The World About Us

Half a million tons of snow travelling at up to 200 miles an hour... From the Andes to the Alps, ever since man made his home beneath the mountain, avalanches have preyed on him. But now the careless tourist is replacing the mountain dweller as the avalanche's main victim. This film looks at avalanches from their beautiful beginning in the snow crystal to their terrible effect on the dwellings of men, and on to perhaps their ultimate control by explosives and science.

Man has always been intrigued by storks, an extraordinary group of birds including the hammerhead, openbill, marabou, and the grotesque shoebill or whale-headed stork-. The most famous is the cherished white stork, the subject of many legends and fables. Heinz Sielmann's film shows 'A Summer with the Storks' in Germany before they migrate south to pass over Istanbul in one of the most spectacular sights of the bird world.

A hazardous dugout canoe journey through Venezuelan jungles towards the source of the Orinoco. The Guaica Indians live short and violent lives wife-stealing and feuding. But for centuries they have at least been protected from 'civilisation' by the remoteness of their jungle home. Six members of the Hovercraft Expedition brave dangerous rapids to seek out the secrets of some of the most primitive people on earth.

Far out in the North Atlantic lives a community that is often isolated by dense fog or furious storms-the Faroe islanders. By fishing, catching seabirds, and climbing the huge sea cliffs in search of eggs, many islanders lead a way of life that has remained unchanged for centuries.

Orang-utans, Indian rhinos, Asiatic lions, Komodo dragons... These are just a few of the rare and extraordinary animals featured in this film. They were photographed by Eugen Schuhmacher during his seven-year odyssey through the world's last wildernesses in search of vanishing animals.

* Oranges, sunshine, surfing, Hollywood-that's modern California. But it's also smog, garbage, overcrowded roads, and sprawling cities. A thousand people a day pour in to add to the twenty million already there. From the highest snowy mountains to the lowest hottest deserts man's impact has been felt... by sea elephants, snow geese, Californian condors, sea otters, and the grey whales that spend half their life on an amazing migration.

Two hundred miles south of Timbuctu lies a vast plateau of sandstone. After rising gently for 150 miles it suddenly drops sheer for over 900 feet, the result of a gigantic disturbance in the earth's crust. At the foot of this vast cliff live the Dogon-one of the most mysterious tribes in the continent of Africa. One of the complex ideas which the Dogon hold on life is that each human being is mirrored by a twin in the animal kingdom. As a result, a man is forbidden to kill the animal with whom he shares a part of his soul, but if by accident or design he does so, then he kills part of himself.

As they leave South Africa, Cousteau and the crew of the research vessel Calypso take aboard two young Cape Fur Seals. Given the names Pepito and Cristobal, the seals gradually form attachments to members of the team and even act as messengers for the divers. Then one day, off South America, Cristobal swims away...

This is the story of a 1,000-mile kayak voyage up the coast of Japan made by ten students: four British, six American. They experienced both the stifling calms of the Inland Sea and the storms of the Pacific, the frenzied excitement of the great Tinjin Festival, and the peace of tiny isolated islands whose inhabitants had never before seen a foreigner of any nationality. They visited the atomic dome at Hiroshima and watched the intense religious ritual of a modern Samurai swords-man. By the end they felt that, though their voyage had only been fleetingly written in the water, what they had learned would not be so soon forgotten.

Film, shown for the first time in colour, of the uproarious balloon race organised in 1965 by the BBC's Travel and Exploration Unit in which ten passenger-carrying balloons took to the air from a field near the Oxfordshire village of Stanton Harcourt and landed in various parts of the Cotswolds.

The sturdy individualism of Newfoundland's men of the sea takes them on a hazardous journey along the Labrador coast in search of the fish on which their livelihood depends.

Lemurs are animals unique to Madagascar. They have been isolated on this vast island off the south-east coast of Africa for twenty million years. Shy, gentle, and in some cases beautiful creatures, they have in time been hunted by the Malagasy people as food and feared as reincarnations of the dead. An Oxford University Expedition has completed a two-month field study and for the first time a great deal of lemur behaviour has been recorded on film.

Tonight's film tells the story of a family of Canadian Eskimos, the Annanacks. It traces their history from the great famine of nearly a century ago, when the family only survived by resorting to cannibalism, right up to their comparative prosperity today, leading one of the first Eskimo working co-operatives. As well as giving a picture of Eskimo life in Ungava Bay, it also looks at a modern city, Ottawa, through fresh eyes - the eyes of the Annanack family

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of this famous scientist and writer, best-known for his prodigious four-year journey across South America and for the Pacific current which bears his name. Foremost among the many Latin-American nations to celebrate this event will be Mexico, visited by Humboldt in 1803-4 and where he is revered as one of the founders of the country's independence from Spain. In this birthday tribute Robert Cundy follows Humboldt's route across Mexico from ocean to ocean, Acapulco to Vera Cruz. He descends silver mines and climbs recently erupted volcanoes to present a portrait of a country whose diverse landscape and mysterious past presented an irresistible challenge to a scientist and humanist fascinated by everyone and everything

When Cousteau and his team go whaling, their aim is to tag not to kill. This can be dangerous when your targets are the 20-ton Finback or the bigger, and reputedly savage.

Since the great European discoveries began 500 years ago, the Primitive peoples of the world have found themselves in collision with the white man. Tonight's documentary tells the romantic and then tragic tale of this collision in South America and Australia, with the camera penetrating deep into the jungles of the Amazon and Arnhemland

When the British left India in 1947 it is said that they left behind them 'some of their customs, a little of their culture, and very occasionally a few of their kind.' Left-Over Raj is the story of a few of the kind who remained behind in the city of Calcutta - half a dozen individuals who chose to stay behind feeling that they could accept their new role in an independent India, and perhaps contribute something. They are people like Captain 'Dinkie' Fownes, a race-horse trainer; John Crossley, who makes tea-chests and distributes milk to 1,000 slum children every day. Tony Lucey runs his own little factory; Desmond Doig works for the Calcutta Statesman.

This week's programme in the series of films from all over the world about our astonishing planet and the creatures that live on it features a tiny island in the sub-Antarctic, the home of the world's largest sea-birds - wandering albatrosses. They share Bird Island with vast numbers of fur, leopard, and elephant seals; with penguins and a wide variety of other birds. For 18 months three scientists worked through storm, sunshine, and blizzard, studying the wandering albatrosses and filming this unique record of the wildlife of Bird Island.

Rain falling on the high, dry Chyulu Hills of Kenya filters through the lava soil until it emerges as cool, running springs at Mzima. Zebra and elephant visit the oasis to drink, but this unusual African portrait is more concerned with the animals that live at the springs. It is a fascinating world in which frogs climb trees, birds swim, turtle and crocodile feed side by side, and the lumbering hippopotamus takes on a new grace in the unique underwater photography of Alan Root.

The most exciting river in the world: fierce Stone Age Indians, animals, and fish which came straight from a nightmare or a science fiction story, all figure in a film which traces the river Amazon from its source in the Andes to its many mouths spread over 200 miles of the Brazilian Atlantic coastline.

Each autumn millions of wild ducks, geese, and other birds migrate southwards through the United States to their winter quarters. This film follows them to the Mexico border and shows some of the work of the us Fish and Wildlife Service, which has to strike a fine balance between providing sport for the American hunters and ensuring the protection of rarer species. Among these is the entire world population of one of the rarest birds of all - the Whooping Crane.

The life history of a moth makes a fascinating story, and some of the larger and more brightly coloured ones have an additional attraction in that they produce silk for the cocoon in which they undergo their final metamorphosis. One species in particular has been used by man for the production of silk, originally in the Far East and later in the West. The story of this sericulture is as intriguing as the natural history of the moths themselves.

Fenced in behind high mountains, largely bypassed by history, the hill tribes of the Philippines have had a unique opportunity to evolve at their own pace: thus they still pursue the blood-feuds of their head-hunting ancestors, but now also have an organised police force; still carry out pagan sacrifices, though many now regard themselves as Christians. It was into this society that Professor Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, anthropologist and explorer, took his cameras to record the beauty of their mountain rice fields and the savagery of their pagan buffalo sacrifices -sacrifices which some viewers may find almost too brutal but which are perfectly natural to the descendants of head-hunters.

David Cabot explores the country-side of Ireland and finds some unusual wildlife in a variety of places. Wagtails among Dublin's Christmas lights; wild geese on remote islands; choughs in ruined castles; rare plants and a peculiar slug in the Burren, the great limestone desert in the west. He follows the coast from Achill Island where the huge basking sharks are caught to an island with the largest colony of roseate terns in Europe.

For centuries the wandering Lapps and their reindeer lived in a forgotten world of their own -the endless snows and frozen forests of Lappland. Then came the snow-scooter and the snow-tractor, and almost in a single generation the Lapps turned from nomads to settlement dwellers. But one man determined that their old way of life should not be forgotten: his name, Per Host, explorer, photographer, honorary Lapp. For two years he lived with the last of the wandering Lapps. He filmed the bitter hardships of winter spent in tents far within the Arctic circle. He recorded the excitement of reindeer round-ups and battles. And with the Lapps he endured the long spring trek to the coast, ending in the spectacle of the whole reindeer herd, nearly 1,000 strong, swimming an arm of the sea. At the end of his wanderings he returned with a faithful picture of a now-vanished pattern of existence - life of great harshness led amid surroundings of great beauty.