Africa: The Greatest Show On Earth

The very centre of Africa.

And the centre of two million square miles of dense tropical rain forest.

At first glance it seems deserted and eerily still,

not an easy place to live.

MONKEY CHATTERS

But in fact, there is a greater concentration of animals here

than anywhere else in Africa.

And in this world, they must grab every opportunity.

Competition is intense and unrelenting.

TREE CREAKS

Even the forest itself fights its corner with spines

and poisonous sap.

Here, every living thing must fight for its space.

Such beauty.

But the flower is self-serving,

enticing animals into an unwitting alliance.

Stingless bees.

They have to work hard.

The forest flowers make them do so by rationing their nectar,

forcing each bee to visit and so pollinate

at least a thousand blooms each day.

For the bees, it's worth the effort.

They need the nectar to make honey, which they store in pots.

It's so precious, they keep it hidden beneath the bark of a tree.

But their secret is out.

MONKEY HOWLS

Nothing is safe in this forest.

Chimpanzees love honey.

She seems oblivious to danger.

A fall from up here could be fatal.

But she does need a bigger stick.

Only a chimp has the ability to break into a stingless bees'

nest as well hidden as this.

Chimps are extremely intelligent,

but none is born with the skill to use a tool.

Youngsters like this one must learn by watching.

She uses special tools, one after another,

to get all the honey she can,

and in a few minutes, she destroys what took the bees years to build.

In the rainforest, nothing is safe.

MONKEY HOWLS

Here in the Congo,

there can be as many as 500 trees crammed into every acre.

In the battle for space,

some will rise to over 60 metres high in just a few decades.

In a valley like this,

there could be close on 1,000 different species of tree.

Up here, the crowns barely touch.

Each tree seems to respect its neighbour's space.

When they germinate down on the forest floor, young trees

and plants are less restrained.

But every new generation fights it out,

in battles we can see by accelerating time.

They must get light if they are to survive and they squeeze,

crush and even slash one another in order to reach it.

Despite the thick canopy above, some sunlight does filter through

and allows a few low-light specialists

to bloom near the forest floor.

Down here there are animals, too, that seek out the sunlight.

The forest's largest predator.

A female rock python.

Her body is five metres long, weighs 100 kilos and has 4,000 muscles

that she uses to crush the life out of her victims.

But right now, her need is not for food. It's for warmth.

She finds a rare patch where a shaft of sunlight strikes the ground

and she begins to bask.

She's cold-blooded,

so this is the only way she can raise the temperature of her body.

But now she's becoming very warm indeed,

more than ten degrees hotter than usual.

At 40 degrees centigrade, she's in danger of killing herself.

Just in time, she moves off.

She disappears below ground.

This is her nest and it's full of giant eggs.

It's critical for the eggs development

that they stay above 30 degrees.

Here in this special filming burrow, she gently wraps her super-heated

body around the eggs, passing onto them the warmth of the sun.

She has done this every day for three months.

The repeated heat stress on her body is so great it could be lethal,

and at the very least, it will take three years for her to

recover from incubating this one clutch of eggs.

Her parchment-shelled eggs carry the pressed imprint of her scales...

an indication of the strength of her embrace.

At last, her efforts are rewarded.

But the babies can't stay here. They must leave their sanctuary

and find food in the tangled world above.

They're over 60 centimetres long, already big enough to be

a threat to the smaller inhabitants of the forest.

But they are themselves vulnerable.

Particularly to other snakes.

But this one is their mother.

Unusually for snakes,

her maternal instincts continue for days after her eggs hatch.

Even so, the forest is such a dangerous place that only

one in 100 of her youngsters is likely to reach adulthood.

Just occasionally, , the competition eases.

A tree suddenly produces fruit.

It's a magnet for the creatures of the canopy, and they, in turn,

as they feed, create a bonanza for those on the ground below.

CHIMP SNORTS

A mob of red river hogs.

HOGS SNORT AND SNIFF

They have travelled over two miles through the thick undergrowth

to get to this fall of fruit.

But in the African forest, little comes for free.

This feast is a bribe.

The hogs will carry the seeds in their stomachs

and deposit them far from the parent tree.

Night falls.

But one living community, which is neither animal nor plant

continues its never ending work in the darkness.

This ground is alive with fungi that digest all the litter

discarded by the forest.

Some rare fungi do so with enzymes that are luminous.

The local people call them "chimpanzee fire."

Without the fungi, the dead vegetation would pile so high

the living trees would be submerged.

Dawn, and a new day reveals just how much control the jungle

has over its own environment.

The forests of the Congo are the lungs of Africa.

As they use the sunlight to build their tissues,

so they release oxygen and water vapour into the air.

Each hectare of forest produces, as vapour,

almost 190,000 litres of water a year.

So much that it creates its own weather.

Clouds blanket the forest, driving up the humidity and temperature.

A storm is brewing.

The Congo might be the richest part of Africa,

but it's also the most violent.

ROARING THUNDER

BOOMING THUNDERCLAP

Each year, as many as 100 million lightning bolts

strike the forest.

That's more than anywhere else in the world.

BOOMING THUNDERCLAP

And with the lightning comes the rain.

Up to 95% of the rain that falls here

is generated by the forest itself.

ROLLING THUNDER

With the deluge will come change to the animals and to the forest.

It's certainly perfect weather for frogs.

The big storm is the cue for the most important climb

of this frog's life.

It's a male in search of a mate.

But if he is to find one, he has to get to the top.

He needs to keep his wits about him,

for the rain also brings out hunters.

Easy does it.

The top, at last.

But he's late to the party.

FROGS CHIRP

The higher a male sits, the further his voice will carry,

so the top slots are worth fighting for.

And he's won.

He has the top place.

So now it's time to sing.

FROG CHIRPS

FROG CHIRPS

And a white-bellied female responds.

They join together to mate.

The loser will have to wait for the next storm before he sings again.

She lays her eggs on a blade of a long leaf.

And he, using his back legs, folds it over

and glues its two edges together, shutting the eggs inside.

This sealed nest is the safest place these leaf-folding frogs

can find to protect their precious brood.

Within days, the eggs are developing.

The timing is perfect.

The rain washes away the glue and the tadpoles slip

out of the leaves into the growing puddles below.

The rainy season reaches its peak and the ground has been transformed.

The forest is flooded.

It's a new world.

Fish swim in from the swollen streams,

exploiting this newly created space, snapping up the drowning insects.

This is a butterfly fish.

A Congo bichir.

The hunter becomes the hunted.

The butterfly fish is too quick and leaps out of danger.

The floods gradually drain back into the established waterways

that run through the forest like blood vessels.

There is so much water flowing through the forest that even

little rivulets can carve out the soil around an ancient boulder.

This is the home of one forest creature that has lived

here in the Congo for 44 million years.

Picathartes.

These birds mate for life,

and the male reaffirms the bond by displaying to the female.

They're building a mud nest on the underside of the boulder's

overhang, where it'll be protected from the rain.

The female takes the lead.

The male doesn't seem quite so skilful.

Oh, dear.

Luckily, she can put things right.

Now she's collecting the soft furnishings.

He's brought some, too, but he still can't get it right.

In the end, the female seems satisfied with the finish...

and just in time.

THUNDER