Discovery captures ‘Nature’s Most Amazing Events’ on TV and website
When Discovery Channel and BBC work together, the results are stunning.
Last season, it was “Planet Earth” which became the most lauded natural history series in television history.
This season, it is “Nature’s Most Amazing Events,” a six-part high-definition series premiering May 29, 30 and 31. Two installments will air each night from 8 to 10 p.m.
Discovery and BBC co-produced the series that was filmed in 2007 and 2008 at remote wilderness locations around the world. It captures astonishing seasonal events that reveal the awesome power and grandeur of the planet’s rich natural diversity — from the summer melt of ice in the Arctic and the annual salmon run in Canada to the flooding of the Okavango Delta in Africa and the massive migration in East Africa’s Serengeti plain.
Complementing the series is Discovery’s online site that features an interactive Earth Live 3-D globe, Animal Arcade games such as the Caribou Ice Jump and jigsaw puzzles and wallpapers with amazing images. Go to www.discovery.com/naturesmostamazingevents to enjoy these features and to get a deeper insight into the series’ topics.
–Penny TV
“NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS” EPISODE GUIDE
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Arctic Summer’ (7 p.m. Friday, May 29) — During an Arctic summer, nearly three million square miles of sea ice rapidly begin to melt. For polar bears, the change in habitat threatens their survival … for others like arctic foxes, whales, and immense flocks of birds, this brief summer transforms the Arctic into one of the richest and dramatic places on Earth. Cameras capture the greatest seasonal change on the planet during a year when the sea ice retreated further and quicker than ever before. The elusive narwhal whales, with their mythological-looking unicorn tusks, are filmed for the first time using aerial cameras as they head north to feeding grounds.
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Grizzly Wilderness’ (8 p.m. Friday, May 29) — The annual return of Pacific salmon to the rivers where they were born is one of the greatest natural events on the planet. Each year, more than 500 million salmon swim up to 20,000 miles to return to their birthplace to spawn and die. In a television first, cameras capture the emergence of a mother grizzly and her cubs from their dens in the Alaskan mountains to hunt salmon — but they face fierce competition from equally hungry coastal wolves and cameras capture a dramatic confrontation between the wolves and a lone bear. High-speed cameras, and a specially designed underwater kit, record how the salmon swim upstream against powerful torrents while avoiding numerous predators ready to feed after the long winter.
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Surviving the Serengeti’ (7 p.m. Saturday, May 30) — Each year more than a million wildebeest and a quarter million zebra and gazelle migrate on Tanzania’s Serengeti Plains in one of the most spectacular events of the natural world. This episode shows the epic trek of herds that follow the rains to fresh pastures, and the difficult tale of the predators left behind. The crew captures the desperate plight of a single pride of lions over an unprecedented year of filming to reveal a different side to the Serengeti. And for the first time since 1967, the Serengeti’s only active volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, begins to billow ash and smoke. Using a gyro-stabilized helicopter mount, the team captures the dramatic eruption while revealing why the herds return each year: Fertilized by the volcanic ash over thousands of years, the short grass plains are among the most productive grasslands in the world.
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Army of Predators’ (8 p.m. Saturday, May 30) — As winter arrives along South Africa’s east coast the inshore waters cool, drawing nearly a billion sardines northwards. The sardine run is the world’s largest marine spectacle, attracting the planet’s greatest concentration of predators. A storm triggers the sardines to begin their desperate dash as they are tracked by a super-pod of 5,000 dolphins while yet more predators wait up the coast. The 15-mile long shoal of sardines is pushed northwards as thousands of sharks, whales and flocks of birds encircle. A spectacular feeding frenzy ensues as the dolphins force the sardines into enormous bait balls on which all the predators feast. Filmed in high-definition, super-slow motion, the scenes reveal every detail of the high-octane action from the air, the ocean surface, and underwater.
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Kalahari Flood’ (7 p.m. Sunday, May 31) — At the peak of the dry season in the Kalahari Desert, herds of elephants reveal remarkable new behavior as they make the most of stagnant pools, arid woodlands and dwindling waterholes guarded by lions. Their fortunes change, however, with the dramatic annual flooding of Botswana’s Okavango Delta, which turns 4,000 square miles of desert into an incredible maze of lagoons, islands and swamps. Great herds of elephants, buffalo, bull hippos, swamp deer, zebra, giraffe, crocodiles, and numerous birds and fish invade the wetlands, setting up some of the greatest clashes in nature. As the flood finally reaches its peak, famished elephants and buffalo, near the end of their epic trek across the desert, face a final gauntlet of an equally hungry pride of lions.
••NATURE’S MOST AMAZING EVENTS: ‘Pacific Feast’ (8 p.m. Sunday, May 31) — In the northeast Pacific, along the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia, the arrival of summer triggers an explosion of plant life greater in scale than the Amazon rainforest. Remarkably, the basis of this bloom is phytoplankton, or microscopic floating plants. The sun sparks a plankton bloom that attracts enormous amounts of wildlife – herring, several species of whales, sea lions, birds – all of whom race against time to make the most of the abundant feeding season before winter closes in. Humpback whales endure an exhausting three-month voyage from Hawaii. Sea lions struggle against ferocious predators and stormy seas. A never-before-filmed scene captures the dramatic struggle for life between killer whales and a one-ton male sea lion from above and below water. Amazing underwater footage shows a whale take a shoal of herring in a single gulp. And finally, remarkable images from the surface and from the air reveal humpback whales employing a cooperative fishing technique to harvest the riches of the sea.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
The URL in the above post is broken. Try: http://discovery.com/nature
http://discovery.com/naturesmostamazingevents