These Baby Birds Can't Catch a Break | The Making of Asia | BBC Earth

This year's chicks have managed to survive the desert, the plastic and the cannibals, but nature has one last test to throw at them. The words desert island conjure up images of soft sand, lapping waves, a palm tree or two. Paradise. But this particular desert island is Rubud Island. It's in Bahrain and it's far from paradise. The Asia crew have come here to film a large colony of Socotra cormorants, which are currently in the middle of their breeding season, raising their chicks. I think it's pretty unusual to see seabirds in this sort of landscape. It's crazy, dry, arid, unforgiving. And obviously these guys are used to fishing at sea and being in sort of rocky, craggy places, but I don't know, it's quite a surprise to see them in such a desert sort of environment. The crew must also deal with this sweltering desert climate, and the heat isn't even the biggest challenge. We've got the masks on in here because there's a really fine dust, the guano, like bird poo that comes off the colony. And what happens is that can really clog up and fill the hide. And so you can't breathe a lot of the time. So we wear this to try to protect ourselves. And there's also a few nasty things you can get from the birds. So hopefully these are going to prevent that. The worst thing is the flies. The flies just won't leave us alone. We know that they've just freshly emerged from cormorant carcasses. And the next thing they do is land on us and crawl all over our face. So that's probably the most difficult thing about being here, to be honest. This is undoubtedly a brutal environment for people and birds alike. But lately, the cormorants have been having to deal with a new challenge. It becomes really quite quickly apparent when you'll hear how much plastic is on this island. And for an island with no one living on it, it's just very depressing just to see that even here, all this stuff is getting washed up. We've seen juveniles playing with the plastic. We see juveniles eating the plastic as well. I've seen one get tangled up in some fishing net, which thankfully it did manage to escape from. Yeah, it's pretty sobering to come here and see that. As if that wasn't difficult enough, the chicks face another danger at the very beginning of their lives. Cannibalism. Many of the juveniles here, the larger white birds, are abandoned by their parents, which means they're not being fed anymore. But unfortunately for them, it's they can't forage for themselves. They can't fly. They can't swim. So they're starving. Their only solution is to walk around the colony and look for any food they can find. It's just rocks and sticks and bones. There's nothing to eat except small chicks. They're all just so hungry. They're just waiting for any food. So it's unsurprising that they do this cannibalism. They are right on the edge. The number of dead chicks you see around the colony just shows you how on the edge these birds are. Yet the majority of chicks have managed to survive the desert heat, the plastic and the cannibals. But nature has one last test to throw at them. What a morning. We were kept up all night by the storm yesterday, expecting and fearing the worst. So what's the damage? So we've lost our shed. It's moved one kilometre maybe to here. The impact of this unseasonal weather on the cormorants is clear to see. Lots of dead chicks after the storm last night. It was a really heavy storm. So now all the white dots here are just dead chicks. These guys literally have nests made out of dust in the ground. There's no shelter. There's no protection. So I can't imagine what they went through last night. Honestly, it's a miracle there's any chicks left alive at all. It's amazing that some of the more devoted parents just obviously must have stuck through it. And now, remarkably, it appears that life on the island is already beginning to return to normal. It's really promising that some adults are now going off to feed because that shows that there's still something worth feeding. In the last few days of shooting, the crew witnessed that for these birds, living on the edge is their day-to-day reality. They make these amazing wavy formations. So just to see tens of thousands of birds doing that all at once was, yeah, pretty magical. Yeah, it is. It is overwhelming when 15,000 birds fly just very close over your head. It's just the noise of the wings and the birds. It's just everywhere. That's pretty amazing. It reminds me of, you know, accounts you read of sort of Victorian numbers where the skies go black and there's just abundance and just animals everywhere. Beautiful.