Brazilian Atlantic forest wildlife film at Rotterdam festival

This video is the trailer of the film Brazil, a natural history: Fragile Forest.

At the Wildlife Film Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, are not only films from Africa, but also this film.

The organisers write about it:

This enigmatic forest once stretched along the coast of Brazil for thousands of kilometres. Now there is only 7% left. Yet it is still home for many remarkable animals. Muriqui are the largest monkeys in South America. These very rare, highly social creatures greet each other with hugs – the closer the friendship, the more intense the hugs.

Great dusky swifts fly through the tumbling waters of the mighty Iguaçu Falls to build their nests on the slippery rock faces behind the curtains of water.

Coatis are curious looking creatures with their long flexible noses and banded tails, making them quite comical. But appearances can be deceptive; coatis are efficient hunters. They are also very social, living in all-female gangs that are composed of sisters, mothers and aunts. The females support one another in their day-to-day lives, keeping a watch out for predators.

Blue manakins are also social, but in a completely different way. In the depths of the forest, the males of these startlingly colourful birds work as a team to court a female. Like miniature circus performers they jump and bounce on a branch, one after the other, to excite their audience. Only the lead artist gets to carry out the last act.

New research finds that 500 years of over-exploitation has halved mammal populations in South America’s once majestic Atlantic Forest. A new analysis of mammal populations reveals the devastating effects of human disturbance since the area was first colonized in the 1500s. They found that apex predators and large carnivores, such as jaguars and pumas, as well as large-bodied herbivores, such as tapirs, were among the groups whose numbers had suffered the most: here.