SBS - Wildest Latin America (2013) Part 2 Pantagonia The Ends of the Earth. 29/03/2013 16:28:48

Wildest Latin America

Through beautiful photography and the extraordinary stories of the animals and people that live there, this series celebrates Latin America’s most iconic and dramatic locations. It’s taken millions of years for animals to adapt to places as different as the high Andes and the sweltering Amazon; the windblown Patagonian steppe and the swamps of Venezuela. The result is an incredible diversity of species – from army ants to armadillos, jaguars to giant otters. Each has developed a unique way to stay alive; yet each must fit in to a complex jigsaw of life. We reveal the extraordinary behaviors and adaptations that are key to survival and success. People have had far less time to carve out a living, yet with ingenuity and determination, they too have found ways to make the most of what the continent has to offer. Incredible lifestyles continue to this day. We follow individual hunters and fishermen as they demonstrate the skills of their people. And we unveil the strange, sometimes painful rituals that determine the identity of Latin America’s diverse people. Each program ties together the latest revelations about life in this continent of extremes. These stories combine to give a fascinating, exciting and in-depth understanding of Latin America’s most spectacular places.

Part 1: Patagonia The Ends of the Earth

Covering 800,000 square kilometres of Argentina and Chile, Patagonia is the southernmost part of South America. It’s a place of extremes – of vast ice fields and snow-capped mountains; of windswept deserts and violent oceans. Survival here means being tough enough to cope with brutal winters, and canny enough to exploit brief seasons of plenty. This episode follows a year in Patagonia and sees animals survive in unlikely places. Guanacos, relatives of the camel, sit out snow storms in the Southern Andes. Winter is long and hard and pumas and foxes must scavenge to survive. But when spring finally arrives everything in Patagonia goes into overdrive to make the most of a small window of opportunity. An amorous armadillo struggles to get through his mate’s armoured defences; penguins come ashore to reunite with partners they haven’t seen for six months; even gauchos work hard to train horses they depend on for their livelihoods.

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