We live in a very weird world.
And at winter time it just gets weirder.
This is a perfect circle in the ice.
It's pretty wild.
Every day, new stories reach us.
Stories that surprise us.
It was like, "Did we actually experience that?"
Shockers.
When I came around that corner, that's when I saw him.
I mean, he's dead.
And sometimes even scare us.
Oh!
We've scoured the globe to bring you the most curious creatures...
I would pay serious money to see this.
..the most extraordinary people...
It's all about having fun during winter.
..and the most bizarre behaviour...
I'm being chased by these damn things!
..using eyewitness accounts and expert opinion
to understand a weird world
of confused penguins,
snowboarding crows...
Wee! It looks like it's having great fun.
..and turkeys that seem to be possessed by the devil.
I was a little creeped out.
It was definitely eerie.
We examine the evidence,
test the theories...
..to work out what on earth is going on.
Our first weird and wonderful story is all about snow.
Now, we love to play around in the stuff and animals, well,
they're no exception.
DOG BARKS
MUSIC: Merry Christmas Everybody by Shakin' Stevens
# Snow is fallin'
# All around me
# Children playin'
# Having fun
# It's the season
# Love and understanding
# Merry Christmas everyone. #
Undeniably wonderful.
But I have to tell you the star of this story is nowhere near as cute
as that lot, but it does take playing in the snow
to a whole new level.
Time to head to Russia.
It's 2012, in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals.
And a local family have caught a crow on camera.
Doing something very strange.
The crow has found a lid from a jar of mayonnaise
and in front of the astounded family's eyes,
it uses it to snowboard.
So what on earth is this crazy crow up to?
It looks like it's having great fun.
Nicky Clayton from Cambridge University is one of the world's
leading experts on corvids - that's the crow family.
SQUAWK!
Wheeee!
All the way down, back up to the top.
It's just doing it time and time again. It's so cool.
This doesn't surprise me at all.
You see corvids doing so many weird and wonderful things.
It's interesting watching animals play, isn't it?
Are they just having fun?
Are they just messing about?
Or is there something more involved?
One idea is that you learn
quite a lot in a safe environment from playing.
It gives you the opportunity to try things out.
And this bird really is trying things out.
Just watch what it does next.
One interesting observation is that it tries it on the bit of the
rooftop without snow. Sees it doesn't work...
..and instead focuses on the bit with snow, where it will slide down.
So, by trial and error, the crow's figured it out.
Clear evidence of learning through play.
But that's nothing new.
There are countless examples of this right across the animal kingdom.
Cats chase string to practise
catching mice and pouncing on stuff hones their killer skills even more.
But crows, now, they are really special.
Corvids, in general, are extremely intelligent animals.
In fact, my husband and I refer to them as the feathered apes,
because, when it comes to cognitive abilities,
crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees.
You see, I told you, crows are special and
there is one particular area where these feathered ape brains really
come into their own and that's tool use.
New Caledonian crows, in captivity,
have been observed bending a piece of wire into a hook to retrieve a
bucket of food.
And jays will drop stones into a tube containing water
to raise the level and get the prize.
And it's not just crows in captivity,
in the wild the New Caledonian crow uses sticks to catch grubs.
And the Japanese carrion crow has taken tool use even further.
It purposefully drops nuts on to busy pedestrian crossings.
Cars then break the outer casings
and once the traffic stops,
the crows safely retrieve their rewards.
Simply incredible.
But in all of these examples,
these cunning corvids have one thing in common,
for their complex endeavours they get a reward - food.
But the bizarre thing in our video is that this crow doesn't get any
food at the end. So why bother?
The fact they seem to be doing this just for fun, without any reward,
suggests that it's much more than just learning.
A number of studies have found that when animals engage in play,
their brains grow.
So, actually, the crow in our video is doing so much more than just messing around in the snow.
I mean, yes, it's learning.
Yes, it's stimulating itself.
But what sets it apart from other animals is that it's growing its brain.
Amazing!
Big brained, highly-intelligent animals,
like us and like crows, love to play.
Because play is good for the brain.
So, there you go, snowboarding actually makes your brain bigger.
Now, winter really is full of the tales of the unexpected,
from the surprising...
Whoa!
..to the scary...
Heads up, heads up. Right at us.
Ohhh!
..to the downright strange.
And our next story is strange with a capital S.
The state of Michigan, USA.
The small town of Vestaburg is home to Jason Robinson.
It's something that I've never seen around here and I know a lot of
people that have been here their whole lives
have never seen anything like that.
It's unusual.
I spend a lot of time outside.
I've seen lots of beautiful stuff, in the woods, in the water.
For the last ten years, Jason's been taking the same route to work.
My commute is very short and peaceful.
There is no traffic to be concerned about.
I notice things.
I take in what's out there when I drive to work.
But one day last winter his daily commute took a surprising turn.
I thought that it was such a strange occurrence that I wanted to share it
with people.
This is Schmeid Road, where it crosses the Pine River.
And this is a perfect circle in the ice and it's pretty wild.
I've never seen anything like that in nature first-hand.
I didn't have any idea how it happened.
It looked almost supernatural.
A perfect disk of ice, almost three metres across,
gently rotating on the surface of the water.
And what's even more bizarre is that Jason is not the only person to have
witnessed this spectacular scene.
These spinning circles of ice have been spotted all over the world.
So, what exactly is behind this mesmerising phenomenon?
I didn't know what to think. I initially thought it was man-made.
I thought that some crazy hillbilly with a chainsaw cut it.
Honestly.
Well, hold on a minute, Jason,
that's not such a crazy theory, is it?
Remember crop circles?
These mysterious shapes began appearing in the British countryside in the 1970s.
Everyone thought they were created by aliens,
but it turns out they were just an elaborate hoax, made by humans.
Could these ice circles also be a hoax?
I had a lot of people contact me and think that I did it.
People I know, friends said,
"How did you cut that circle in that ice? How did you get out there?"
But the ice was so thin I couldn't imagine anybody was brave enough to
venture out there and make a circle on the ice, on the thin, thin ice.
Jason's right.
In all of these cases,
the ice simply isn't thick enough to carry the weight of a human.
As weird as it seems,
these incredible circles must have been created naturally.
But how?
Well, last year,
scientists at the University of Liege in Belgium made a fascinating
discovery.
Now, here's a block of ice that we've infused with blue dye and
here's some water. So, let's see what happens when I put the ice into the water.
If I just centre it here.
There we are.
And look at that.
It's started to spin.
But the question is, why?
Well, as the ice melts in the water,
it chills the water beneath it and when that water reaches
4 degrees Centigrade, it becomes denser than the water around it.
Denser and therefore heavier, and it starts to sink.
And as it sinks, it spirals,
causing a vortex and it's this spinning which turns the disk of ice above it.
Look at that! It's doing it absolutely perfectly.
And in nature, in the river, as it spins round and round,
the edges are ground down and gradually it becomes a perfect circle.
And these natural shapes have
actually inspired some very unnatural behaviour.
The natural ice disk was an inspiration for this project.
Meet Janne Kapylehto. Inventor of the ice carousel.
Ice carousel is all about having fun during winter.
Janne uses chainsaws and ropes to create enormous disks on frozen
lakes in his native Finland.
It seems that everyone's invited.
Although inspired by nature,
Janne doesn't exactly rely on vortices to get his disks turning.
There's many ways to make the ice carousels spin.
I usually use outboard motors.
Janne's creations have become an obsession and now he's got the whole
of Finland in a spin.
MUSIC: You Spin Me Right Round by Dead Or Alive
The more popular they've become, the bigger they've got.
Janne's latest creation is 100 metres in diameter,
which apparently is a world record.
You could say he's revolutionary.
Now, ice can be a lot of fun for humans and animals,
but for some species it's a matter of life and death.
September 2017,
Julie Stevenson and her husband were on a trip around the Arctic when
they experienced something truly spectacular.
We were like, gobsmacked.
It was like...
Did we actually experience that?
On the last day of their month-long expedition,
they were anchored off the coast of Wrangel Island,
when Julie spotted something strange.
What we saw from the ship was a whole lot of like, fluffy dots.
They looked like sheep.
They looked like hundreds of sheep.
Now, hold on. Sheep, in the Arctic?
Surely that's a bit unlikely.
My husband was in the bridge,
he took his binoculars and looked through,
and he said, "They're polar bears!"
The director of Wrangel Island reserve said,
"No, they can't be polar bears, there's too many."
So we were excited and keen to go and have a look.
And as they got closer, the white dots began to take shape.
It was like, "oh, my gosh, there's so many bears!"
There's like hundreds of bears here.
I did get emotional.
I was crying, people were hugging me because I found it so moving.
So profound. To see so many bears in one place.
Over 200 polar bears,
that's more than 1% of all the polar
bears on the planet, in one place.
Now, these are solitary animals,
it's rare to see any together.
So seeing this many was simply extraordinary.
Indeed, so surprising it even baffled polar bear experts.
Absolutely amazing. I would pay serious money to see this.
I've been working with polar bears for 42 years,
and to see that many in one location was incredibly unusual.
Now, polar bears spend the majority of their lives alone.
So what had brought them together in this one place?
And in such large numbers.
Well, the bears aren't the only animal on the beach.
Yes, that is a whale carcass.
Whale blubber is absolutely packed full of calories,
it's the perfect meal for a hungry bear.
But the question is, on this remote island,
how did so many bears find the feast at the same time?
Well, many animals have a keen sense of smell.
But the polar bear's is in a class of its own.
Polar bears have an amazingly well-developed sense of smell,
that part of their brain that deals with scent is probably
more developed than in most other mammals.
A polar bear's sense of smell is
actually 150 times better than a human's.
They can smell a seal from 20 miles away.
And from three feet below solid ice.
OK, so any polar bear within 20 miles could pick up the scent of
that carcass, but here's the problem.
You see, polar bears are essentially solitary animals,
in fact they are pretty anti-social.
It's one of the reasons why they have such huge home ranges, so they
can simply avoid one another.
So what could have brought 200 of these animals together within
a 20-mile radius in the first place?
Well, in winter, polar bears
spread out across thousands of miles of ice.
But in summer, when the ice has melted,
the polar bears are limited to patches of land.
Forcing them close together.
Normally in the summer, polar bears are waiting.
They are waiting for the ice to form
so they can go back out onto the pack ice and hunt seals.
And this corner of Wrangel Island is a special spot.
Now, we've got a theory as to why
all of these polar bears came together for this extraordinary event.
You've got to imagine that this ball is Wrangel Island.
At this time of year,
the bears are essentially trapped on it because they are waiting for the
sea around it to freeze so that they can go out and hunt.
But historically,
it's this corner of the island where the seas freeze first.
And clearly, the bears remember this, too,
as they've all gravitated in that direction.
It's a bit like they're waiting for a bus, except the bus is very,
very late and therefore you've got a big queue of bears.
And then they get a bonus, because a very stinky whale carcass turns up,
and they are all hungry so they simply can't resist it.
And what you've got is the perfect recipe for a polar bear party.
Except, haven't we forgotten something?
Like I've said, polar bears simply don't like other polar bears.
I thought that there would be a lot more argy-bargy,
a lot more fierceness between them.
And that's an understatement.
200 unsociable, hungry bears?
It should have been a bloodbath.
The bears were so relaxed,
there was no overt growling or lip curling to chase another bear away.
OK, so why the truce?
The reason the bears weren't fighting is because you had this
enormous food resource. Everybody was going to get a full stomach.
If there was a limited food supply, so say, rather than a big whale,
there was a small seal carcass, there would probably be an argument.
So they are focused on feeding rather than fighting.
And this makes for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I've got to admit to being very, very jealous.
I didn't really have a thing for polar bears until I saw so many of them.
Then I got how important it was.
And it was such a privilege.
I was sort of shell-shocked.
Even now, thinking about how amazing it was.
All right, don't rub it in!
So, while crows are snowboarding in the Urals...
..and a Finn has us all in a spin...
This carousel makes people happy.
..some polar bears are having a party in the Arctic.
What a weird wintry world we live in.
For our next curious case, we travel from the top of the world...
..right down to the bottom.
Antarctica.
Home to millions of Adelie penguins.
Ice and sea.
And sea and ice.
Life is pretty good by penguin standards.
But inland, 70 miles away from the colony at Cape Royds,
lies one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
The dry valleys.
So barren, it's like the surface of Mars.
And apart from a few bacteria, there's no life here.
But there is evidence of death.
When you're hiking along for hours on end, and you come across nothing,
and suddenly you see something that doesn't look like every other rock,
it catches your attention.
I was working in the Dry Valleys,
I hadn't seen any animal life in months.
I was on an eight-hour hike and suddenly I almost tripped over a dead body.
Stopped to have a look, and it was a dead penguin.
When I realised it was an Adelie penguin and not a Rock,
it was really quite staggering.
How the hell did this penguin get so
far inland away from where it's supposed to be?
And this sad discovery wasn't a one-off.
I was usually hiking about eight to 12 hours a day,
and I'd stumble across at least one carcass a day.
It is fairly bizarre,
it's clearly not the environment they're meant to be in.
Why these marine animals have died so far from the sea was baffling.
But then in 2006, a documentary film crew stumbled across some evidence.
They filmed a penguin behaving very strangely.
The group of penguins on the right are heading out towards the sea.
The penguin on the left is on its way back to the colony.
But this penguin, the one in the middle,
doesn't seem to know which way to go.
Then it heads off in an entirely different direction.
Heading inland, straight towards the Dry Valleys.
So what's going on?
OK. Let's have a little recap on the day-to-day activities of
the breeding Adelie penguin.
The eggs and the young are here, at its home in the colony.
And if it's got young, they'll need feeding,
so they will travel across the ice to the sea,
to hunt for fish, and then they will return across the ice to the colony,
where they will regurgitate them.
And that's about it, really.
It's colony to sea, sea to colony,
colony to sea, and back again.
But what about that single penguin,
travelling off in the wrong direction,
all alone?
What was it doing?
In the world of penguins, group behaviour is hugely important.
They go everywhere in flocks.
For a single penguin to leave a flock means that there is some major
factor that is involved.
So what could possess a penguin
to set off on this solo suicide mission?
One of the theories about why penguins end up in the Valleys is
that they are using light reflected off water and the clouds as navigation aids,
and so the lakes inside the Valleys reflect some of this light on the
clouds and the penguins,
thinking it's the ocean, start heading inland.
It's an interesting idea, but does it stand up?
Is this how penguins navigate, using visual landmarks?
Well, animals use all kinds of ways to orient themselves.
We know bears use their amazing sense of smell.
Turtles use invisible magnetic fields to find their way.
Some birds even navigate using the stars.
But scientists have discovered that
penguins have another way of getting around.
Some researchers are interested in how penguins oriented,
and so they travelled to Antarctica and they captured about a dozen
penguins and they flew them to the South Pole,
which is a featureless plain.
And so they released these penguins and they found that as long as the
sun was shining, they all went north-east.
When the sun became obscured, they wander every which way.
So they concluded that these penguins were using the sun
to orient themselves to the point of the compass.
Penguins have an in-built compass set by the sun.
They don't find the ocean by looking for it,
their compass guides them toward it.
A visual clue, like a shimmering mirage,
could not have confused our penguin.
So what was pulling it towards the Dry Valleys?
Well, David has an extraordinary explanation for
this very strange behaviour.
It's a pretty widespread phenomenon amongst animals,
including humans, where a very, very small proportion of individuals
have some malfunction in their brains
where they confuse left with right.
They think they are going the right direction,
but they are going the opposite direction.
This penguin was completely convinced that the direction it was
going would get it to the ocean.
The best explanation for what this penguin is doing in the clip was it
was expressing some form of dyslexia.
Our little penguin had it all topsy-turvy.
You see, in his head he thought
that he was moving in the right direction,
and all of the other penguins had it wrong.
It was a classic case of mirror image malfunction.
Yes, his internal compass was completely askew.
North became south, south became north.
So while he thought he was heading to the sea, in fact he wasn't.
He was heading off on a long walk to the Dry Valleys.
And certain death.
Poor little penguin.
Our weird world has plenty of strange secrets for us to solve,
so for our next story,
we are heading to the snowy tips of the Himalayas in India to uncover a
macabre mystery hidden in the ice.
The Himalayas.
Home of the highest peaks in the world.
An icy, dramatic landscape
where freak weather conditions, knifing winds,
blizzards and avalanches are commonplace.
But, in the summer of 1942,
miles from the nearest village,
a mountain ranger stumbled upon a scene of utter horror.
A frozen lake had thawed to reveal the stuff of nightmares,
hundreds and hundreds of human bones.
Now, in 1942, World War II was raging across the globe.
And so, the British Indian government assumed that these were
the remains of Japanese soldiers,
that they'd been sneaking through India in an attempt at a land
invasion and met an icy end.
So there you have it,
the theory that these were the bones of Japanese soldiers killed by
hypothermia seems pretty straightforward.
But then, in 2004, more than 60 years after the macabre discovery,
a group of scientists revisited the lake to analyse the skeletons in
much more detail, and they discovered something remarkable.
You see, the bones dated back over 1,000 years.
So, if they weren't the remains of World War II soldiers,
who did these ancient skeletons belong to?
There could be 200, 300, 400 here, easily.
I've never seen anything like this before,
so many people in one place at one time with an unexplained cause of death.
Bone expert Ben Garrod can learn
a lot about a person from their skeleton.
If we are looking at male and female,
males have these big brow ridges over the eyes here.
They also have, usually, a much more significant chin,
you can see in this area.
And then we have to look at other things as well. Were they juvenile?
Were they adult? Was there a mixture of the two?
The skull's not just one big bone, and you can see there's one here,
two and three, so these lines actually fuse when you are about 25,
maybe 30 years old, so we'd look for
at what point these things are starting to fuse together.
It's techniques like this that the expedition were able to use to learn
about our mysterious skeletons.
There were some young people, some kids, lots of adults and some
older ones as well, and at least 35% were females,
so there's a real mixture of demographic within this population.
OK. Hundreds of people, male and female, of all different ages,
in a very remote location, which suggests, of course,
that it could be some sort of graveyard.
That would explain why there were so many there.
Well, it would, except that carbon dating has shown that they all died
at exactly the same time.
So what could have wiped out all of these people in one instant?
What you're trying to look for is something that would cause mass deaths,
so was there some infectious disease, something like
tuberculosis, that went through the group? Sometimes,
it can be preserved in the bones themselves, but there is no sign
of any infectious disease in any of the skeletons
that would explain why such a big group of people died in one place at one time.
But there is a force in the mountains that could wipe out a large group of people.
Avalanches.
Tonnes of snow, rock and ice.
They claim hundreds of lives every year,
so certainly have the power to kill.
Could an avalanche be to blame for what happened here?
If you've got rocks cascading down on you, they are all over the body.
You've got injuries to your chest, your legs, your pelvis, your face,
your skull. You just can't see the mass trauma you'd expect from a
catastrophic landslide.
But there was a vital clue in the skulls.
You see, many of them had something in common.
They are quite small, they are quite round, they are what we call a
depressed fracture, so if you imagine that a little circle of
destroyed bone has sunken in,
it's almost like where you push something and it's just collapsed on
itself and then sunk in underneath.
So what might cause injuries like this?
Human sacrifice?
Perhaps an attack by an invading army?
Something hitting the skull that's a type of blunt force trauma,
so it's not an axe, it's not a spear,
it's not a knife from an invading army.
Roughly the same size.
You're talking about seven or eight centimetres across,
so something was hitting the skulls that was about the size of a snooker
ball. Probably the weight as well has caused this amount of damage.
This is lots of things hitting these skulls at very, very high speed,
and they are all in the same area, so they are from here up.
They are not from the side, they are not from the back, so something is
getting these skulls from this angle or above.
Now, I'm no expert,
but I'm pretty certain that snooker wasn't invented 1,000 years ago.
So what was hitting all of these people from above in this way?
Whoa!
BANGING
Ow!
This one just hit me in the head.
Not only does hail damage cars and property,
there are even reports throughout history of mass deaths
caused by huge hailstorms.
Obviously, we are used to hailstones two or three millimetres across,
maximum the size of a pea.
Even at that size, they can cause quite a lot of damage.
But, in certain parts of the world, you can get hailstones that are two,
three, four, five centimetres across,
if you are hit with something the size and weight of a snooker ball,
over 100mph, in the head?
It's game over. And if you've got, sadly, 200, 300,
400 people all travelling together in quite a small little group,
and then you get this hailstorm above you,
and all the hailstones are this sort of size,
you stand very little chance of surviving.
Who'd have thought it! Hundreds of people,
wiped out by a single hailstorm 1,000 years ago.
Gives me the shivers.
And now from a Himalayan whodunnit to a tale of intrigue out on the
tundra - and, rest assured,
I promise you this one has got a happy ending.
Siberia, a snowy wilderness
stretching for five million square miles right across the Arctic Circle,
and home to an animal synonymous with winter.
Reindeer are found here in their millions.
In fact, there are more here than anywhere else on the planet.
But, in 2016, disturbing reports started coming in.
In the Yamalo-Nenets region in the far north-west,
a shocking discovery is made.
Reindeer are dying.
This is devastating news for the Nenets,
some of the last remaining nomadic reindeer herders.
These indigenous people rely on reindeer for transport,
food and warmth.
Without them, they simply wouldn't be able to survive.
This really is the nightmare before Christmas.
And it's not the first time that large numbers of reindeer have been
struck down so suddenly.
We're going to take you to Norway,
where more than 320 reindeer have
been killed by lightning on a mountain range in the south of the country.
300 reindeer, killed by lightning.
I wonder if the mass death in Siberia could have been caused by a
similar extreme weather event?
Lightning is a very unlikely factor.
In Norway, the animals died bunched up in a very small area.
In Siberia, there were many thousands of animals over a very large area,
so it was a completely different pattern and all the evidence is that
the animals died over a period of weeks, not only a single night.
So, if it wasn't lightning, what could be the culprit?
Several years ago, fish were found in a river not far from the reindeer,
with radiation 20 times the safe level.
The finger was pointed at a top-secret Russian nuclear power
complex, but, on this occasion, there were no such leaks to blame.
There are other reasons that could explain mass mortality,
and that is disease, particularly epidemic diseases.
Without answers, the Nenets begin burying the corpses,
but little do they know the danger they are in.
Within two weeks, 90 people are hospitalised.
The population are terrified.
And then a disturbing breakthrough.
Finally, the mysterious killer has a name,
and it's one of the most deadly diseases on the planet.
This is anthrax.
Anthrax is bad for you, it's really bad news!
Anthrax is a disease caused by a bacterium called Bacillus anthracis.
It's so dangerous because if you eat the organism, if you breathe it in,
then the disease is almost invariably fatal.
Anthrax, it's one of the most feared diseases in human history and has
fascinated scientists for decades.
'The commission members visit the bacteriological laboratory to
'conduct an examination into the problem of anthrax.'
Anthrax occurs naturally,
it lives in the earth in the form of spores which are self-reproducing
organisms.
In biological terms, anthrax is one of the most difficult organisms to
destroy that there is.
It's resistant to heat, radiation,
to sunlight, to drying out.
It's an amazing structure.
We know that anthrax can survive in the right environment for well over
100 years.
And it's that resilience which is key.
Because this amazing structure, as Tim calls it,
had come back from the dead.
In Siberia recently there has been unusual warming which has led to the
melting of the permafrost.
In these conditions,
the spores of the anthrax which have been dormant in the soil may be
released. It's thought that they might have been released from an old
carcass of a reindeer that died many years earlier.
Reindeer had been killed by a natural outbreak of anthrax in 1941.
And for all these years they've been frozen in the permafrost.
But now the anthrax spores had come back to life.
When reindeer graze, particularly on the short swards of the tundra,
they ingest a lot of soil and ingest these anthrax spores and quickly
develop toxins which lead to their death.
So, dormant anthrax spores from a 70-year-old carcass were to blame.
Who'd have thought it?
Thankfully the disease was contained and both the Nenets and their
reindeer were vaccinated against further outbreaks.
Rudolph and friends were back in action in time for Christmas.
You see, I told you there was a happy ending!
So, from a perplexed penguin to hailstones from hell,
and a contagious killer back from the dead.
These really are strange sagas indeed.
Now, if those stories gave you the shivers,
I've got to tell you that our next tale is truly chilling.
The small town of McAdoo, Pennsylvania.
February, 2015.
And it's a bitterly cold night, minus 20 Celsius.
At 9.30pm,
25-year-old Justin Smith leaves a party to walk the two miles back to
his father's house.
But the next morning, Justin still isn't home.
His girlfriend called me and said, "Is Justin home?"
At that point,
it's just got me nervous, very nervous.
Don heads out to find his son.
It's now been nine hours since Justin was last seen.
When I came around that corner that's where I saw him.
He was in the snow and he was lifeless, blue, blue colour.
And I just said, "No, Justin, no, no, no!"
"You can't go, you can't go, you can't leave me."
He's frozen, he's frozen like a block of ice.
And I just held him in my arms and just cried.
There's my son, dead.
Paramedics arrive at the scene.
The ER doctor on duty, Gerry Coleman, takes the call.
All signs led me to believe he was probably dead many hours prior to
when they called me. The problem is,
I could not pronounce him dead, because he was cold.
If he was warm, he'd be pronounced dead.
Now, common medical practice dictates that you can't be certified
as dead until your body is at room temperature,
so Dr Coleman instructed the paramedics on the scene to begin CPR and bring him in.
I remember the paramedics kind of bursting through the doors and when
I looked down he literally looked and felt like a block of ice.
I remember the staff kind of looking at me, like, "Why are we even doing
"this, it's clear as day that he's gone."
Now, my body temperature is normally a tasty 37 Centigrade.
But if it drops by two degrees, I get hypothermia.
If it drops down to 30,
then I probably become unconscious, and if it drops below 25,
my heart stops beating.
Justin's body temperature was just 18 degrees Centigrade.
We got up to the hospital and I met Dr Coleman and he sat down right
across from me and grabbed my hands and he said to me,
"I'm going to throw everything I have, including the kitchen sink, at your son."
They tried to revive Justin for two hours but it was just no good.
The only viable way to give Justin
the highest chance of survival is through ECMO.
ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.
Basically, blood is taken out of the body, it's warmed up,
it's re-oxygenated and pumped back in.
They moved him to an ICU unit and
they hooked him up to this ECMO machine.
I was praying, that's all I was doing.
As the ECMO machine gradually warmed Justin's blood,
something remarkable happened.
His heart started.
I got a call and they said, "Hey, you know that kid you sent me down,
"we got him on ECMO,
"his temperature is now normal and he's not out of the woods but he may make it."
That's absolutely incredible.
Justin's heart was beating normally but what about his brain?
Surely having been starved of oxygen for so long it would have suffered
catastrophic damage?
At that point I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, what if he's a vegetable,
"what are they going to do?"
I remember, we're all in the waiting room and the neurologist,
said, "Are you the father?" I said, "Yes."
And he just put himself on the chair like this and he goes,
"I can't explain this."
And I sat next to him and I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Well, if you take an orange and put it in the freezer and
"the next morning, put it on the counter, it becomes mush.
"That's what I expected from Justin's brain."
He said, "The EEG is normal."
I got my son back.
I'm 100% lucky. There were things
that were out of my hands and somehow everything fell into
place. So I'm really blessed.
When I look at that photo of me sitting on the snow bank it kind of
motivates me to work harder.
Things can happen, bad things can happen,
but there can be positives out of them.
A frozen heart that beats again?
A brain starved of oxygen that's fully functioning?
This is the stuff of fiction.
How can this be possible?
So, when people hear the word hypothermia they tend to think - bad thing.
Actually, hypothermia can be protective because hypothermia
reduces the body's need for oxygen.
So, as Justin cooled, what happened was,
his breathing reduced and his heart rate reduced,
down to almost imperceptible levels.
Now, you may have even found him at that state and thought him dead,
but deep down inside him there was
just enough going on for him to stay alive.
But how do we explain Justin's brain?
You see, under normal circumstances,
after being starved of oxygen for just a couple of minutes,
the brain simply can't survive.
Could it be that these extreme temperatures bought Justin's brain some valuable time?
We know that once you get the brain down to about 20 Celsius,
it's got about an hour it can survive without oxygen.
So, when the paramedics turned up, it may well be he was "dead",
but he had a protected brain, so provided you can, with great skill,
warm somebody up carefully, restart the heart and restart the breathing,
do all the things you need to keep them stable, they have a chance.
So, the extreme cold gave Justin's brain an extra hour of protection
after his heart and breathing had given up.
So, as it turns out, hypothermia actually saved his life.
Well, with a bit of help from Dr Coleman, of course.
Dr Coleman,
one single decision he made saved my life and I can't thank him enough.
He's an amazing person.
Justin's back where he was.
I mean, he's just a fun-loving kid.
He loves life. This is a second chance for him.
There it is!
Whoo!
And unbelievably,
it's not just humans who can survive under such extreme conditions.
Wood frogs in North America, for example,
can last weeks - seemingly frozen solid.
Just like Justin, they have the appearance of being dead.
Their breathing stops and so does their heart.
But when the ice thaws, they return to their normal, healthy state,
completely unharmed.
Other animals, like this Woolly Bear caterpillar have a kind of
antifreeze in their blood.
And the New Zealand weta can
withstand 80% of its body tissue turning to ice,
and still recover when spring arrives to thaw it out.
There's no doubt at all, is there,
that the natural world is every bit as weird as it is wonderful?
When you think about it, we've had snowboarding crows,
polar bears having a party and confused penguins.
But for our last story,
we've got a very peculiar piece of behaviour that concerns our
traditional Christmas dinner.
And it's very odd, very odd indeed!
It was around 6.45, and I was driving down the street,
came to a stop sign.
I noticed something kind of strange.
That is the craziest thing I've ever seen.
FUNEREAL MUSIC PLAYS
Turkeys walking in a circle around a dead cat in the middle of the road.
Bro, this is wild.
That's right, your eyes aren't deceiving you.
A ring of turkeys circling a dead cat.
I didn't think anybody would believe me so I whipped out my phone,
like all of us do, typically.
I took a picture and I'm like, a picture's not going to do enough justice.
Let me take a video.
Jonathan continued to film the turkeys circling this dead cat.
It was almost as if they were involved in some kind of bizarre ritual.
I was a little creeped out.
It was definitely eerie.
I was watching and I was, like,
this looks eerily like a seance of some sorts.
I'm, like, is this cat going to just hop up and start walking away?
Some people were telling me that they were praying to the cat,
and making sure that the cat was in a better place.
Others said the cat wasn't actually dead,
it was sitting there waiting for the turkeys to finish blessing it!
How incredibly bizarre is that?
But let's go through this bit by bit.
Firstly, turkeys, in the middle of a street, in a major city.
The first time I saw one I was in complete shock.
I thought, "What is this bird doing here? Where did it come from?"
Probably 20 years ago there were no calls coming in for turkeys,
nobody was seeing them, and now we're getting up to seven calls a week.
The population has kind of grown a little bit more than it was before.
So, where have all these turkeys come from?
Have they escaped from a farm?
They are not farm turkeys,
they are wild turkeys that are sharing the neighbourhoods with us.
Wild turkeys?
Why on earth are there are wild turkeys in the middle of a city?
Turkeys in urban areas, it's a fairly recent phenomenon that we
have, maybe over the past five or ten years.
It has everything to do with people and food.
In Boston, they're finding lots of food and that's in the form of bird
feeders in people's backyards and other areas.
Boston and other cities are now full of wild turkeys.
What's more, these city slickers are causing trouble on the streets.
Attacking pedestrians.
I'm being chased by these damn things.
And even attacking cars.
We've had calls from people who feel they can't get out of their car
because the turkey is so aggressively attacking the side of the car.
Oh, my God.
They can run up to 25mph,
which is phenomenal, and they're not afraid of us.
Unbelievable!
So, why are these bothersome birds so aggressive?
Get outta here!
Could this be a case of Christmas dinner striking back?
Turkeys are very social animals and so we see a lot of interactions
amongst the individuals within those blocks.
There's a lot of jockeying for position as to who might be the
dominant animal within the group.
That's kind of their constant social struggle.
And what happens in the cities like Boston is,
turkeys become so used to seeing people that they kind of lose their
fear and the people can become the object of that social hierarchy,
that social struggle that exists with turkeys.
That male bird is trying to dominate another male bird,
that other one's trying to get away and he's going to continue to chase
him until he feels he's comfortable in his male turkeyhood.
So, basically,
dominant male turkeys are always on the lookout for someone to boss around.
Which is why they're confused when they see their own reflection.
But Jonathan's turkeys don't look particularly angry.
In fact, quite the opposite.
It all feels rather calm and measured.
Gentle, almost.
Why? Well, it's simple.
Because these turkeys are female.
When you have a flock of females,
there's always one that is the leader of the group and the rest
tend to follow in line.
So, imagine the situation where a flock of turkeys is coming down the
road and they observed a cat that is acting very strange,
in their perspective.
It's not moving. You know, cats can be a predator for turkeys.
That hen turkey saw this threat and was moving around it to observe and
kind of give it a wide berth and all her friends followed suit with her
in a circle.
I think it's just the perfect storm of a strange situation,
the animals responding to it in a way that is consistent with what
they normally would. So it seems to be reasonable, even though it looks
completely unreasonable at the very outset of it.
So, there you go. It isn't some sort of spooky death ritual at all,
it's simply a bunch of female turkeys playing follow the leader.
I know what you're thinking, what on earth happened to the cat?
One of the first things I thought about and everybody always said,
make sure you go back and see where the cat is, see if the cat's gone,
see if they ate the cat. And like I said, I never thought they were
going to eat the cat but when I got back the cat was sure enough gone,
so who knows what happened to it? But no turkeys, no cat.
Winter is a weird old time of the year.
Snowboarding crows, spinning ice disks, confused penguins,
polar bear parties, anthrax,
a man who was frozen solid and came back from the dead.
And when you're sitting down to your Christmas dinner,
spare a thought for the good people of Boston,
who have to deal with their turkey Twizzlers.
Have a weird and a wonderful Christmas.