Sigourney Weaver, Discovery Channel, and the BBC have teamed up for a month of Sundays to show us what 70 camera operators spending more than 2,000 days in 200 locations all over the globe can do. They bring back pictures in high definition of the natural, stunning, predatory world, from rain forests to volcanoes, from Lapland to the Gobi Desert, from Ethiopia to the Australian outback. They travel by camel, camper van, cinebulle (a hot-air balloon with a camera platform), and heligimbal (a whirlybird with the cameras mounted on gyroscopes), filming overhead, underwater, stuck in sand, consorting with walruses and whales, penguins and pumas, white wolves and venomous tree frogs, lions hunting elephants, Mongolian gazelles running away from everybody, and, for the first time on film, the mating ritual of the Blue Bird of Paradise.

Discovery Channel
Premiering Sunday, March 25, 8 p.m.

Related:

• Archive: “Television”
• Articles by John Leonard
• Table of Contents: March 26, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!