[light drum music]
- NARRATOR: Voracious, intense, and hungry,
the dermestid beetles are very effective at what they do.
But don't worry, they're no threat to you
unless you find yourself in a bat cave.
- LEE WEST: I definitely don't want to fall when I'm
in the cave now.
If I fell in here and you know like broke my leg or something,
what would happen?
And I don't know.
I don't really want to find out.
[eerie music]
- The back beach is back well away from the water line.
Different kind of critters live back here
and one of the most important ones
shows us evidence of his little house right here
with this mound of sand and little hole,
and we're going to dig down there and see if we can
uncover this little ghost crab
that lives in this little burrow.
He sits down there in nice air-conditioned comfort
all day long,
waiting for the next night.
And there we go.
Here he is.
Look who lives down in the burrow,
a ghost crab.
One of the neatest little critters on the back beach.
Neat little exoskeleton colored just like the sand.
Look at those beautiful little periscope eyes pop up and down.
Got neat little pockets there to put the eyes down
when he goes in the burrow.
They're basically a scavenger.
They feed on most anything live or dead that they can
run across, but they're also little predators.
They know how to get clams and little fish and things
in the surf.
And we're ready now to turn him loose and let him go back home.
[gentle wind blows]
- The world's oceans are the last frontier on this earth,
and I love being underwater
and I've always dove ever since I was little.
So every time I go it's just a thrill each and every time.
[splash]
I love doing research underwater because it's such
a complex and fascinating environment.
The basis of my research is to take photographs of the coral
and to compare that to photographs I took at the
Flower Gardens,
which is the coral reef right off the coast of Texas,
and try to see what's similar and what's different
about the two sites.
[owl call]
- GERALD STEWART: The practice or art of calling wild game
is the uh simple activity of going out and reproducing a
sound that occurs naturally in the outdoors anyway.
Out in middle of the light.
This is incredible.
- NARRATOR: Many nocturnal animals don't see the color red
very well at night, so Gerald uses this to his advantage.
Then, if they stay around, he gradually removes the color.
- GERALD: During the nesting season the male screech owl
retrieves and brings a bug back to the mother and fledglings
on the average of every 30 seconds.
Can you imagine the amount of work he has got to do
in a night?
[owl call]
They live on moths and lizards and June bugs
and all kinds of little things.
[owl call]
He's sticking around a long time.
[owl call]
- NARRATOR: There's no magic, just the good use of a
few sounds and a lot of time recording them.
- I looked up in this tree and there was a bear in the tree.
So I go in and tell my wife.
She didn't believe me, of course,
she had to come out and look.
[dart gun pops]
- BONNIE MCKINNEY: Good shot!
He'll go down in a minute.
He's in a perfect tree because he'll just hit those branches
and it will break his fall all the way down.
We're going to attempt to drop him down.
[laughs]
[branches snapping]
- BONNIE: That's a big bear!
Okay I need tip of his nose,
right on the tip,
right down the center of his back.
We need more tape!
- BILLY PAT MCKINNEY: We put the tracking collars on these bears
because we want to determine their home ranges
and compare it to other studies in the United States.
I expect us to find some pretty exciting information out,
and without the tracking collars, we wouldn't know
as much about what was going on.
Especially about individual animals.
- Collar is plenty loose.
He's snoring.
[bear snores]
- GIRL: My daddy snores.
- BONNIE: He'll wake up and he'll be really groggy.
[indistinct chatter]
- BILLY: He's not really a problem bear.
He didn't do any damage or tear anything up.
We really moved for his protection,
not for peoples' protection.
[truck engine rumbles]
[jazzy trombone music]
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