The Pacific coast.
Final frontier of the Wild West.
The animals here live literally on the edge.
For them all,
pioneers and prospectors...
homesteaders...
and outlaws...
the coast is a land of opportunity...
but also, the ultimate testing ground.
[horse neighs]
[rattles]
[bird squawks]
California has always been the promised land,
drawing the hopeful westward.
It's lured these giants out of the waves.
Northern elephant seals.
Now, they've set up a frontier town on this beach.
Here, tough guys take what they want.
And feuds are settled in blood.
[bellows]
The local boss, the alpha bull,
calls the shots in this slice of the Wild West.
His bellow is law.
[bellows]
This is no place for a lady.
But the ladies are here.
The boss plans to get with every one of them,
and doesn't aim to share with any of the dudes hanging around.
This young lady showed up here about two months ago
to give birth.
Even this rough outpost is better
than the wilderness of the Pacific for her pup.
She nursed him for about four weeks.
In that short time, he gained around 200 pounds.
Mom lost 400.
She hasn't eaten since she got here.
With the little guy now big enough to survive alone,
she wants out of here.
She has to get back to the sea to eat.
[bellows]
But it's not that simple.
She has to run the gauntlet of those young ruffians...
...all desperate to mate with any of the boss' beauties.
[bellows]
She works her way, cautiously, towards the surf.
But she doesn't get far.
One of the bigger boys tries to take advantage.
[groans]
The boss is having none of it.
He weighs close to two tons, and is nearly 14 feet long.
[bellowing]
He's armed with a double-barrel proboscis.
It works like a megaphone to boost the bellowing.
Usually, the bigger gun wins.
[bellows]
The larger proboscis makes more noise.
But the rival's not impressed.
[deep bellowing]
So the boss is gonna have to open up
a big, ol' can of whoop ass.
[bellowing]
In the end, the boss is just too much seal.
His dominance means he gets the girl,
ensuring that she carries the strongest genes
back to sea.
Next year, she'll return to this same frontier town
to give birth.
And the big guys will be waiting.
[bellows]
The seals aren't the only ocean drifters
coming to try their chances in the coastal Wild West.
There's a gold rush coming.
Gold that's fleshy and pink.
In Alaska's remote Southeast,
hundreds of thousands of humpback salmon
stampede upstream to spawn.
They must make it to the exact same inlet where they hatched.
Anan Creek sees one of the biggest humpback salmon runs
in the world.
But the salmon don't make their way unchallenged.
A gold rush like this draws prospectors.
Black bears, hungry for spoils.
They usually hunt alone.
Not here.
They must jockey for access to the bounty.
The biggest, strongest males grab the most lucrative claims.
A young cub has no business in a lawless place like this.
Mom tries to chaperone her tenderfoot
through the rough crowd.
He needs to gain at least 25 pounds
in the next couple of months if he's going to survive winter.
They must get to the salmon.
But this spot's already taken.
To get to the fish,
mom and her greenhorn must get past this big male.
He could kill the cub without breaking a sweat.
[growls]
She tries to stare him down.
But he ain't goin' nowhere.
So she risks a direct challenge.
[roaring]
No dice.
[cub crying]
She has no choice but to lead her young'un upstream
to a lesser claim.
A few dead fish, left over by the adults,
will help tide him over.
And maybe he's safer, out of the way.
The riches here are luring in the big guns--
the black bears' archrivals,
the browns.
The ultimate tough guys.
They could kill the cub, the mom and the adult male.
Here in Alaska, brown bears are the robber barons.
Food is their business.
And they'll railroad anyone who tries to keep it from 'em.
Weaker prospectors be damned.
The heavies head towards the prime fishing spot--
the gulch that the black bears have staked out as their turf.
Yet more jaws the salmon must try to avoid
as they seek out their spawning grounds upstream.
Usually, when brown bears run into black, it ain't pretty.
Even a juvenile brown is more than a match
for a full-grown black bear.
But during the gold rush of fish, incredibly,
the barons and the prospectors call an uneasy truce.
Perhaps nowhere else on Earth will you see blacks and browns
feed together like this.
For the bigger youngsters,
the riches on hand are kind of overwhelming.
But it's an opportunity to practice different ways
of getting the gold.
The snorkel.
The belly flop.
The swipe.
There's no shortage of opportunity.
Twice a day, even more salmon are sluiced in on the tides.
Nearly exhausted from their epic swim,
they fight upstream to fulfill their destiny to reproduce.
Many make it to within yards of their goal, only to be taken.
But the survivors have what it takes.
Guts,
determination,
and sheer numbers
ensure that next summer, the gold rush will go on.
And highlight once again,
the contradictions of life in the Wild West.
It's a rich land.
But riches attract bounty hunters.
And they must fight to get what's theirs.
Powerful sea lions take what they want...
...while seagulls eke out a hardscrabble life.
A giant Pacific octopus.
The biggest in the world,
with a leg span that can top 14 feet.
She can camouflage herself in an instant.
And she needs to.
She's carrying over 50,000 fertilized eggs.
Out here, raising a family can take everything you've got...
literally.
She's in outlaw territory.
She needs a hideout she can defend.
She's 90% muscle.
But with no skeleton,
she can squeeze her bulk into a tiny hidey-hole.
Now, she readies herself to make a last stand
against the ocean's desperados.
Of all the ocean's tough guys,
our mother octopus should fear one the most.
The sunflower sea star.
Don't let the cheerful name fool you...
or its pace.
It may not be the fastest gun in the West,
but it moves quicker than you think.
Up to a yard a minute,
on the 15,000 tube feet lining its underside.
Time lapse blows their cover.
It'll devour anything it can overwhelm.
Even extend its stomach outside its mouth for bigger prey.
For these outlaws,
50,000 octopus eggs is like a stash of gold.
Hunkered down in her fort, the mother is ready.
She's braided together her thousands of rice-sized eggs,
and glued them to the walls.
For six months she broods.
Using her siphon as a pump,
she aerates her babies, and washes away parasites.
She can't leave them, even to eat.
Her color fades.
She loses half her body weight.
The sea star bandits wait to storm her hideout.
She must find the strength to defend her kin.
With her last breaths, she forces water over the eggs,
to help free them from their shells.
And, having saved her babies,
she now makes the ultimate sacrifice.
Her carcass becomes bait,
drawing the bandits away from her young.
And they need all the help they can get.
Of the tens of thousands that hatch,
on average, only two will survive.
A couple of tiny settlers
dwarfed by the vast wilderness they've been born into.
The scale of the West has always made it a daunting world.
And the giants of the depths have their counterparts on land.
Redwoods.
The tallest trees on Earth.
Nearly 40 stories high,
60 feet around.
The bark alone can be a foot thick.
The oldest was a sapling when Julius Caesar ruled Rome.
Like any frontier,
this vertical world has its homesteaders...
and its hardships.
A spotted owl dad is trying to raise his young-uns alone.
The chicks squabble over who gets enough breakfast.
[chicks screeching]
The louder owlet gets the goods.
The softer-spoken brother goes hungry.
Only if their old man can hunt down enough varmints,
will both owlets survive.
And working alone, it ain't gonna be easy.
The owlets are begging for their lives.
It's their screeches that trigger
the homesteader father to hunt.
He must catch around 15 mice a day to keep everyone fed.
And the mice are doing their best not to get caught.
Dark fur helps the deer mouse hide.
Its ears are big to listen out for danger.
But what good is that if danger makes no sound?
The owl's flight feathers are so lightweight,
they're see-through.
Fringed edges let air pass,
breaking up the flapping noise that a normal bird makes.
He's silent as death.
The mouse never knew what hit him.
Even just 1/30th of a second before the talons strike...
...the mouse still doesn't have a clue.
Finally, the second youngster gets enough to eat.
The homesteader's hungry family is fed for another day.
Hundreds of feet below the towering redwood frontier
is an untamed backcountry of moss and fungus.
But also, of unexpectedly dapper dandies...
Banana slugs, America's biggest slugs.
They can grow even larger than the fruit they're named for.
"Slick" here may be dressed up fancy,
but he works as the local farmer.
He helps the forest by munching on competing shoots and weeds,
but sparing the redwood seedlings.
For now, Slick's a lover, not a farmer.
His scent-sniffing lower tentacles
pick up a mucusy "come hither" signal.
Eyes on his upper tentacles peer after it.
Slick can't tell from here if it's male or female.
But it doesn't matter!
Banana slugs are both.
They're hermaphrodites.
They take their sweet time, mating for up to 12 hours.
Nothing premature about Slick.
He may be hermaphrodite,
but when they're done, he does what males do.
He hits the trail.
Slick was lucky in love.
But the Wild West forest is a dangerous place.
In the redwood boondocks,
a garter snake is on the lookout for easy marks.
And the banana slug ain't exactly dressed to blend in.
It looks like it's all over for our mustard-colored Romeo...
...until Slick plays the mucus ace up his sleeve.
The snake has bitten off more than it can chew.
The slug's repulsive slime makes him very hard to swallow.
Choked back up, Slick emerges, more or less unscathed.
But he's not out of the redwoods yet.
A masked bandito is on the hunt.
The raccoon has a trick to neutralize Slick's slime.
Rolled in a coating of dirt, he goes down easy as a corndog.
Just another victim of the Wild West's dog-eat-dog rules.
Rules that, out here, even cats have to play by...
...no matter how small.
Bobcat kittens, just four weeks old.
They explore their world and roughhouse
to develop the muscles and nervous system
they'll need to survive as hunters...
...just like their mother.
A lone ranger, on the prowl.
She gets her moniker from her stub tail.
As the West's junior cat,
she may play second fiddle to the mountain lion.
But if anything, she's even more resourceful.
They call her the coyote of cats.
She'll eat almost anything she can take.
Like all felines, she's an expert hunter.
But rarely does the bobcat chase down her prey.
Instead, she prefers to bounce.
This loner has to make her pounces count.
The family will stay together until fall.
Then the kittens must make their own way...
...heading out into the wild coastal West.
A giant land, with plains that stretch
to the underwater horizon.
On the wide open spaces of the seabed,
land owners must fight off claim jumpers.
The sarcastic fringehead fiercely defends
his home on the range.
He has a rival.
Like Hatfield versus McCoy, it's a bitter land feud.
Neither's gonna give up his home and hunting ground
without a fight.
This ocean just ain't big enough for the two of 'em!
It's not about teeth.
It's the size of their mouths that matters.
A bare-knuckle fish fight...
...until Hatfield finds an opening.
Done and done.
Rival vanquished, Hatfield retires to his front porch.
Homeless, McCoy must wander the darkness.
When night falls on America's coast, the stars come out...
...and find their reflection on Earth.
Glow-in-the-dark millipedes.
Now filmed in the wild for the first time.
These are found only here in the mountains of California.
Chemicals in their exoskeleton react to produce light,
similar to fireflies.
Like any self-respecting citizen of the Wild West,
these guys are packing.
If attacked, the millipede will ooze deadly cyanide
from the sides of its body.
The alien glow serves as a warning.
He's a gunslinger, and he wants you to know it.
They spend their days underground,
emerging at dusk to forage and mate.
Courtship is a prickly affair.
Each leg intertwines with its partner, like a zipper.
These millipedes actually only have around 60 legs.
But the male does have two penises.
Good to be a bug!
They unzip after they're done.
The climbing sun lights up the Western coast,
and rises over a little slice of heaven.
This isn't a natural wilderness.
It's been tamed by one critter
that has mastered the coastal Wild West.
Pioneers, fired with a sense of manifest destiny.
Beavers.
Next to humans,
no other animal has done more to transform the West.
At up to 50 pounds,
they're America's biggest rodent, by far.
Big enough to take on the wild Western landscape and win.
This was once a creek,
till the beavers turned it into their own water world.
Like the workers and engineers who built the West,
these guys took the land as they found it,
and made it what they wanted it to be.
The dam they've built doubles as their home...
...with a pair of teenagers and a passel of little ones.
Mom and dad will likely be together for life.
The babies are only a couple months old.
But already they've got a sweet tooth for sticks.
Mom carefully grooms herself
to maintain her fur's waterproofing.
She's gonna need it.
Outside, trouble is brewing.
[thunder]
Just when you think you have the Wild West tamed,
the wild busts out.
The sound of running water brings on a compulsive obsession
with making it stop.
With nimble, five-fingered hands,
webbed feet, and chiseled teeth, they work 24/7.
But even an expert lumberjack can't be certain
where the tree is going to fall.
The downed trunks become construction material
to repair their storm-damaged lodge.
The busy beavers embody the spirit and hard work
that conquered the West.
But all the coast's characters are determined to make it here.
Prospectors and homesteaders.
Lone rangers and feuding rivals.
For them all, the Wild West's final frontier remains
the ultimate land of opportunity.