BBC - Lost Land of the Jaguar

Lost Land of the Jaguar Parts 1 & 2 & 3

The TV naturalist and mountain climber Steve Backshall reckons he should be living in another century.
“I’ve always thought I was born in the wrong era. I should have been born into the golden age of exploration and off exploring with the likes of [the great 19th-century Amazon explorers] Wallace and Bates, and Darwin. Nowadays it’s a lot harder to find places genuinely worth exploring.”
It’s lucky, then, that there’s still Guyana. A small sliver of a country squished between Venezuela, Suriname and Brazil, Guyana is the size of the UK yet has the population of Liverpool. Most of it is pristine – and unexplored – rainforest.
This is a dream for the likes of Backshall and the team of wildlife experts who the BBC sent to spend a month in the Guyanan jungle for their new nature series, Lost Land of the Jaguar.
It means Backshall and his colleagues were able to find not only some of the elusive animals the country is already famous for (including the jaguar) but also some of the thousands of undiscovered species that Guyana’s jungles are believed to contain.
Dr George McGavin, an entomologist based at the prestigious Oxford University Natural History Museum, who was also on the trip, says he found the whole experience “absolutely jaw-droppingly gobsmackingly amazing”.
“Guyana truly is a land of giants,” he enthuses. It contains the world’s largest eagle, the harpy eagle, which are “rare as rocking-horse s**t”. It contains the world’s biggest snake, the anaconda, of which he saw a “bloody huge” 24-foot example. It also boasts the largest otter, and the largest spider.
“In episode two you’ll see us hunt for the spider,” says McGavin. “When we find it I hold it up to the camera. It’s the size of a soup plate. It spans both my hands and still its legs hang over the edge. It’s called the giant goliath bird-eating tarantula although in fact it very rarely eats birds – only small children.”
If McGavin’s the jester of the group, Backshall’s the action man. It fell to him to make the series’s most daring outing – and so find even rarer creatures.
The same team visited Borneo, and Wilderness: St Kilda, when Backshall joined another group visiting a remote Scottish archipelago, the naturalist tends to spend most of his time in front of the camera dangling off the ends of ropes. Distressingly, this enthusiasm for sheer rock faces led to a bad accident recently, when Backshall fell 10 metres off a Chepstow mountainside, breaking his back and ankle. But we can only be thankful such a tumble didn’t take place in Guyana.
Backshall was the leader of the first-ever ascent of a 400-metre-high, vertical-walled, table-topped mountain (known as a “tepui”) just over the border in Venezuela. “We were sleeping on ledges with thousands of feet of empty air beneath us,” he recalls. “Some of the rock was very loose and would come out in your hand. Some consisted of enormous slabs as big as fridges, which, if you touched them too heavily, would come pinging off. That definitely rated as the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
At the top he found “this lost world environment” and, among other things, a plant-inhabiting tree frog that was not only a new species, but unique to that tepui top. “Get something in your hand which has never been seen before,” he says, “and it’s pretty exciting.”
There is, of course, a serious side to all this dare-devil adventure. At the end of the expedition, George McGavin met Guyana’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo, to emphasise the importance of protecting the country’s rainforest. It’s an aim with which Jagdeo has sympathy but, as head of one of the world’s poorest countries, he will need the help of the international community if he is to achieve it. The Guyanese are desperate to use the rainforest for logging and farming, and in a country which can rarely afford teachers for its village schools, it’s a tempting source of revenue.
The problem of saving Guyana’s rainforest is not a simple one. The world’s current system of carbon credits, Backshall points out, won’t help. It rewards the growing of a new forest, but not the maintenance of an old one, even though the latter does an “incomparably” better job of consuming carbon gases. Instead, McGavin has an almost utopian vision. He believes “the governments of all developed countries should pay the countries that have rainforests to look after them almost on our behalf.” It may be a pipe dream to expect a global partnership to rescue the Guyanese rainforest, but Lost Land of the Jaguar makes a compelling – if at times hair-raising – case for its protection.

Part 1


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0:58:02

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Part 2



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Part 3



620MB
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0:51:39

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