The Life Of Birds 1. To Fly Or Not To Fly (1 of 19)

The Life Of Birds

This Magnificent series celebrates the incredible variety of the world's best loved creatures and provides fresh insight into their fascinating way of life. Three years in the making, David Attenborough travelled around the globe, visiting 42 countries from the Arctic to Antarctica to uncover the private life of these conquerors of the air.

Birds take centre-stage for the first time and turn out to be remarkably bright and engaging creatures. Apart from their advanced acrobatic skills, they have some bizarre ways of finding food and getting a mate. In Japan, crows crack open nuts with the help of cars and in Australia, choughs gang up and kidnap their neighbours young. Far from the comfortable image of birds singing away in British gardens and swimming on ponds, humble hedge sparrows are cheating on their mates and coots are killing their young!

Birds are the most accomplished aeronauts the world has ever seen.
They fly high and low.
At great speed and very slowly.
And always with extraordinary precision and control But birds are not the only creatures in the air.
There are also small furry mammals, bats, like these in Texas.
They are so competent in the air that they have just made a journey from Mexico, a thousand miles away, simply in order to rear their young in this cave, which is particularly suitable for them as a nursery.
Just now they are flying out to catch their evening meal of insects.
But they had better be careful, because in the skies above them there lurks a creature that can outfly them.
It is, of course, a bird.