Starting at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, April 14, tune into a night of natural wonders! Discover Attenborough’s favorite moments on Nature, take a dramatic look at how enigmatic polecats faced extinction and survived on Wild, and then watch Wild Australasia where animals live alongside people.
Nature: Attenborough’s Life Stories: Understanding the Natural World (8:00 pm)
In this episode of Life Stories, David Attenborough reflects on the scientists and the breakthroughs that helped shape his career. Now a world-famous veteran of wildlife presentation on television, Sir David Attenborough was eight years old in 1934 when he saw his first natural history film. It featured the popular naturalist Cherry Kearton, one of the earliest pioneers of wildlife photography and filmmaking. “Kearton’s films captured my childish imagination,” says Attenborough. “It made me dream of traveling to far off places to film wild animals.”
Wild! Polecats (9:00 pm)
Only a hundred and fifty years ago, polecats were amongst the most common predators throughout the British Isles. At that time, they were familiar to country-dwellers as the “Masked Raiders”. By the end of World War I, these beautiful, enigmatic animals had been brought to the very brink of extinction. The causes of such a rapid decline in numbers makes for a classic tale of conflict between carnivores and people. This film tells the dramatic story of how these enigmatic animals survived.
Wild Australasia: New Worlds (10:00 pm)
Australia is famously full of the weirdest animals, grown up in isolation for almost fifty million years. But they are no longer alone here: people have also come to live in this land. From the steps of the first people sixty thousand years ago, to the massive European changes in the last two centuries, how have those iconic animals coped with life alongside humans? The relationship is a surprising, bizarre and often poignant one. Where else in the world would a mob of kangaroos get in the way of your four-iron drive down the fairway on an exclusive golf course? Or giant lizards stride around a busy working oilfield?
