[Tom Hiddleston] The night.
A shadowy world that hides more than half the animals on our planet.
Until now, cameras only offered a glimpse into their lives.
But with next-generation technology,
we can see the night as clear as day.
With cameras a hundred times more sensitive than the human eye...
we can now capture the beauty of night...
in color.
Alien landscapes.
Strange creatures brought to life by the darkness.
Unseen behaviors.
Now we can follow the lives of animals
in Earth's last true wilderness.
The night.
It's the last light of day in Patagonia.
[birds singing in the distance]
These are the southernmost mountains in the Americas...
and home to the continent's most wide-ranging large cat.
Puma, the mountain lion.
This young female is called "Petaca."
She's a curious teenager, just 13 months old,
and still under her mother's watchful eye.
[sniffs]
Her home mountains are among the best hunting grounds in the Andes.
[purrs]
The ideal place for Petaca and her two bigger brothers...
to get to grips with life.
But their mother's care won't last much longer.
[growls]
And little Petaca will soon have to fend for herself.
[animal hoots]
[birds cawing in the distance]
As night approaches, it's time for the pumas to go in search of a meal.
But Petaca still relies on her mom to hunt for her.
Ninety percent of puma hunts happen between dusk and dawn.
Mom is leading the cubs on the trail of the pumas' top prize.
Guanaco.
Wild relatives of the llama.
[brays, snorts]
[whinnies, snorts]
[brays, snorts]
In daylight, the odds are stacked against the cats.
But as dusk falls,
the chance of success grows.
[guanaco squealing]
At twice the size of an adult puma,
they're no easy quarry.
Mom is giving Petaca and her brothers a vital lesson.
By pushing the herd uphill, it's harder for them to outrun her.
[guanaco squealing]
And she spied an opportunity.
[guanaco squeals]
[guanaco squealing]
Petaca's mother makes her kill...
as dusk fades to darkness.
But with moonlight cameras,
we can now see the pumas' nighttime world like never before.
[guanaco squeal in the distance]
Pumas' night vision is six times more sensitive than ours.
Allowing Petaca to navigate through the darkness with ease.
This is the first time these cats are being filmed
using only the light of the moon.
This new way of seeing
allows us to follow the family into the night
and witness a pivotal moment in Petaca's life.
As the family share the meal...
Petaca must learn to win her share.
But this vital lesson is the last her mom will ever give her.
[bird chirps in the distance]
Her mother has picked up the scent of a nearby male.
The time has come to leave her cubs and start a new family.
For Petaca, losing her mom is a life-changing moment.
She's left with only her two brothers for support.
[mewls]
The cubs call into the dark for their mother to return.
[mewls]
But she doesn't respond.
[mewls]
From now on...
they're on their own.
[mewls]
To survive, Petaca will need to grow up fast
and find her place amongst the community of cats
for whom these mountains are home.
Patagonia's night skies
are amongst the clearest and darkest in the world.
Untouched by the lights of humanity,
this night wilderness has become a vital refuge for pumas.
And these wildlands support the large herds of guanaco
on which the pumas rely
and that Petaca must learn to hunt.
[guanaco squealing]
Three months on,
and only she and one brother have stayed together.
They've survived this far on the diet of small animals.
But to get a decent meal they must master hunting guanaco.
The guanaco know pumas will attack at night.
Lookouts keep vigil from each hilltop,
ready to alert the herd at the first glimpse of a cat.
Tonight Petaca takes the lead.
She may be smaller than her brother but she's more tenacious.
And is their best chance of success.
Without night cameras, she can't be seen in the darkness.
The guanaco don't know she's coming.
But in her inexperience, she's too high on the slope.
She needs to get below her prey so they can't escape downhill...
and creep to within meters to stand a chance.
Just as her mother showed her.
[guanaco squealing]
It's just not her night.
And things are only going to get tougher.
Two months on and the arrival of winter
brings new challenges for Patagonia's pumas.
In the colder weather, the cats need up to 3,000 calories a day
just to survive.
With the mountains dusted in snow,
finding cover to hunt is harder.
And the pumas here are forced to take chances.
[guanaco snorts]
For Petaca, the winter has brought an even greater concern.
A new puma family has followed the guanaco herds...
[cub mewls]
...into the heart of her territory.
[mewls]
At just 10 weeks old,
these cubs pose Petaca little problem
as they explore the mountain slopes where she herself was raised.
But their mother is a far more dangerous threat.
She's a powerful, more experienced female
and will fight to have this territory for her family.
For young Petaca, a fight could lead to serious injury.
There's no choice... but to leave.
[puma mewls]
To find their own territory,
young pumas will roam for up to a year
and may cover over 700 kilometers.
[puma mewls]
Petaca and her brother
must now venture far beyond the world they know.
It's a journey that happens mostly under the veil of darkness.
But they're not alone out here.
[puma growls]
A larger male has killed an adult guanaco...
and the carcass is drawing in cats from kilometers away.
Pumas were always thought of as solitary.
But only now are we discovering they live complex nocturnal lives.
As the cats come together,
tension is rising.
[puma growls, roars]
[growls, hisses]
Petaca must pluck up the courage to get a share.
But as the smallest here...
she needs to tread very carefully.
A stare from the bigger cat is a test.
Freezing with head kept low...
is a sign of submission.
As she closes in...
she must now hold her ground.
[puma hisses, snarls]
[growls]
Once the other cats have had their fill...
remarkably, Petaca is rewarded with the carcass all to herself.
Petaca has found her place within the community of cats here.
The most important step on her path to adulthood.
We're now discovering that for young pumas,
sharing carcasses is like social networking.
They are sites to meet other cats
and maybe even a future partner.
Nine months later and another summer has passed.
[birds singing in the distance]
Petaca has grown strong during her first year of independence.
She's no longer with her brother but she's not alone.
[cub mewls]
Two small kittens.
Her first litter.
Born in the warm days of summer.
Only eight weeks old, they're completely reliant on their mom.
[mewls]
Like all the challenges she's faced over the last year...
Petaca already seems to be taking motherhood in her stride.
She has mastered the mountains
and is ready to pass on her secrets to the next generation.
To follow pumas in Patagonia,
the Earth at Night team had to pioneer a new approach to night filming.
-[man, on radio] Go ahead. -Where are you at?
[Tom Hiddleston] For cameramen John Shier and Dawson Dunning,
that meant following these large cats in the dark on foot
for the very first time.
[man] The key here to filming the cats, really, is-- is when they move,
you gotta stick with them, but you wanna stay with them
in a way you're not interfering, especially if they're hunting.
So it's this balancing act.
[Tom Hiddleston] Using thermal spotting scopes that detect an animal's heat,
John and the specialist guides could track the cats
and, most critically, keep the team safe.
[Shier] The key is that the spotter hangs back
ideally on a hill above me so they can see what's going on,
um, tell me if there's guanaco coming up
that the cat might try to hunt, so I can get in position.
Where are you at?
[spotter, on radio] I see everything.
[Shier] That spotter behind me is even more important at nighttime
because he's constantly scanning, seeing what's going on.
When I'm out at night with these cats, I don't worry about the cat I'm following,
'cause I can see it, I can follow it, I know what it's doing.
I worry about the cat that I don't know is there, that I'm going to stumble into.
[Tom Hiddleston] Following the pumas over months,
the crew walked a collective 5,000 kilometers.
The equivalent distance from Los Angeles to New York.
Working in close proximity,
they learned the cats' nocturnal behaviors
and the pumas soon got used to them.
[Shier] Some nights we're out there with them for 17 hours.
It's like a lot of animals, if you treat them with respect,
uh, don't harass them, a lot of times they'll treat you
like you're just part of the landscape.
[Tom Hiddleston] By closely following this community of cats over two years...
John and the team captured some remarkable moments
in the pumas' struggle for survival.
[guanaco brays]
But the most compelling story to emerge
was that of Petaca
as she faced her first year of independence.
[Shier] The first thing anyone would know is, well, her brothers
were kind of hopelessly just screwing around,
they're not paying attention.
Petaca always paid attention.
[Tom Hiddleston] Pumas are notoriously elusive.
[Shier] Right here. Just settle.
[Tom Hiddleston] So to get such intimate insights
into the life of an individual puma is incredibly rare.
[pumas roar, growl]
[Shier] I'm really close, maybe 15 yards?
[Tom Hiddleston] Following her story through the seasons,
their dedicated approach paid off
when Petaca allowed John and the team
a privileged view into a whole new chapter of her life.
[Shier] This is really rewarding and a really special situation for me
because it's a cat that I've known now for basically its entire life.
And to-- to get to spend that much time with it and to get to know it,
and to see it have its own offspring, uh, that's really rare.
And, I mean, it's especially rare for a puma.
All right, I need to go up a bit. I'm starting to lose light anyways.
[Tom Hiddleston] By being able to follow Petaca and the other pumas at night,
allows us for the first time to see the whole story
of these ghosts of Patagonia.