The rainforest canopy floating a hundred feet above us
has been an unKnown world - until now
"Yes!"
A new breed of explorer is now venturing
onto the green roof of the world
going where no one has gone before.
We join the adventures
of these Heroes of the High Frontier
In the darkest depths of the darkest forest, the crew assembles.
The pioneering spirit harnesses modern technology
as a courageous band sets off on a voyage of discovery.
A flame ignites a quest to a place of our world,
but, until now, always just above our reach... the rainforest canopy.
Almost a century ago explorer William Bebe wrote:
Yet another continent of life remains to be discovered,
not upon the earth, but one or two hundred feet above it.
There awaits a rich harvest
for the naturalist who overcomes the obstacles and mounts
to the summits of the jungle trees.
The rainforest canopy is home to more living creatures
than anywhere else on the face of the earth.
Many are born here and will die here, too,
rarely, if ever, touching the earth.
Their lives, their whole world has been a mystery.
The canopy is the last biological frontier on earth.
Biologist Terry Erwin began exploring this world just 16 years ago.
Since he had no way to reach the canopy,
he brought it down to earth.
Clouds of insecticide welled up -
and a rain of entirely new and unKnown creatures came down.
So many creatures of so many kinds,
it seemed there were 20 times as many species
on this planet as we had thought.
The canopy was a hot-bed of evolution.
Just what was going on up there?
There was only one way to find out.
A combination sling-shot, fishing pole is Nalini Nadkarni's own invention
for shooting a line a hundred feet up.
"Yes!" "Oh, my God."
Accuracy is essential.
To get that all important first line up over a limb,
a climbing rope is hauled up to which she attaches her Jumar ascenders.
Ever since her first climb, for 19 years,
"I realized, at that moment, that first rope climb,
I Knew where I was going for the rest of my life,
I was going up in the canopy."
It takes hard work and courage to conquer this new world
- but when they climb, Nalini and the other canopy researchers
are also returning to a very old world.
Our ancestors lived in trees.
Perhaps, we are returning to a place buried deep in our primal memory.
A place of primal fears.
Braving these dizzying heights
the first canopy researchers discovered a complex web of life.
"We really felt like pioneers,
we felt like we were frontiersmen, going to where
no human had ever gone before and, and everything we picked up
was something new and something different
- new species, new interactions."
Nalini learned that giant forest trees
actually sprouted roots from their uppermost branches.
Jay Malcolm found that animals believed to be extremely rare,
were actually common creatures if you Knew where to look for them.
Meg Lowman investigated the chemical warfare
between animals and plants,
a source of the canopy's bewildering diversity.
And Neil Rettig spent months up a tree,
unveiling the life of one of the world's most magnificent eagles.
Working in the canopy has taught them
that this is where the rainforest lives...
...where light is turned into life.
The canopy is a powerhouse of the forest.
It's where sunlight changes into stored energy.
It's where trees reproduce, where the flowers and the fruits are,
where pollination takes place, where fruit dispersal takes place
so I think it's really where everything's happening in the forest.
This is where the birds feed.
You can see where, where all the, the bark and the, um, eh,
the epiphytes have been sort of Knocked off
because this is where the birds themselves
and the monkeys come and feed on these big fruits.
I can't believe I'm in top of this tree...
"Today I got up much higher than I ever had before,
I was able to shift the ropes around
and I was actually able to get to the very top of this tree.
"God! Wow!"
"I can see forever!"
Just 25 years ago,
up the rivers of Surinam and Guyana, came an expedition
in search of one of the canopies greatest predators.
It was the personal quest of a 23-year-old Neil Rettig.
He and two friends sought to witness and film the life of the Harpy eagle.
The Harpy's life in the wild was practically unKnown
until Neil strapped on spikes like telephone repairmen use
and jury-rigged a reinforced cable
big enough to wrap around the huge girth of a rainforest giant.
Somehow, they scaled one hundred and fifty feet to reach the nest.
"When I think of the crazy things
that all three of us did (Wolfgang, myself, and Allen), it's unbelievable.
I mean, we're lucky we're still here."
They built a blind from which they could watch the nest.
They used a ladder to climb
from the crown of one tree up into the nest tree itself.
While exposed outside the blind, they were under constant scrutiny
and frequent attack by the most powerful eagle in the world.
When the blind was complete, Neil looked through his lens
to meet the fierce gaze of the Harpy for the first time.
"The harpy eagle will, will always be my favorite bird of prey.
I feel like I'm part of it or it's part of me."
After a month of observation,
a tiny ball of fluff appeared between the mother's powerful talons.
Neil was the first to ever glimpse, not to mention film,
a newly hatched Harpy chick in the wild.
But his exhilaration almost proved fatal.
"I had just finished spending three days in the blind
watching the chick hatch
and I was completely overwhelmed with, with excitement;
and I started climbing down, using the belts and the climbing spikes,
and I was just thinking about other things,
I was daydreaming,
I was so excited that the chick had actually hatched and I filmed,
in the early morning when the chick was a tiny little baby,
and I just, I remember leaning backward
and just falling into space - and it was like slow motion.
I remember falling down and trying to grab a hold of the, a palm tree,
crashing through the vegetation and landing on my back
and then, then I couldn't breathe.
And I looked up and, uh, Wolfgang,
my, uh, associate was coming out of the blind
and the eagle came and ripped off a piece of his pants
and flew away with it
- he shot back up in the blind and he said he'd come down in the dark
Well, finally, they, they, he climbed down
and they carried me out in the stretcher and,
one week later, I was, I was climbing again, that's how crazy I was."
Protected by luck and a motorcycle helmet,
Neil suffered only a few broken ribs from his 55 foot fall.
He continued to film, capturing the parents hunting
like sharks among the green billows of the canopy.
Sloths are a favorite prey of the Harpy.
Usually, they eat part of the carcass before bringing it to the nest
- but, this time, dinner is delivered alive.
Neil, who had survived a fall from five stories,
was felled by a tiny insect bite.
Infected by a parasite, he was forced to leave.
I Knew someday I had to go back and complete the entire study
and actually document what happens
when that young Harpy makes its first flight.
Neil was one of the first to venture up into this high flung new frontier
but he and other pioneers will soon climb into canopy's
all over the world.
The rainforest canopy is like an eighth continent,
an archipelago of floating islands
that encircles the globe in a belt above the equator.
Originally, it covered 12% of the planet's land area,
but more than half of it has been destroyed by logging and agriculture.
Yet, it remains home to more than half of all the animals
and plants living on earth.
Canopy explorers are discovering that each island of rainforest
has a nature all its own.
Malaysia's canopy is one of the highest
and most unattainable in the world.
Like giant lollipops, trees rise a hundred feet
before spreading their crowns into the clouds.
From miles around, animals are gathering here for a great event,
unique to Southeast Asia's rainforests.
They are coming for a feast.
In the course of a just a few weeks,
most of the trees here will bear fruit,
laying out a banquet in the sky.
The seeds of the tallest trees...
...helicopter down a hundred feet into the canopy below.
>From there, it's another hundred feet down into the dark
orangutans make an endless pilgrimage
through these tree tops in search of food.
They travel alone except for females and their young.
They maintain detailed mental maps of huge tracks of forest,
memorizing the location of each favorite fruit tree
and the shortest routes between them.
While still a baby at mother's breast,
an orang begins a lifetime of learning
just where and when to find ripe fruit.
When a wave of mass fruiting hits a valley,
it gives the orangs something even more precious than food
- a chance to socialize with their own kind.
Infants get a rare chance to play with other youngsters their own age.
Long thought to be loners by nature,
we now Know that orangs enjoy each other's company
- when there's enough food to go around.
Even the big males are welcome to join the party.
Gibbons, too, relish the sweet, abundant fruit.
Orangs would usually threaten a gibbon who dared to eat
in the same fruiting tree,
but with plenty of food of around,
the little ape can eat his fill in peace.
Then he swings away with effortless grace,
hundreds of feet above the ground.
Orangs are too heavy for such acrobatics.
Instead, they descend to the under story,
where they put their weight to good use.
Still 50 feet above the forest floor,
they sway back and forth on the pliable saplings,
working their way between the taller fruiting trees.
Moving among the trees
presents special challenges for all canopy creatures...
...especially those without limbs.
A snake requires exquisite balance.
This one is quite comfortable with life out on a limb.
The flying snake glides from tree to tree.
It flattens its body into a ribbon- shape, swimming through the air.
It's not easy to escape such a talented predator.
Ribs raise wings, as a warning at first.
Flying dragons soar through the open colonades of a Malaysian forest,
just one leap ahead of their predators.
These are the gothic cathedrals of the canopy,
but there are places that resemble the tangled webs ofjungle lore
- the lush forests of Costa Rica.
Here, epiphytes, the plants growing on the trees,
may weigh more than the foliage of the trees themselves.
Woody vines called lianas Knit the canopy together
providing by-ways for all sorts of creatures
and making a prehensile tail a useful and common adaptation.
The booming calls of howler monkeys
attract the attention of a passing jaguar.
For canopy animals,
it is the forest floor that is a dangerous place.
Ajaguar would love to snatch a howler,
if only it could reach their treetop refuge.
The close-Knit canopy...
...is a green roof shading the forest floor.
A dark netherworld populated by the undead.
Most seedlings that sprout here slowly starve in the endless gloom.
But vines make their own luck,
they flail about following every sunbeam to its source.
Some climb using tendrils that coil tightly,
pulling the plant skyward.
Others take a more direct approach,
wrapping their stems around any support that leads up to the light.
When they finally break out into the tropical sunshine,
they turn the power of the sun into the stuff of life.
No sooner is light turned into substance than it is consumed -
transforming the sun's energy yet again.
Orchids don't have to fight for their place in the sun,
they start life up here already.
They are epiphytes, so-called air plants,
which thrive without any connection to the earth below.
But one infamous plant makes the most of both worlds.
The tiny seedling sends down roots.
Just thin strands at first,
heading a hundred feet to the forest floor below.
Once it connects with the earth, it gains new power.
Its leaves compete for light with the host tree,
while its roots multiply and merge into misshapen limbs.
They wrap around the trunk of the host in a deadly embrace,
constricted and starved of life, the host usually dies and rots away,
while the roots solidify into the trunk of a forest giant
with an empty heart.
The strangler fig may be a killer,
but it also provides food for countless animals
and support the thousands of epiphytes in lush hanging gardens.
Epiphytes are the particular passion of Nalini Nadkarni.
She practically lives up here when she's working.
She studied the cloud forest
and each day is reminded of how it got its name.
"I think one of the most amazing feelings of working in the canopy
is when the mist and fog and cloud roll up the mountainside
and it hits the forest, it hits the tree in front of you,
and you suddenly realize you are being enveloped in a cloud."
This daily misting provides just what epiphytes need.
Mosses catch droplets drifting past.
With each drop, they gather a bit of dust,
some from as far away as the Sahara Desert.
Soil builds up
and the hanging gardens grow in size and diversity, building more soil.
A kiss from a desert wind, blown wet and warm feeds the forest.
"I suddenly feel like this is what an epiphyte feels like,
this is the nourishing mist and fog that's coming through.
So I feel it on my face, feel it on my hands
and I understand better what an epiphyte is."
Nalini has discovered that the moss mats,
that blanket the oldest branches, play a vital role.
"These mats are just full of roots, they sort of Knit the soil together...
I'll just finish clipping these last roots,
and then the moment of peeling them away.
Watch this.
And what you see is this soil and it's just riddled with roots.
It smells great,
it's like this very earthy smell,
which is kind of funny when you think of where, where we are,
but you can see that the branch is actually not all that thick
Um, the branches always look a lot more thick
when they have their moss mats on them.
So there are lots of invertebrates, insects, earthworms
that live in this material high, high above the forest floor,
you have to get up here,
you have to look in these plants,
you have to look in this soil to figure out, really, what's happening,
what's going on up here."
Nalini's perseverance and her daring led her to a remarkable discovery.
"A really amazing thing about these moss mats are that
they can actually nourish the tree itself, they can feed the tree.
Some species of trees can put out roots from their own branches
and trunks that go into this soil and take in food and water.
And, so, the epiphytes are getting support,
they're getting their place in the sun,
but the tree is getting nutrients and water from the mats
that the epiphytes make.
So, it's kind of like the epiphytes are paying rent to a landlord
and it's just a really amazing situation."
Suspended in three dimensional space,
these hanging gardens are like coral reefs in the sky
- creating opportunities for a whole community of life.
They provide good pickings for a Kuati.
Flowers are nectar, even ants for protein,
even ants for a protein snack - with a bite.
But ants are just the appetizer.
Fruit is the main course.
Following its nose, the Kuati is led to the very summit of a great tree.
Monkeys with prehensile tails are better equipped to feed up here.
Though the Kuati is no canopy specialist,
he is not to be denied.
He searches for the ripest fruit.
His cast offs feed a band of Kuati females and their young
on the forest floor.
The seeds would never survive beneath their parent tree anyway,
where specialized fungi and insects wait to prey upon them.
Animals connect the sun lit canopy with the earth below in many ways.
Flowers are designed to attract animals,
but leaf-cutter ants are not invited guests.
They strip palatable blooms en masse.
Millions of ants working together collecting the bounty of the canopy
and sucking it down into the earth below.
Whether it's carried or just float down,
it is rapidly recycled back into living matter.
Fingers of slime mold spread over the leaf litter,
breaking it down into plant food.
The gossamer threads of fungi help the roots of trees
absorb 95% of the nutrients -
building forest giants that rise up into the light.
The leaf litter hides many miracles.
A strawberry frog guards its eggs
which develop in a puddle of rainwater.
As soon as the tadpole hatches,
she moves it to a more secure nursery,
encouraging it to wriggle up onto her back
No bigger than a thumbnail,
she undertakes a phenomenal commute, heading straight up.
She climbs in search of a bromeliad - an epiphyte with a rosette of leaves
that channel rain and mist into a central reservoir.
This tiny ocean in the sky comes complete with miniature sea monsters
- mosquito larvae, feeding on rotting debris.
This debris also acts as fertilizer for the plant.
She drops her tadpole off in the first empty reservoir she finds.
But her work is not yet done.
She has other tadpoles stashed in other bromeliads,
and every two days she makes the rounds.
Her offspring's telltale vibrations signal her to lay another egg -
but this egg isn't fertile, it's dinner - it's her tadpole's only food -
a brilliant strategy for survival
until a thirsty coati happens by.
It takes researchers years to discover such elaborate strategies
and just seconds for a coati to send them astray.
The sky-high world of epiphytes is made up
of millions of such little life and death dramas.
"I love epiphytes.
I don't Know why I do.
I think it's something about they live in the treetop,
and ever since I was a little kid, I like climbing trees...
it was a world I could escape to, no grown-ups,
no grown-ups climb trees so it was just my little world
where I could go up and read
and... It's been 17 years
and every time I put on my Jumars and go up a rope,
it's that same feeling of exhilaration,
of what will I find today, what will I learn today...
The rain forest canopy yields its secrets
to only the most determined explorers.
It took Neil Rettig fourteen years to return to Guyana
and his work with the Harpy eagle.
"I think what's at the center of the connection with the canopy is,
for me, a link back to my youth,
when I was a 23-year-old wild adventurer.
Just the odors of the flowers and bird calls open up all these memory banks
that had been shut down for all those years - it was unbelievable.
It was just like I had never left."
A Harpy's calls help lead Neil to its nest
just a few miles from his old study site.
Neil was now one of the world's best wildlife cinematographers
but he was as thrilled as ever to set his eyes on a Harpy chick
"It was like having a reunion with an old friend."
"Possibly, one of the new adults was the baby from 1975."
For six months, Neil kept his vigil.
As he watched the chick grow,
he wondered if he would finally capture
the maiden flight of a harpy on film.
Every day brought Neil and the chick closer to their goal.
While Neil watched the chick prepared,
exercising and testing its wings.
Then one day, Neil turned the camera on just in time.
A long awaited milestone for the chick, its mother,
and perhaps most of all - for Neil.
Such long term dedication has coaxed a few of its secrets
from the canopy,
but as the light of a day fades,
a cloak of mystery descends.
The next frontier in canopy exploration
beckons out of the gathering dark
Few have dared to climb into this high flung wilderness at night,
when it comes alive with a whole different community of animals.
They come out to reap the bounty the canopy built by day.
Bats are the unsung heroes of the rainforest.
They hover over the branches, sniffing out the ripest fruit.
Only just able to carry its prize,
it flies to a roost where it can feed in safety.
Bats play vital roles in pollination, insect control
and the reproduction of trees.
The bat eats the sweet flesh of the fruit but discards the seeds.
They fall far from their parent tree's shadow,
where they have a better chance of surviving.
Animals help many canopy plants reproduce.
Epiphytes face unique challenges
spreading their seeds around the hanging gardens.
One solution, a sticky coating that keeps the seeds
from falling to the forest floor
and attracts a particular species of ant.
These ants are strong enough to win the tug of war with the plant.
They carry them to their nest
but they eat the nutritious coating leaving the seeds to sprout.
The seedlings grow turning the nest into a garden
overflowing with the ants favorite food plants,
some of which are never found anywhere else.
A canopy mouse quenches its thirst in a mouse size bromeliad.
Mice eat epiphyte seeds and are, in turn, eaten themselves... by Boas.
It's flicking tongue tastes the victim's presence
as it follows it out onto the thinnest vine.
Sometimes, there's no where to go, but down.
It spreads its limbs like a parachute.
The mouse crashes through foliage hurtling six stories down.
It weighs so little - air resistance slowed its fall enough
so that it landed safely,
one of the benefits of being a small creature in the canopy.
Small animals thrive in rainforest canopies the world over.
In the Great Amazon Basin,
they could travel from treetop to treetop for thousands of miles.
The woolly opossum was thought
to be one of the rarest of the Amazon's creatures.
Its prehensile tail is naked at the tip to give it a strong grip.
They are built like little wrestlers.
Babies cling tightly to their mothers,
who grasp the thinnest of lianas with powerful feet.
Those without a family in tow have more freedom of movement.
They are all searching for sweets.
They drink nectar and eat fruit.
The mother must seek her dinner elsewhere.
Using aerial roots as a ladder she follows another sweet scent.
So sweet is this perfume it distracts the opossum from its meal.
The aroma of ripe banana proves irresistible.
Mother and offspring are lucky to have missed this treat.
The wooly opossum finds the morning light unnerving.
By now, it should be hidden in the darKness of its lair.
But it has no need to fear,
the trap was set by biologist Jay Malcolm
who is exploring the night-world of the canopy
with some startling results.
"These wooly opossums are the single most abundant mammal
in this forest,
more abundant than any other kind of rodent,
more abundant than any kind of monkey,
or any other kind of mammal and that was a total surprise.
People Knew that there were things up there,
we just didn't Know how many or where,
so, when we started doing this,
everything we found out was brand new.
Gaining access to the canopy and putting traps up in the canopy
has really allowed us to enter a new world,
a new realm of, of research.
And, we, uh, Know almost nothing,
there's new species of small mammals,
so, there promises to be a lot more surprises."
"Off you go."
>From museum rarity to common critter -
they just had to look for it in the right place.
To service as many traps each day
Jay learned an ancient technique of tree climbing.
"This is called the picoino or foot-belt,
it's the same method that the Amerindians have always used
to climb up palm trees.
The way it works is what you're really doing,
you're sort of pushing out against your heels,
so you're really sort of turning your feet into a pair of pliers."
To climb seven stories in a manner of seconds,
a feat that requires incredible strength and stamina.
Should he lose his grip, even for an instant,
he would crash to the ground below.
Having attached a small pulley,
he raises a simple and ingenious frame for his trap.
Once it is in place,
he slides down like a fireman on a very long and rough pole.
Then he simply raises his trap into position
where it will await an overnight guest.
Jay finds that he captures opossums only within the undisturbed canopy.
Canopy animals are stopped short
where the fabric of the forest is slashed by a clear-cut.
Thirteen years after the chain saws stopped,
this place is still a no-man's land, a desert.
"An area that's been cut over and used,
and you Know what it's like walking down there,
it's hot, full of all sorts of burrs and messy stuff,
from a life standpoint it has been, basically, trashed
- there's not much left there,
it's just a, a tragedy."
Despite efforts to save it,
the rainforest is being consumed at an unprecedented rate,
lending an air of urgency to canopy exploration.
But in the face of such a huge problem,
you have to dream larger still.
A lighter than air arc ascends with the dawn.
Suspended beneath is the canopy luge,
a sled bearing excited researchers on the trip of their lives.
Among them, is one of the founders of the field,
Meg Lowman, who has explored canopies the world over,
but, today, she goes where no one has gone before.
Their mission - to trawl the green sea of the canopy
and to get some inkling of the biological richness it contains.
Right or left... exactament...
The blimp maneuvers the luge carefully.
Sidling up to a tree crown a hundred and fifty feet in the air.
As soon as they are close enough to reach,
nets are wielded frantically.
...encore
They scoop up insects and collect whole branches in an all out effort
to gather as many samples of canopy life as quickly as they can.
It would have taken weeks of difficult and dangerous
climbing to get the samples they amass
in just one morning on the luge.
The luge is part of operation Canopy,
which invites the best researchers, the world over, to join its venture.
They also use the canopy raft,
a web-like platform dropped over the crowns of several trees.
Walking atop the swaying trees is like walking on the face of the sea.
"I guess I feel really special walking on the tops of trees
and I really tiptoe all the time
because I'm frightened of disturbing these poor little buds
or snapping a branch,
but, in actual fact, with the raft and its wonderful mesh floor,
our weight is dispersed really nicely"
Meg's work in the treetops has shown that over millions of years
plants evolved poisons to defend themselves from being eaten,
while insects evolved ways to overcome these toxins.
Rain forest plants and insects are waging a bio chemical war.
The arsenal of poisons and antidotes created by canopy plants
and animals are a pharmaceutical gold mine.
They are the stuff that medicines are made out of.
Who Knows what cures to what dread diseases may be hidden
among the samples collected by the crew of operation Canopy?
Each evening the best canopy scientists in the world...
...share a meal along with their ideas by swapping techniques,
samples and data they are beginning a new era in canopy research.
They have blazed a trail into the last biological frontier
- opening this eighth continent to exploration.
Upon their shoulders the next generation can scale new heights.
Today, canopy tours offer a thrilling new perspective on life.
But the greatest thrill is realizing we are part of this beautiful world
floating above our own, for good or ill.
The same pioneering spirit that brought up into the canopy
has given us the power to destroy it.
The first canopy explorers have given us a unique opportunity
to save this amazing world.
We have a choice. It is up to us which path we take.