Natural World

- Season 28

(2010)

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A celebration of the life and legacy of Echo, the world's most famous elephant, who was born in 1945 and died in 2009, and who Natural World followed for the last 20 years of her life.The timing of Echo's death could not be worse. The wise old matriarch had guided her family for half a century but the cruelest drought in living memory devastated her home under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. Will her 38-strong band of relatives and descendants overcome the loss of their leader, hunger and poachers to survive?

The Californian sea otter is one of the rarest, and possibly cutest animals in the world. So when a sea otter mum decides to have her pup amongst the yachts of a millionaires' marina, it is a unique event. The mum must teach her baby how to dodge the boats and find the food in this busy harbour. However, the arrival of a tough male sea otter signals disaster for the family. When mum is attacked, the poor pup is left on her own and must fight for survival.

Snow leopards stalk their prey among the highest peaks. Concealed by snowfall, the chase is watched by golden eagles circling above. On the harsh plains of the Tibetan plateau live extraordinary bears and square-faced foxes hunting small rodents to survive. In the alpine forests, dancing pheasants have even influenced rival border guards in their ritualistic displays. Valleys carved by glacial waters lead to hillsides covered by paddy fields containing the lifeline to the East, rice. In this world of extremes, the Himalayas reveal not only snow-capped mountains and ...

An intimate portrait of the spectacular Drakensberg - 'dragon mountains' - of South Africa, following giant antelope, bone-cracking vultures and raucous baboons as they struggle to survive in a land of extremes. Serval cats and jackals patrol the slopes watching for any weakness and bearded vultures fly overhead. Eland antelope face constant challenges straight from birth and climb high to find food but avoid wildfires, freezing rain and starvation on the way. Despite these battles, this mountain kingdom offers some respite in summer and allows life to cling on in ...

A dolphin is about to be born in the treacherous waters of Shark Bay in Western Australia. Puck, the wise mother, must use all her skills to keep her newborn safe from the sharks that sweep into the bay every year. With the help of her close knit family of females she must teach the vulnerable baby dolphin the secrets of survival. From whistling to her unborn calf, to the first few hours of baby Samu's life and the struggles her eldest son faces leaving home, this film provides a rare insight into the lives of bottlenose dolphins.

Giant Pandas were on the brink of extinction but now they are coming back, thanks to an extraordinary conservation project. The Chengdu Research Base in central China is at the heart of a project to breed 300 pandas, and then start introducing them back into the wild. It is the most ambitious and controversial conservation effort ever mounted. Shot over two years, this film follows the pandas and keepers as, through visionary science and round-the-clock care, they edge closer to the magic number of 300.

Wildlife documentary featuring the fascinating lives of Britain's beautiful butterflies filmed in exquisite detail and also a celebration of their enduring appeal to the British people. Butterfly-costumed carnival-goers dance at Notting Hill, street artist Nick Walker uses their image to brighten bare city walls, burlesque dancer Vicky Butterfly recreates butterfly dances and at Britain's biggest tattoo convention women reveal their butterfly tattoos. Britain's butterflies have never been so threatened, three quarters are in decline. A search for butterflies leads to ...

It's the largest and most ambitious habitat recreation project ever known: to bring back to life one of the world's greatest marshlands. And it's happening in Iraq. Considered to be the original Garden of Eden, the marshes were once Iraq's wildlife jewel, where man and nature thrived for 5,000 years. But in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein drained these gigantic wetlands and turned them into a desert, destroying a home to thousands of people and millions of birds. Donning his body armor, filmmaker David Johnson travels to the Mesopotamian Marshes to follow the work of Azzam ...

In the 1960s, Born Free captured the world's imagination with the story of Elsa, an orphaned lioness who was taken in by George and Joy Adamson and returned to a life in the wild. The book and film sparked a new love of nature that has blossomed ever since, but the true story of what happened afterwards was far more tragic as both George and Joy were murdered. Fifty years on, this emotional and revealing drama documentary re-lives those events - with intimate contributions from Virginia McKenna and David Attenborough.

A real-life drama about a family of chimps trapped in a lost world. They live in a deep and ancient forested gorge that runs though the African savanna and for fifteen years it has been cut off from the rest of the jungle, leaving the chimps imprisoned. Here, they face a daily life-or-death dilemma: whether to leave the safety of the gorge and venture into the predator-ridden savanna to find food, or face hunger. There's now only twenty of them left and as Brutus the alpha male loses his grip, can the family hold it together or is time running out for the Kyambura ...

Passionate English conservationist Collin Stafford-Johnson and his Indian local friend - Hindi interpreter Salim started a unique documentary on a tiger family in Ranthambhore National Park, an abandoned royal fort in in Rajastan, putting the focus on exceptionally bright and inquisitive male cub 'Broken Tail'. It took a tragic turn when the tiger youngster went missing for over a year, only to be found killed by a train. The film mainly shows how the probably hopeless plight of tiger - and wider nature preservation in India, with its expanding population and economic...

From the giant King Cobra to the tiny sawscaled viper, India is home to many of the world's deadliest snakes. Now a new report has revealed that India is in the middle of a snakebite epidemic of epic proportions, with a loss of human life far in excess of any official figures. Armed with more than forty years of field experience, snake expert Romulus Whitaker and his team set out on a journey around India to investigate the natural history behind these chilling new statistics and to see what can be done to help India's people and ultimately, its snakes.

Wildlife documentary following the search for grizzly bears in the beautiful Cascade Mountains of Canada. Wildlife filmmaker Jeff Turner has spent a lifetime tracking grizzly bears around the world, and now he has come home to spend a year in the mountains of his youth to discover if the grizzly is still surviving in this beautiful area of British Columbia. Tracking the wildlife through the four seasons of one year, he encounters many animals from his childhood, including black bears, ospreys, coyotes and mule deer. But with all the changes to his old stomping ground,...