured by new predators.
Their food was being eaten by
foreigners with bigger appetites.
And their habitat was being taken from
them, so that the land could be farmed.
Many native animals,
once numerous, quietly disappeared.
And they're still going now.
Since the british arrived,
54 species of mammals,
birds and frogs have gone.
In the desert, almost half of all the
mammal species have become extinct.
This shocking decline has no parallel
anywhere else in the world.
Australia's most famous extinct animal
managed to hang on
for a while in tasmania.
The tasmanian tiger was one of
australia's few big carnivores,
but it had been driven from
the mainland by dingoes,
and the remainder killed by farmers
who accused it of taking sheep.
In 1936,
the year it was finally
given official protection,
the last one died in a tasmanian zoo.
But although the picture looks grim,
things are not always what they seem.
In the far southwest corner of
australia there once lived a small,
pointy-nosed marsupial
called gilbert's potoroo.
It hadn't been seen for
over a hundred years,
and was presumed to be long extinct,
the victim of the usual troubles.
Then, in 1994, one was spotted.
It wasn't lost after all - only hiding.
Although it's the size of a rabbit,
it eats almost nothing but fungi,
which it digs for in deep undergrowth.
And it only comes out at night.
No wonder it was hard to spot.
There may be fewer than forty of them
left in the whole of australia -
in fact it may be
australia's rarest mammal,
and it needs intensive protection.
But it's not extinct.
And it goes to show
that australian wildlife is easy
to lose in such a big place.
What else might there be
hiding out there in the vastness?
There's a search going on to find
australia's most legendary
and obscure bird -
a little green parrot that
looks like a fat budgie.
It was named the night parrot,
because it's probably nocturnal.
It's said to run around the spinifex
grassland of australia's dry interior,
but it hadn't been seen for eighty years.
Everyone assumed the night parrot
was just another museum piece.
But then, in 1990,
one was found in queensland,
squashed at the side of the road.
Here was evidence that there might
still be night parrots running
about out there,
somewhere in the darkness.
There were campaigns to make sure that
anyone who spotted one in the vast,
lonely landscape would know what it was.
Long-distance road-train drivers were even
shown pictures of what to look out for.
And then came a report that a live one
had been seen in a remote cattle station,
called newhaven,
right in the centre of australia.
The farm owner, alex coppock,
is convinced of what he saw.
Around his cattle trough,
drinking with the other thirsty birds,
were two unfamiliar birds
he'd never seen before.
They were definitely parrots,
but not the usual ones.
Alex has lived and
farmed here for 40 years,
and he knows the birds
of the outback pretty well.
These strangers certainly
weren't budgies, or ringnecks.
They were little fat birds,
and had very short tails,
and oddly marked green feathers.
Checking what he'd seen
against old illustrations,
alex was sure that the birds
at his trough really were night parrots.
If the night parrot does still exist,
this is the kind of place
where it would live,
with spinifex clumps to hide it
during the day, and plenty of water.
It's the holy grail for ornithologists,
none more devoted than richard jordan.
He looks in the places
that seem most promising,
in the hopes of flushing
the secretive little birds
from their hiding place.
But there's not a glimpse.
It may be australia's least known bird,
but it seems that it was a sitting
target for foreign predators,
and it couldn't cope with
changes brought by farming.
The search goes on.
Even old bird's nests are checked,
in case a fragment of night parrot
feather has been woven in.
Even this would be evidence.
But in 13 years of searching
richard has found nothing.
Nightfall is the time to watch.
This is when these secretive
birds would come to drink,
with all the other birds
that rely on these remote waterholes
in the middle of the desert.
But it is, to say the least, unlikely.
Many people claim to
have seen the night parrot,
but so far, none can prove it.
The only solid evidence there's been,
was that one squashed bird found in
queensland, and the search goes on.
This is a huge country,
and the most vulnerable animals
tend to be the most cryptic.
So how do you find out
if they even still exist,
let alone help them survive?
Ask the people who know
the land better than anyone.
Australia has been inhabited
for 60,000 years.
Until the british landed,
there were maybe half a million people,
in a place three-quarters
the size of europe.
But they lived across the whole continent,
and they knew the wildlife intimately.
Aborigines had long been
managing the landscape.
They regularly burned it,
to clear the way for hunting,
and to encourage fresh plants to grow.
The native wildlife had become
tuned in to this new regime.
When white people came, the aboriginal
population dwindled to barely a quarter.
But their skills didn't vanish entirely.
And now, all over australia,
they are helping with
the rediscovery of lost animals.
A lizard called the great desert skink
had been missing for decades.
Western scientists had only found
twenty in almost a century.
But when aboriginal landowners
helped the search,
the skinks began to reappear,
always on aboriginal land.
In uluru, the locals called it tjakura
now traditional owners,
like norman jackeleri and scientists,
like steve mcalpin,
pool their skills
in the continuing search.
Norman knows this area intimately,
it's his home.
As a young child he was
taught to recognise signs
and follow animal tracks
by his grandparents.
As a scientist, steve relies on
norman's special knowledge,
that has only come from
a lifetime spent in the bush.
But now, they are teaching each
other the skills needed to find
and study these elusive animals.
What's that one?
Fox
so, there's a fox come through here,
so they're probably hunting
for that tjakura, i reckon.
There are predators here,
foxes are a problem,
but this was definitely skink country.
It seemed that western science had
been looking in the wrong places,
all those years.
Tjakura.
Oh yeah, a beauty.
It's a beauty, isn't it?
...lt's an animal that
norman is quite familiar with.
190...
so the skinks had always
been here after all,
and the local people
knew their behaviour well.
They knew that they came out at night
from their big family burrows in the sand
to feed on desert plants
and hunt for insects,
leaving their distinctive tracks.
But something else became apparent.
In order for the lizards to thrive,
the land must be burned
in the traditional way.
It may seem drastic, but this has been
going on here for thousands of years.
The skinks need habitat like this,
selectively burned to provide
just the right amount of cover
and fresh new growth on which they feed.
But even with such intensive care,
while all those foreign
predators roam at large,
the mainland is still a dangerous place
for much of australia's wildlife.
It seems unfair,
but the only safe place is on an island.
Luckily australia is surrounded with
thousands of islands, large and small.
Without these natural refuges,
a further nine mammal species would be
extinct in the jaws of mainland predators.
Barrow island, 80 km off
the northwest coast of australia,
has been separated from
the mainland for 7000 years.
No introduced animals have had a chance
to get here and trash the place,
and the difference it makes is enormous.
Here the natives can really relax.
There is such a wealth
of wildlife on barrow,
that it was made a nature
reserve a hundred years ago.
But there's a further twist to the tale.
Oil was found here in 1954,
in amounts too valuable to ignore.
This top class nature reserve
became a major oilfield.
Five hundred wells
sprang up across the island.
What would become of all the wildlife?
It seems they're doing pretty well!
The kangaroos that
live here are called euros,
and they thrive in the spinifex
among the pipework.
They're not at all shy,
and they'll even use
the mechanical structures
as shelter from the blistering
heat of the summer sun.
In this extraordinary place,
giants cruise around
the oil tanks quite unfazed.
Perenties are australia's biggest lizards,
and this perentie is after something.
On this desert island,
where fresh water is in short supply,
a dripping air conditioner is a luxury.
It's not easy to get a drink round here.
Rules are strict about how
the wildlife is treated on barrow -
no animals can be brought to the island,
and nothing can be taken away.
And some are doing even better here
than they would on the mainland.
At night,
when the oilmen have their supper,
strange nocturnal creatures emerge,
lured out by the smell of the barbie.
This is a golden bandicoot.
It used to be common on the mainland,
but introduced predators
virtually wiped it out.
Nowadays it's almost
only found on islands,
but there may be fifty thousand of them
living it up on barrow alone.
And this is a burrowing bettong,
a tiny kangaroo that
spends its days underground.
In fact, it's the world's
only burrowing kangaroo,
and it comes out at night to feed.
It too hangs by a thread on the mainland,
but here it's safe.
To watch these animals
fearlessly looking for scraps,
it's easy to see how effortlessly
a predator could pick them off.
But not here.
Australia's largest, most famous island
is also a wonderland of lost wildlife.
Tasmania too has long been
free of dingoes and foxes,
and it's a last sanctuary for
some remarkable animals.
This is the only place in the world
where tasmanian devils still live wild.
They've long been gone from the mainland,
but here they thrive as
they've always done,
living in tangled forests and screaming
at each other over scraps of carrion.
There are other oddities in the darkness -
strange spotted cat-like animals,
called tiger quolls.
They too are rare elsewhere.
But tasmania is no remote wilderness.
It's full of people,
and the wildlife has to take its chances
alongside towns, roads, and farms.
This is a busy sheep farm,
but it too has some surprises.
At night,
when all the farm workers have gone home,
strange things start
happening in the shed.
A tasmanian devil has been
sheltering under the floorboards.
And a tiger quoll has made
her home in the roof.
The quoll is raising her babies here,
and leaves them up in the rafters while
she comes down to find something to eat.
She and the devils wander
round the shed at night,
looking for food left by the farm workers.
Quolls are carnivores,
and she'd kill live prey with a bite
to the back of the neck.
But sometimes it's easier
to break into a lunch box.
Tasmanian devils too like to scavenge,
but it's not always quite that easy.
Devils will be devils,
and always ready for a bit of
a punch-up over a scrap.
But mostly it's just a lot of noise.
People and wildlife have become
entangled with each other.
Even in the heart of the busiest cities,
they are forced to live together.
The night sky of melbourne is filled every
night with thousands of enormous bats.
Grey-headed flying foxes, native
australians, are struggling in the wild,
because so much of their natural
forest habitat is being cleared.
Here in town,
they find everything they need.
Just a flight away,
there are orchards full of fruit,
exactly what these fruit bats love best.
And they have some exasperating habits.
The bats may take just one bite,
and then sample the next,
like a picky child,
leaving a trail of half-eaten fruit
and some very annoyed farmers.
At dawn they fly the 40 kilometres
or so back to town,
following the course of
the river and the roads.
They're heading back to roost for the day.
And this is where they chose.
Nearly 30 thousands bats took up residence
in a piece of imitation rainforest,
in melbourne's elegant botanic gardens.
Here in the garden it's a few degrees
warmer than the surrounding area,
and with so much food nearby
it suits them very nicely.
But this number of bats has
become too much for the trees.
Many of the plants here
are rare and fragile,
and none of them can stand the wear
and tear of so many hefty animals,
some of which can weigh a kilogram.
So here's a dilemma -
a botanic garden that wants
to preserve its precious trees,
and a native bat that's
on the endangered list.
There are ongoing efforts
to persuade the bats to leave
and settle somewhere else,
where they'll cause less havoc.
There's a strange love-hate relationship
between australia's wildlife and people.
Australian animals are
diverse and peculiar,
and while some have declined
in the face of human changes,
others have thrived and
are doing better than ever.
But for better or for worse,
there are few places in the world
where they are quite so familiar.
And in spite of the sophistication
of the australian way of life,
people still yearn to have
contact with wildlife.
In a land where almost
everyone lives in towns,
thousands of visitors pay to
watch a spectacle like this.
Every day, hundreds of rainbow lorikeets
fly in over the suburbs near brisbane
to one particular park.
These are completely wild birds,
only visiting to take
advantage of the fact
that people want to see them up close.
When they've finished their
free meal of artificial nectar,
the parrots will disappear
again to their roosts.
No-one is quite sure where they all go.
Humans encourage them,
and they're exploiting human generosity.
The first european settlers had such
little regard for the native wildlife
that they brought blackbirds
and nightingales from england,
to make the place feel more like home.
Now, two hundred years later,
there's a growing appreciation
for the remarkable
nature of the landscape and its animals.
Australia's people and
native wildlife are bound together,
and there's no going back.
In some places the land has
changed beyond recognition,
and dozens of unique animal
species will never be seen again.
But despite everything,
an incredible wealth of strange,
tenacious animals is still here.
Wildlife remains,
even in the heart of cities,
and wilderness is never far away.
Modern australia is still
a wild and special place.
