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00:00We're up at our highest point on the trip to date, it's about four and a half thousand
00:29metres, which is getting over three times the height of Snowdon, so we're pretty high.
00:34We're on a grassland just at the foot of Shiveling, which hopefully is outside the front of my
00:42tent.
00:43I haven't seen it yet because it was cloudy when we arrived, so we'll just go and have
00:53a look.
00:55Nice on the outside of the tent, and there she is, absolutely beautiful, not bad for
01:10a view from your bedroom window.
01:18As you can see it's a pretty remote place up here, and it's absolutely amazing how many
01:24people will make this pilgrimage up to these heady heights to pay their respects to the
01:30peaks.
01:32It's 17 miles from the nearest town, the town of Gangotri, all the way up to here, the mountain
01:40of Shiveling, and it was extremely hard work for us to get up here, and people are using
01:46mules walking for hours just to get to the source of the Ganges.
01:54It may look like I'm hanging out in a quarry, but actually this is a glacial moraine.
02:04It's all the rocks and rubble that have been pushed up as the glacier has moved past and
02:09down the valley, and there's some big stuff here which just shows the power the glacier
02:15has as it's trucking its way down the valley.
02:20It's also very difficult to negotiate, particularly when you're filming yourself.
02:34We've managed to get various time lapses during the day, but in order to get the killer shot,
02:39the dawn reveal, we're going to have to overnight and bivvy up on the escarpment.
02:48Myself and Ian, the infamous cameraman, have decided to bivvy tonight up at this glacial
02:54lake in the attempt to get some nice shots first thing in the morning.
03:09Right, that's the mat, sleeping bag, as you can see Ian's glorious bivvy bag, mine is
03:27a lot less interesting.
03:41So let's get this right, that's your home, and this is the deluxe McCarthy version, and
03:52this is what we've come to film.
03:55I'm a bit scared now, I've suddenly realised I might be under-prepared for this.
04:01It better be good weather tomorrow morning, so we can make it all worthwhile.
04:17I had a toasty evening, and slept really well, no snow as you can see, which is a plus.
04:25So I'd better get up and do a time-lapse of the sunrise.
04:43It's time for work.
04:44This is what we do.
04:45This is what we do, Mr Producer, I hope you appreciate this.
04:51I've got a time-lapse going, and hopefully, as the cloud dissipates, we'll see the sun
04:59catching its peaks, it's the most spectacular sight.
05:04Unfortunately, we've only got one take at this, because we've got to head down tomorrow,
05:09so we've got numerous cameras dotted around to try and capture this amazing spectacle
05:16of the dawn over Shiveling.
05:46I think that was well worth the night in the bivvy bag.
06:01We've got a really nice time-lapse of the sun rising on Shiveling, and it's looking
06:07beautiful now.
06:08Just the tops and the clouds, but other than that, perfect.
06:16We've heard this rumour, there's bears, Himalayan black bears, and they've been seen in a village
06:40up in the Himalayas called Tolma.
06:46We hear they are coming in at night to take advantage of the apple harvest.
06:50We've brought our infrared cameras to try and catch them in the act.
07:08So we're just on the edge of the village that we're staying in, and we've decided to
07:13pick this orchard to try and film the bears in.
07:17There's windfall apples on the ground, there's pretty much nothing else around for the bears
07:23to be eating, so there should be bears coming in almost every night.
07:30The black bears are going to be fairly aggressive, so we couldn't use just the normal canvas
07:37but had to have something a bit more substantial.
07:38So these walls are a foot and a half thick, so I feel reasonably comfortable in there.
07:45It's pitch black outside, we're filming everything with infrared light, so I can't see anything.
07:51The animals can't see anything either.
07:53We've had foxes come through, lots of fox activity, jungle cats come through, so there's
07:59stuff around.
08:00No bears yet.
08:02They have a huge Hindu festival called Diwali with lots of fireworks.
08:08They had that about ten days ago, so one thing we think is maybe the fireworks have scared
08:13the bears away and it's taken them a while to come back into this area.
08:18We're hoping the chances of a bear coming in will just increase over the next week,
08:21but so far we haven't seen so much as a footprint, so we're all a bit nervous about not getting
08:28the sequence.
08:40Night after night all we managed to get was foxes, unfortunately no bears.
08:45Mind you, the foxes seem to like the apples, something I've never seen before.
08:59With not a bear in sight, we decided to spread our net wider and set up infrared cameras
09:16on the outskirts of the village.
09:18It may look like we're rewiring the whole hillside here, but in fact we're setting up
09:25infrared camera traps to try and catch Himalayan black bears doing their thing at night.
09:33It basically involves setting up infrared beams that the bears cut, which triggers the
09:42camera to go off, and then we get them drinking, feeding, whatever they're up to.
09:49All we've got to do is turn up and then we've got them.
09:55OK.
09:58Yeah.
09:59Picking it up.
10:00Absolutely there.
10:01That's OK.
10:02That's a good distance from there.
10:03Because I'm coming to frame by the wolf's troughs.
10:11Is it high at the back?
10:12I need to check it over the trough.
10:14Yeah.
10:16OK.
10:25OK.
10:29Yeah, it's keep coming through.
10:31Let's go to the other one.
10:33That's that.
10:34That works then.
10:36So we're about 200 metres outside the village and we set up a camera trap system here because
10:45there is a very clear path that runs out of the woods and in towards the village and we
10:51think there is a good chance that any bears or leopards that are going to come towards
10:57the village are going to get funnelled through here because there's not many options for
11:01them to go anywhere else.
11:03So we've set two infrared beams, so anything that breaks the beam will trigger the cameras
11:09to turn on.
11:10This is a motion detector.
11:11We've got these two infrared lights that they fire up when there's an animal detected.
11:19And so we've just sort of set it up, hoping for the best.
11:24We've seen leopard tracks here, bear tracks, there'll be foxes, martens, musk deer, you
11:32name it.
11:33So hopefully, we've got about ten days, we should get something coming through.
11:40But there's lots to go wrong with this kind of set up and it's just a question of fingers
11:46crossed, really.
11:47See what we get.
11:48By day, village life carried on as normal, oblivious to what we were up to on the outskirts.
12:48Each morning, we're desperate to find out what we might have got on the camera traps.
13:19So, we've got one on now.
13:30So, five minutes on the tape.
13:43Oh, some guy carrying huge amounts of wood on his back.
13:50No bear, no leopard, no cow.
13:56Oh well.
13:59Right, OK, let's look at the other one.
14:13Oh, we've got a fox.
14:30That's nice.
14:32OK, it's not a bear or a leopard, but it's something.
14:38Great, OK.
14:41But a couple of nights later, success.
14:45John visits Rudrad Singh, the head of the village, to show the fruits of our labour.
14:50Do you want to stay?
14:53OK.
14:55Shall we look at, let me show you the shot, yeah.
15:01Bat, that was a bat.
15:04Bridge builders coming home.
15:07We've had fox almost every night.
15:13Even darker still.
15:16Come on, come on, come on, give us something.
15:20Whoa!
15:23Hey, he's big.
15:26That is amazing.
15:31See, he doesn't drink, but he just keeps on going.
15:35Very big bear.
15:36Yeah, very big bear.
15:37OK, so that, after two weeks, that is our first evidence that bears exist here.
15:45This is a bit further up the trail, so this is to see whether the bear kept on going out of the village along this path,
15:56or whether it went up into the forest.
15:59Come on, Mr. Bear.
16:02Hello, Mr. Bear.
16:05So he's not in any hurry.
16:09Wow.
16:13Very big.
16:14He's huge.
16:16That is, he's much bigger than North American black bears.
16:22These, I mean, these are good shots, but we still need them in the orchard.
16:28Sadly, it wasn't to be. No more bear visits for the rest of the trip.
16:33We had to leave the foxes to enjoy the apples on their own.
16:59Adam did come across one real problem tiger during the course of the production.
17:05The man is claiming that the tiger ripped through this mat, came into the hut.
17:13When he heard the sound, he came, and the mat is still up.
17:16The tiger is inside through the hole.
17:18And a couple of weeks after this incident, the tiger came back to the village.
17:28Just coming up to the hut, where we very first saw the evidence of her two weeks ago
17:44when we first arrived down on this trip, the hut,
17:47where she ripped through the mat that was across the front of the hut,
17:52the guy who woke up in the middle of the night to find the tiger was right underneath him.
18:00She didn't make a grab for this guy, did she?
18:03From what I tell her, she came out.
18:05She just came out of the jungle growling.
18:08And then one of the guys from up top came down, grabbed a stick here, whack,
18:17hit the tiger, tiger ran off.
18:20Something's not right in her head.
18:22I mean, I don't think this tiger has got long left.
18:24I mean, she just seems to be doing the craziest of stuff.
18:28And I hope, I don't know, sometimes tigers do crazy stuff and then they go back to being normal.
18:35That would be a fantastic situation.
18:37Or she just disappears naturally. Fantastic.
18:43If not, if this is her last throes of being a tiger and just for some reason being pretty desperate,
18:52then I hope it doesn't cost anyone.
18:59It was good to go up there and talk to those, everyone in the huts.
19:06And it's something I had quite a long chat with just about what was going on
19:11Just trying to explain how dangerous it is.
19:14Because we can't do this every night, we're not going to be here for months and months.
19:20So you've got to come up with some kind of system.
19:26So Adam decided in the end to try and put a collar on this tiger that was behaving erratically
19:30so the villagers would be able to keep tabs on exactly where she was.
19:35I'm with the tiger team.
19:38Adam's in the cage in the forest over there with his dart gun,
19:43waiting here to a kill that the tiger's made.
19:46We're going to wait on the boat. We're a few hundred metres away.
19:49And hopefully she'll come back soon.
19:58We've been waiting on the boat.
20:02We've been waiting on the boat for about two hours.
20:06The tiger's come back to near the kill.
20:12But she's just been lying there, just sleeping for about two hours, not moving.
20:20So we're just sitting on the boat, waiting.
20:31How many have you got?
20:35Two, 16.
20:38We've got a couple of darts.
20:44OK, do you understand?
20:47Darting successful?
20:49No, miss.
20:52Adam's tried to dart her, but he's missed her.
20:55So she's gone back to the forest.
20:58She wasn't running, she was walking back in.
21:00Maybe she's not had too big a fright. Maybe she'll come back out.
21:04We'll just keep waiting.
21:21The dart's gone in.
21:23OK, the tiger's running.
21:25The tiger's running away. We don't know if the dart's in, but she's running quite fast.
21:28Suggests that maybe it has gone in.
21:36OK, we're all spreading out into the forest to look for the tiger.
21:39It's hard ground, so it's hard to follow her tracks.
21:47We're spread out, fighting our way through this thick forest,
21:53looking for the tiger, who's somewhere in here.
22:03We've found the tiger.
22:07We've found the tiger.
22:20There's no sign of infection or mange or anything like that.
22:25Let's look at her teeth.
22:27One OK canine, and she's got three very broken canines.
22:33This tiger was in much worse condition than Adam had realised.
22:36Her teeth were so bad she couldn't eat her kill, so she was starving to death.
22:41It was her hunger that was probably making her act so strangely.
22:45All floors are intact.
22:47Her skin's fairly, a little bit, pretty slack.
22:51She's an old animal. I'm not going to collar her.
22:54How long do you reckon she's got?
22:57Weeks at best.
23:02They're still working hard to stabilise her temperature.
23:05In these conditions, she could overheat really quickly under the influence of this drug.
23:13But in fact what happened was that as night fell,
23:15the tiger's temperature actually started to drop really worryingly,
23:18and the tiger team had to take measures to keep her warm.
23:23And that's when it started to get really interesting.
23:32It's about four, four and a half hours after the tiger started.
23:40The team's been rubbing her vigorously and they've put her under blankets to try and keep her warm.
23:46We just bring in some hot water to make hot water bottles to try and get her temperature up.
23:53She's still a little bit cooler than Adam would like,
23:55so it's a full-on effort to try and pull this tiger through the night.
24:00Adam thinks she is going to make it,
24:05but it could be a long haul yet.
24:08He reckons we could be here till after dawn.
24:13So it's probably going to be an all-night vigil.
24:24The tiger is slowly regaining consciousness.
24:29Her ears are now twitching in response to sounds, which is a good sign.
24:35And her temperature has increased a little bit.
24:49So this is a good sign, isn't it?
24:52Yeah, every bit of extra movement is on her way to getting up.
25:04Just after dawn, it's been an all-night vigil with the tiger.
25:11Adam's just made the decision that it's time to move away from her,
25:18not to sit next to her anymore.
25:20So Adam, what do you think of her condition now?
25:24She's improving slowly.
25:29She's starting to move her forelimbs,
25:33and she seems to be awake a lot more.
25:37So it's going to take quite some time, but I think she'll be all right.
25:45She's going to be here quite possibly all day.
25:48He's expecting her to move off maybe late afternoon,
25:51back off into the jungle.
25:53She's so old and so thin
25:55that it's taken her a long time to metabolise this drug out of her system,
25:59but she's fine. She's going to be fine.
26:02We've opened up the carcass so she can have a good big feed when she wakes up,
26:08and there's plenty of water around there for her to drink as well.
26:11It was very important for the project that a tiger didn't die
26:14as a result of the radiocollaring work,
26:16but when the tiger finally did wander off,
26:18it was clear how painfully thin and old she was.
26:22She was much too frail to do any harm to people, really.
26:26And she was never seen near the fishing village again,
26:30and I'm sure she just wandered off and died quietly in the forest somewhere.
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