Incredible Insects • 2015

44:00

Take an epic voyage over the remote island nation of New Zealand, the last habitable landmass to be discovered on the planet. No bigger than the state of Colorado, this small country offers an incredibly diverse landscape view that changes dramatically with each mile. From snow-capped mountains to sandy beaches, and from the glacier-carved Fiordland National Park to the crater lake of Mount Ruapehu, New Zealand is a land of extremes. It's a place where fire clashes with ice and people are always pushing the limits.

2017 • Nature

58:10

How Earth's five oceans connect to form the largest ecosystem on the planet, and how its network of currents supports the health of the seas and marine wildlife.

S1E4 • A Perfect Planet • 2021 • Nature

20:57

A look at why a leopard let its dinner escape; an ominous dark mass looming over an Icelandic lake; some scorpions glow in the dark.

S1E16 • Nature's Strangest Mysteries: Solved • 2019 • Nature

53:37

This programme focuses on birds. The feather is key to everything that is crucial about a bird: it is both its aerofoil and its insulator. The earliest feathers were found on a fossilised Archaeopteryx skeleton in Bavaria. However, it had claws on its wings and there is only one species alive today that does so: the hoatzin, whose chicks possess them for about a week or so. Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate the probable movement of its ancestor. It may have taken to the trees to avoid predators, and over time, its bony, reptilian tail was replaced by feathers and its heavy jaw evolved into a keratin beak.

8/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature

59:09

Today Earth is a human world, home to eight billion people and counting. Humans now have a greater effect in shaping Earth’s surface than many natural processes. In this episode, Chris Packham explores how dramatic twists in Earth’s story enabled humans to go from being part of nature to controlling it, and what we can learn from this epic tale before it’s too late. The story begins 66 million years ago with the catastrophic impact of the asteroid that wiped out the (Non-avian) dinosaurs. From the ashes of the desolation that followed, a new animal family rose to power. This was adaptable and inventive enough to emerge out of the harsh new world – the mammals. It began with a distant ancestor that shared many traits of the much maligned, but evolutionarily brilliant, rat. Due to a series of extreme geological and climatic events, mammals evolved into early primates feasting in the newly formed tropical rainforests, and then to early humans travelling vast distances between forests in places like East Africa’s Rift Valley. Earth’s story is a saga spanning 4.5 billion years, but it’s only in the last 11,000 years - with the rise of farming - that our species has started to dramatically impact our planet and its ecosystems. The human chapter of Earth’s story might end in disaster, but Chris is keen to argue for a different ending, where all of humanity’s achievements to date “…were just our dress rehearsals, because in the very near future our species will need to reach the zenith of its achievements and… all humanity will have to learn to put our Earth first.”

S1E5 • Earth: One Planet, Many Lives • 2023 • Nature

48:04

Many of the great rivers of southern Africa start high up in mountain ranges, power their way eastwards across wild forests and grasslands, and eventually empty out into the Indian Ocean. Ride the currents of these powerful bodies of water as they reshape the lives of the wild animals who rely on them.

S1E7 • Waterworld Africa • 2017 • Nature