Connected

He's still this way. Monkey's this way.

Why monkey is... monkey is this way?

I don't know.

-No. -Okay, let's look at a different one.

Now the monkey is...

What's the monkey doing?

I think it's nap time.

I'm going to wrap you up like a sushi roll, okay?

-No! -Yeah.

I love putting my two-year-old to bed,

but it's also kind of strange.

Goodnight, bud.

It's not dark.

I'm leaving him there, behind bars,

in solitary confinement,

under closed-circuit surveillance.

And then... I watch.

It used to be out of concern,

but now it's mostly out of curiosity.

It's become the reality TV show I can't stop watching.

Is the monitor going to talk?

What's the camera going to say?

This is an episode about surveillance,

but not in the way you think.

It's an episode about watching.

Watching people, watching animals,

and the technologies we use to do so.

And about how much all this watching can really tell us.

An incredible amount,

but also a scary amount

about stuff we didn't even know we were looking for:

the taste of bacon,

songbirds who can see the future,

forty thousands selfies,

and my cousin Nadim's love life.

Turns out, watching is so fundamental

that our survival as a species depends on it.

Whoa!

I'm Latif Nasser,

and this is a show about the astonishing connections all around us.

Connections between you and me and our world

that'll make you see that world in a whole new way.

It's kind of cliché and obvious to say, but it smells so nice out here.

Okay, so the nets are clear.

We're just going to try to make this less visible to the birds.

So, the whole idea is that the birds are flying through the forest,

they can't see the net, they hit the net and they fall down into this shelf.

I can barely see the net, and I'm standing right in front of it.

To study the creature he studies, bird scientist Christopher Heckscher

has to be tricky.

They're called veeries.

And they're "veery" elusive.

Alright.

-So I'm going to try to bring the bird in. -Okay.

Play the song of the veery.

You ever switch it up and just try the marimba ringtone?

- We've got a veery. -Awesome. We got one.

We got it.

-We got a veery. - Yeah.

It looks plain, right? Like some ordinary brown bird.

But it's not.

It's like watching surgery or something.

-Nice. -This bird has secrets.

Well, for several years, I was out here studying them,

and wondering, "Where do they go in the winter?"

-So nobody knew that? -No, we didn't. We really didn't know.

Chris knew they were headed south but he wanted to know exactly where.

And that's where surveillance comes in.

Chris and his team made tiny GPS tracker backpacks,

weighing no more than a couple of paperclips.

Let's take him to the net.

- Here? - Yup.

Okay.

And then, they sent the veeries on their way.

And what happened? What did you find out?

With the GPS technology,

we were able to pinpoint within ten meters,

where the bird's spending its time.

So, you can see the exact tree where that bird was

when that GPS point was taken.

And here's what's wild:

that tree, that the veery ended up in,

is 4,000 miles away...

in Brazil.

And the most remarkable thing

is they're leaving Delaware, going down to the southern Amazon basin,

and they're flying all the way back,

and I've even found the same bird singing in the same tree.

-Wow. -It's mind-blowing.

But as Chris solved this one mystery, he noticed another.

Each year, the veeries were nesting and leaving Delaware at different times.

So, some birds will shorten their nesting season in some years.

Sometimes they'll stop nesting at the end of June.

-Okay. -Other years they'll go into mid-July.

But that's presumably a big difference for...

Yeah, it's a big difference, um--

-running an ultra-marathon or something? -Right.

The earlier they left, the less chance they had

of successfully raising chicks,

which seemed like a big price to pay.

So, I was trying to think what would be advantageous

of shortening your nesting season?

Chris wondered: Was it about the availability of food?

Or when predators showed up?

But none of his theories matched the data.

Then he thought of something that felt almost too absurd to say out loud.

These birds are crossing the Gulf of Mexico

at the peak of hurricane season,

so they've got to worry about hurricanes, and they've got to worry about storms.

You could be halfway across the gulf and you could run into a hurricane,

you're in trouble.

What if the veeries changed when they left,

based on how bad the hurricane season was gonna be?

So Chris looked back over nearly 20 years of data,

put the veery timelines next to the hurricane timelines,

and it looked like they matched up.

The length of the nesting season in individuals

is correlated with tropical storm activity.

It seemed like the earlier the veeries left in the summer...

the worse the hurricane season would be that fall.

-That is crazy. -It is crazy.

For them to be able to nest at a certain time

because they are anticipating, uh, bad weather.

Like they would have to know that ahead of time somehow. That seems...

It seems incredible.

It just seems impossible.

So in the summer of 2018,

Chris decided to test his hypothesis out for real.

He would try to predict the severity of the next hurricane season

using only his data about when the veeries left Delaware.

The meteorologists were calling for a below average hurricane season.

But Chris's veery data seemed to say something else.

The birds left Delaware early.

-Based on what I was seeing out here... -Yeah.

...watching these birds, the data showed me

that we were going to have a bad hurricane season in 2018.

So, they were in a hurry.

Yeah, to get done breeding fast and get to South America.

So, it was a showdown.

Weather forecasters on Team Not-so-hurricaney,

veeries on Team Extra-hurricaney.

So, June happens, no hurricanes.

July happens...

Like, walk me through the months.

Yeah. So, July happens, August happens,

still looks like the meteorological models, most of them,

were still calling for a below average season in September.

But then...

in September and October there were six hurricanes,

including Category Four Florence

and Category Five Michael.

In the end, 2018 saw

one of the most active hurricane seasons on record.

The veeries actually are as good or better

than meteorological predictions that have happened over the last 20 years.

Like how could this tiny bird with this walnut-sized brain

intuit something months in advance

that, you know, a giant network of scientists and supercomputers

can't figure out days in advance?

I have no idea how they do that. No idea how they do that.

Clearly, they're cued in to something that's linked up with the global climate.

It's a real mystery.

Okay, so show me again.

Hold out your hand with two fingers... Yeah, just like that.

I'm gonna slide her in there.

Just by watching, we can learn way more than we think.

Even invisible things

that we didn't even know we were looking for.

I think it's really cool that we can learn from an animal like a bird.

I think it's a great example of how if we just observe nature,

what can we learn?

It's one thing to see a wild species migrate across continents,

but what if we could zoom in even further on captive animals?

Could we understand what's going on inside of them as individuals?

I feel like this is the least halal thing I've ever done.

My parents are going to be very upset when they see this, but let's go.

-Okay, well, we'll do it anyway. -Okay.

Why not upset parents? That's what they're there for.

Step over. If I open the gate they'll come out.

I'll get in with you to distract them.

- Hi. Hi, there. Hello. -

- So, pigs are pretty inquisitive. -Yeah, they've set up a perimeter here.

Yeah. They're sussing you out.

Sniffing, yeah.

Whoa. Hey, there. Did that guy try to bite me?

Yeah. Not an intentional bite. They just like to taste.

-There's a kind of irony there. -

This may look and smell like a typical pig farm,

but it's oh so much more.

It's a test farm, and Emma Baxter is a researcher here.

Emma is the first person to tell you

that the livestock industry has its problems,

which is why she's trying to find ways to make it work better,

both for the farmers and the pigs.

An example: on giant farms with thousands of pigs,

farmers can't give those pigs individualized treatment

because it's so hard to track which pig is which.

At the moment, the standard way to do that is ear tags.

When you're tagging an animal, you're causing a mutilation, right?

You're putting a hole in its ear.