I've spent much of my working life
trying to film big cats.
I've watched them in the wild
and analyzed the footage in the editing room,
which has given me a real insight into their behavior.
Today, we can see these amazing predators
on our screens any time we choose.
(dramatic music)
But until quite recently,
we knew practically nothing about them.
(dramatic music)
Big cats are normally shy and very secretive.
Today, their populations are shrinking fast,
but now we have the means to view them
in more detail than ever.
(dramatic music)
And learn the intricacies of their lives.
(dramatic music)
Which is just as well,
because we need to find ways of living alongside them
before they disappear forever.
(tense music)
My efforts to film jaguars began 25 years ago
in a place called Nancite Beach
on Costa Rica's Pacific coast.
When Nancite was included in a newly-created
Santa Rosa National Park in 1971,
jaguars were rarely seen here, if at all.
When I arrived to make a film about coatis,
I knew that it was technically possible
to see a jaguar and hoped to include it in the film.
Over a period of four months,
there wasn't so much as a footprint.
I now realize that the presence of coatis
and a pack of coyotes almost meant that
by definition, there were no jaguars here.
Incredibly, at the time,
there was very little research about jaguars.
Most of their behavior was a mystery.
The first jaguar scientists struggled
to go anywhere near their subjects.
But times have changed.
There are now a couple of places in the world where seeing
a wild jaguar is a possibility rather than a dream.
Recently, there were reports of jaguar footprints
on the beach here,
and of course, I had to visit.
(tense music)
The jaguar is one of the most illusive of all the cats.
Until 10 years ago, it was practically unfilmed in the wild.
Compared to the other big cats,
it is one of the least well-known and most secretive,
crafty and perfectly camouflaged.
Jaguars have spent far more time watching humans
from behind a bush
than humans have managed to spend watching jaguars.
(splashing)
(tense music)
It's easy to confuse the jaguar with a leopard,
but they're surprisingly different.
At 50% heavier than the average leopard,
with shorter legs and a much shorter tail,
jaguars also hunt different prey.
Its physique is in fact more tiger-like,
with powerful jaws and powerful front legs and shoulders.
(waves crashing)
For a large predator like the jaguar,
the remote shoreline of Nancite
offers slim pickings.
The total area of beach and forest here
is little more than two square kilometers,
so it would typically make up just a fraction
of the average jaguar territory,
and the chances of actually seeing a jaguar here
would at best be tiny.
But here in Nancite, there are plenty of other predators
and scavengers hanging around, as if waiting for something.
The presence of so many jaguar tracks
suggests something unusual is going on.
(waves crashing)
But filming wild jaguars is one of the hardest
things I've ever tried to do.
The latest high resolution camera traps
gave us a chance to see jaguars in the forest,
but in daylight, all they revealed were nervous animals.
No jaguars.
So we set up on the beach
in the hope we could get a clear view at night.
And waited.
Using only red light to see with,
and super-sensitive starlight cameras to film with.
Without a moon, it's so dark
that even the bioluminescent glow of waves is visible.
But the starlight camera struggles to see detail.
With the help of infrared light,
we can get a clearer view,
and the thermal camera allows us to see anything
that moves on the beach.
A family of raccoons emerges to dig up turtle eggs.
Nancite is a turtle nesting beach,
which is one reason why the American crocodile
is hanging around.
But at this time of year, the nesting season is almost over.
Generally,
only a few single nesters come ashore.
This is an olive ridley, the smallest of the sea turtles.
(waves crashing)
They're much faster to nest than other sea turtles,
so any predator has to find them quickly in the darkness.
For a brief moment, the thermal camera on the clifftops
spots a jaguar on the beach.
(tense music)
It returns to the scrub at the edge of the beach
as if on the trail of something.
My own feeble human vision
can barely see the turtle at close range.
Although cat vision is more sensitive,
it's unlikely a jaguar could see this from a distance.
But the distinctive sound of flippers
slapping on the hard sand could be a giveaway
to super-sensitive hearing.
Human ears could hardly detect this sound
above the waves, but I have observed
coyotes react to small sounds in the surf
a big distance away,
and if coyotes can do this, why not cats?
But it's not until the turtle is actually nesting
that the jaguar makes its move.
The turtles seem to enter a trance-like state,
as if they were unaware of their surroundings
and any threats to them.
Their defenses are designed for sharks, not land predators.
(waves crashing)
The jaguar kills the turtle with a bite to the neck,
cutting the reptile's jugular,
and the turtle is completely helpless.
But the truly remarkable thing about Nancite
is that it isn't home to just one jaguar.
We now know that as many as eight big cats
can visit this beach in one night.
And the biggest males will always take what they want.
Small females have to give way
when faced with a male twice their size.
When there are few turtles, there is competition.
And of course, it's not just jaguars
they need to worry about.
These cats don't like to be out in the open
when they feel there's a threat.
Now the male drags to turtle towards the forest.
Jaguars have been known to eat almost anything,
and have been referred to as dustbins of the forest.
Here they specialize in turtles.
The cats were so relaxed,
we got to witness at close range
their phenomenal jaw strength.
Jaguars are said to have the most powerful bite
of all the big cats,
which could be why they're so adaptable.
Even when they took their kills into thick undergrowth,
we were still able to follow them with trap cams.
The remote images reveal
that each kill lasts about three days.
(sneezes)
And once the ants have found it,
it's just too painful to eat,
unless the jaguar moves it.
As the half moon rises just after midnight,
the beach is transformed.
(dramatic music)
The crocodile returns to the water's edge
as if waiting for something.
Meanwhile, another jaguar appears to patrol the beach.
(tense music)
The crocodile stays near the water for safety,
and now more turtles are arriving.
In the water, they're as light as a feather,
on land, carrying her 40 kilo bulk is an effort.
For reasons scientists don't fully understand,
this beach is just one of a few
that olive ridley turtles use for nesting.
These same animals travel the Pacific,
yet return here to this one spot every year.
She finds the right place and temperature
by smelling the sand.
(waves crashing)
And then she starts to dig.
By the time she's laying,
she's in a trance.
She doesn't even notice me or the cameras.
As if on cue, there's a jaguar.
He doesn't need to listen for the turtles now,
it can see them perfectly well.
(tense music)
As far as I know, this is the first time
a wild jaguar has ever been filmed in moonlight.
(tense music)
This must be one of the most relaxed big cat hunts ever.
The kill technique is the same.
The jaguar pushes the turtle's face into the sand
so it can reach the jugular,
which it cuts.
As the jaguar laps up the turtle's life blood,
the crocodile moves in for a closer look,
but is wise to keep its distance.
Now the jaguar starts to move its prize
away from prying eyes.
But as the cat starts for the forest,
it changes its mind.
(tense music)
Again, the same technique.
In cats, the need to feed
and the desire to kill are not necessarily linked.
Despite the first turtle being enough,
a second is killed too.
(tense music)
It'll be a few years yet before this
two and a half meter crocodile could challenge the jaguar,
but one day it will.
If the big cat doesn't eat it first.
(tense music)
Jaguars were missing here for something like 50 years,
and now they're back
to feed on turtles.
The number of turtles coming ashore is increasing.
They have no knowledge of what is happening on land.
This is the start of a small arribada,
a Spanish word meaning arrival,
used to describe the mass nesting behavior
of the olive ridley turtle.
That's the point, this is a turtle defense strategy
to synchronize nesting so that they saturate
predators with arriving adults
as well as for emerging youngsters.
When the beach is inundated,
even jaguars with the most insatiable drive to kill
are unable to make a significant impact,
and it's predators like jaguars
that create this behavior by preying
disproportionately on the single nesters.
The number of turtles is closely monitored
and we have a good idea of how many come every year,
and what their main threats are.
Jaguars turn out to be way down the list.
(playful music)
By dawn, the arribada is almost over,
some 500 turtles having already nested,
and now the direction of travel
is mostly towards the sea.
Nancite is one of only three major olive ridley rookeries
on the entire Pacific coast.
That jaguars are back after such a long absence
is great news for the cats,
but perhaps for the turtles as well.
Fossils have shown us that jaguars have fed on
these ancient reptiles for hundreds of thousands of years.
Jaguars are a natural part of this beach.
By driving out the coyotes and coatis,
which used to dig up many thousands of eggs each year,
it's actually possible that jaguars
have done the turtles a favor.
There seem to be fewer black vultures
on the beach than I remember from the past,
and that's because they're all hanging around
various turtle kills in another forest.
As far as I can see, the return of the big cats has
changed the ecology of the whole place quite dramatically.
Jaguar scientist Eduardo Carrillo has been watching
the process for 35 years.
(speaking in foreign language)
The fact that we can film jaguars at all
is possibly due to the Nancite Turtle Project,
and mostly to the work of one man.
Wilbert Matamoros has spent most nights
walking the beach for the best part of the last six years
to count and measure nesting turtles.
At first, there were very few jaguars,
and they kept a low profile.
But as the years passed,
the cats became curious.
(speaking in foreign language)
He has spent so much time on the beach with the turtles
that the cats now regard him as just part of the furniture.
Without his constant presence,
it's unlikely that we would have seen a single cat.
Some of the jaguars appeared a bit surprised to see us,
but by the time we had spent a month there,
others began to ignore us completely.
I can tell you that if they don't want to show themselves,
you will never see a jaguar,
and yet here, this beach is utterly unique
in the whole world, and having wild jaguars
just walking 10, 20, 30 meters away has been
one of the most extraordinary privileges of my life.
With the help of radio collars,
Eduardo and his team have been able to track
the movements of the jaguars here
to reveal that some of them alternate their time
between Nancite where they hunt turtles at night
and mountain forests 20 miles away,
where they hunt white-lipped peccaries
during the daylight hours.
As soon as the peccaries detect a jaguar
or any threat,
(teeth clicking)
they use their canines to make this strange sound.
They escape this time,
but as long as a jaguar stays in touch with the herd,
there will always be a chance to catch one.
(speaking in foreign language)
Nancite is a very unusual situation.
Looking at these pictures, it's easy to forget
that places where it is even possible
to film wild jaguars are very rare.
In fact, I know of only one other
where jaguars can be filmed in the wild behaving naturally.
(relaxed music)
Brazil's Pantanal, the world's largest wetland.
(relaxed music)
Caimans, small versions of crocodiles, crowd the bank.
Giant otters patrol the waterways.
And capybaras, the world's largest rodent,
bask in the morning sun.
This is where the biggest of all jaguars
grow to 150 kilos, as big as a lioness.
As with Nancite 10 years ago,
it was almost impossible to see a jaguar here,
but the rise of tourists has helped them
become used to people,
and there's been a huge change in attitude
among ranchers too.
In the space of a decade, the cat that was invisible
to humans can now be seen in the wild
by anyone buying a ticket.
The vultures that scavenge jaguar kills in Costa Rica
are here in numbers too,
keeping an eye on their meal ticket.
So something must be going right for the jaguars.
Despite the fact that there are more caimans here
than any other type of crocodile anywhere else on Earth.
There are thought to be 10 million living in the Pantanal.
On the surface, it doesn't seem to be typical cat country.
(birds chirping)
Most jaguars are quite nocturnal,
but here they can be seen basking in sunlight
or patrolling their territory
or hunting,
and the jaguar has plenty of options.
But this habitat doesn't suit a high-speed chase.
(tense music)
With the approach of a big cat,
(splashing)
everything makes for the water,
which is what you'd expect in broad daylight.
(animals vocalizing)
Caimans, with their own set of powerful jaws
and sharp teeth are not the kind of animal
that is normally preyed upon.
(splashing)
As potential victims, they pose a few problems.
Firstly, once in the water,
the caiman will have far superior speed
and would easily out-swim a jaguar.
Secondly, cats usually kill their prey
with a suffocating bite to the throat,
but caimans can hold their breath for half an hour,
so that won't work.
The only thing that's in the jaguar's favor
is that the cold-blooded reptiles need to bask
in sunlight during the day,
and this is the only chance the big cats have to catch one.
However, caiman have excellent vision
and can see a jaguar coming from a great distance.
A successful hunt requires planning.
(dramatic music)
The jaguar has to get very close without being seen,
and so goes into the forest and moves upstream out of sight.
The jaguar emerges from the forest
directly behind the caiman
in its blind spot.
(tense music)
The cat slips into the water
and swims directly towards the basking reptile
staying exactly where the caiman can't see it.
(dramatic music)
(splashing)
Instead of the typical big cat throat bite,
the jaguar uses crushing jaw power
to bite straight into the brain casing,
and the kill is almost instantaneous.
Perhaps this explains the jaguar's daylight
loving habits here, as caimans spend the night
in the water where the cats can't reach them.
With their ability to swim,
eat anything attitude,
and unparalleled jaw strength,
jaguars have made the forests and swamps
of central and South America their own.
We think of these cats as typical animals of the new world,
but in fact, jaguars began life in Europe and Asia
over a million years ago
and then found their way to the Americas.
Long ago, they disappeared from Eurasia
and we now know from genetic studies that 10,000 years ago,
they came very close to extinction here too.
Luckily, they managed to recolonize
much of their former range, but in modern times,
jaguar distribution is shrinking again.
To see a mother and cub playing in the open like this
was until recently extremely rare.
(tender music) (birds singing)
But now they've begun to show themselves,
we have a real chance to learn more about jaguars
and perhaps find ways of living alongside them.
(relaxed music)