Seven Worlds, One Planet – episode 3 recap: from pumas to penguins, South America is a colourful wilderness

Sir David Attenborough, our whispery tour guide, has already whisked us to Antarctica and Asia in his latest continent-hopping BBC series. Now it was the turn of South America, the most species-rich continent on Earth.

From the volcanoes of the Andes to the Amazon rainforest, this was another spectacularly-shot and suitably epic hour of Sunday TV. Here are the highlights of episode three.

Pouncing, persistent puma steals the show

The episode began with its most action-packed and blood-spattered sequence, high up in Patagonia, where a puma mother drew on a lifetime’s experience to catch prey three times her weight.

The puma, named Sarmiento by researchers, was hunting guanacos to feed her family. At 2m tall, however, and able to run at speeds approaching 35mph, this relative of the camel was one of South America’s largest wild mammals. It wasn’t going quietly.

Sarmiento’s only hope was to go for the throat and try to suffocate her prey. She crept closer, camouflaged against the rocky Andean terrain and sticking to the shadows. (Anyone with a pet cat partial to catching birds would recognise those stalking moves from their garden.) If they spotted the threat, the guanaco would alert the herd to flee with a high-pitched, bleating, almost bird-like call.

Even when Sarmiento managed to catch it, the guanaco put up quite the fight. The puma was flung around like a rag doll; fur literally flew. It seemed that Sarmiento had bitten off more than she could chew; she was severely injured across several failed attempts, with gashes in her flesh caused by the guanaco’s hooves.

With three hungry six-month-old cubs, though, she was hard-wired not to give up, and eventually brought one down. But she’d been forced to stray from her usual hunting ground, and now she had to drag the carcass for a mile back to home territory, despite her weakened, wounded state. It was tiring enough just watching her Herculean efforts.

As we saw in the “making of” epilogue, the camera crew went to admirable lengths to shoot their first-of-a-kind footage. Travelling to the southern tip of Chile – by name and by nature – they covered an area of nearly 1,000 square miles, using airborne drones and expert local trackers to scout these elusive wild predators.

As Sarmiento roamed miles in search of food, they struggled to keep up, hauling heavy equipment over challenging terrain in unpredictable weather. They trekked so far that one of the team wore a hole in his shoe. But, after five weeks of graft, they captured thrilling footage of this life-and-death battle. The BBC has been trying for 30 years to film a successful puma hunt, and now they finally had it.

Guano-coated penguins go crowdsurfing

So many seabirds were fishing off the coast of Peru, meanwhile, that the cliffs were covered in droppings more than a metre thick. The soft guano layer provided an ideal nesting material for Humboldt penguins.

When the grubby avians needed to waddle over to the Pacific to wash off the brown stuff (and catch food for their chicks), they had to traverse a beach crowded with grumpy sea lions who’d come ashore to raise their young and didn’t take kindly to being disturbed. It wasn’t quite the distressing walrus crush of last week, but the area was almost as rammed.

One plucky penguin was determined to lead the way to the water, but reached a dead end while weaving his way through. He ended up “crowdsurfing” by hopping across the sea lions’ backs as they writhed and honked in protest. (Was anyone else reminded of Roger Moore’s 007 escaping from the crocodile farm in Live and Let Die?)

Behold: hipster Paddington bears

Spectacled Andean bears are a rare sight and, due to poaching and habitat loss, they’re classified as a vulnerable species. It was therefore a real treat to see them up close. In the cloud forest, they were clambering 30 metres to the top of the canopy in search of miniature avocados. It was like Paddington gone hipster.

With the remaining fruit dangling at the end of branches too thin to support the bears’ weight, they had an ingenious way of bringing it within reach: biting the branches just enough to swing them down.

Tiny frog, devoted father

Many modern fathers think that the odd school run or trip to a soft-play centre makes them Dad of the Year. Well, they have nothing on the thumbnail-sized poison dart frogs, who went to extraordinary lengths to keep their tadpoles safe.

They kept each tadpole in a tiny pool of water, with up to five dotted around the Amazon rainforest, and had to remember where they’d put them all. When one puddle dried up, Frog Snr had to give his gelatinous offspring a piggyback ride through the jungle to find it a fresh new home.

He then worked with their mother to keep the little ones fed with unfertilised eggs. Raising their young is a six-week test of teamwork and memory. Well played, Kermit and Mrs Freddo.

Brazilian fish leap for their lunch

In one creepily tense sequence, worthy of a monster movie, a semi-aquatic green anaconda (weighing 200kg and 8m long) stalked brown capuchin monkeys from under the water’s surface. Cue sighs of relief when the scout monkey spotted it and alerted his friends to the danger.

Enter the piraputanga fish, who could see through the crystal-clear waters to above the surface, enabling them to track the capuchins along the river-banks as they sought out the juiciest berries. The trout-like fish then jumped and twisted gymnastically out of the water to gobble up the fruits themselves, plucking them directly from low-hanging trees. Apparently, some seeds pass undamaged through the fish, which gives them a vital role in seed dispersal.

Screen time is for the birds

Our feathered friends put on a show for the cameras in this episode. It made for a dazzlingly colourful, almost kitschy spectacle: scarlet macaws jostled with hundreds of other brightly-plumed parrots on a mineral-rich cliff face, gathering enough salty clay to take home to their chicks.

At Iguazú Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil, great dusky swifts made death-defying flights through one of the biggest waterfalls on Earth to reach their hidden nests on the cliff face behind the torrent of water.

We also watched five male manakins put on a dancing display to impress a female, like a feathered boy-band. Luckily for the viewer who wants to see more of such scenes, we have the recent Netflix documentary Dancing with the Birds, narrated by Stephen Fry. (He’s no Attenborough, but he’ll do.)

David Attenborough, Wizard of Oz

All in all, it was another hour composed of wondrous moments. We haven’t even mentioned those pointy-nosed Pinocchio lizards or cotton-tipped tamarins, whose funky hair made them resemble simian Einsteins.

Seven Worlds, One Planet will reach its midway point next Sunday with an episode exploring the weird and wonderful wildlife of Australia. We’ll meet dangerous 6ft-tall birds, kangaroos caught in snowstorms, and reptiles that drink through their skin – while thousands of sharks gather for a rare event.