Synopsis
Episode 1: "Leopards"
In the first episode, Ray Mears arrives at the 270 square-mile Erindi Game Reserve in Namibia, a territory he describes as "one of nature's richest environments". The reserve is surrounded by farmland, and the leopards that stray onto them risk being shot by farmers anxious to protect their livestock. He aims to track his favorite predator: the leopard, an elusive big cat that Mears believes is "hardly understood".
He is joined by his wildlife cameramen: Isaac Babcock, Shane Moore, and Natasha De Woronin, who runs the Global Leopard Project. De Woronin needs Mears's tracking skills to help find male leopards, which have so far eluded her. They intend to fit the leopards with radio collars to help build a map of their movements across the reserve.
Episode 2: "Bears"
In the second episode, Mears travels to the wilderness of British Columbia's Pacific Coast region. He aims to track grizzly bears, black bears, and especially the rare Kermode, or Spirit bear, notable by its pure white fur. It is thought that there are only 400 Kermode alive today.
Mears touches down at the fishing outpost of Klemtu and hires a boat to travel to the remote Mussel Inlet. He finds tracks of grizzly bears taking part in the annual salmon run, which is in full swing. Prints eventually lead him to a grizzly mother and a couple of 2-year-old bear cubs. The crew encounters a massive grizzly male, at which point they carefully retreat.
Leading the team on a final search, Mears finds white hairs on a bear trail near a babbling stream, evidence of the rare Spirit bear.
Episode 3: "Wolves"
In the third and final episode, Mears and his wildlife crew turn their attention to tracking wolves in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Wolves are secretive animals, which makes searching for them difficult. He has ten days to track them before they are taken off the state's endangered species list, at which point they can be hunted.
From the town of Stanley, Mears hikes into the small valleys that drain into the Salmon River. He discovers the tracks of some elk, the principal prey for wolves, and soon finds the tracks of a wolf nearby.
The following day the team gets a sighting of a small group of wolves and eventually comes across an entire pack of around a dozen, following the lead of a silver-backed alpha male. A young female dies during the night, reducing Mears to tears.
Worried that the rest of the pack might have suffered the same fate, Mears leads the team on an urgent search. Ultimately, they make another sighting of the wolves preying on rodents. It is a relief for Mears and the whole team, providing an emotional finale to the series.
The Skeena River is the second-longest river entirely within British Columbia, Canada. Since ancient times, the Skeena has been an important transportation artery, particularly for the Tsimshian and the Gitxsan—whose names mean "inside the River of Mist", and "people of the River of Mist," respectively. The river and its basin sustain a wide variety of fish, wildlife, and vegetation, and communities native to the area depend on the health of the river. The Tsimshian migrated to the Lower Skeena River, and the Gitxsan occupy territory of the Upper Skeena.
A salmon run is an annual fish migration event where many salmonid species, which are typically hatched in fresh water and live most of their adult life downstream in the ocean, swim back against the stream to the upper reaches of rivers to spawn on the gravel beds of small creeks. After spawning, most Atlantic salmon and all species of Pacific salmon die, and the salmon life cycle starts over again with the new generation of hatchlings.
Raymond Paul Mears is a British woodsman, instructor, businessman, author and TV presenter. His TV appearances cover bushcraft and survival techniques.
The spirit bear, sometimes called the Kermode bear, is a subspecies of the American black bear and lives in the Central and North Coast regions of British Columbia, Canada. It is the official provincial mammal of British Columbia and symbol of Terrace, British Columbia. While most Kermode bears are black, between 100 and 500 fully white individuals exist. The white variant is known as spirit bear, and is most common on three islands in British Columbia, where they make up 10–20% of the Kermode population. Spirit bears hold a prominent place in the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples of the area.
Boise National Forest is a National Forest covering 2,203,703 acres (8,918.07 km2) of the U.S. state of Idaho. Created on July 1, 1908, from part of Sawtooth National Forest, it is managed by the U.S. Forest Service as five units: the Cascade, Emmett, Idaho City, Lowman, and Mountain Home ranger districts.
The Sawtooth Wilderness is a federally-protected wilderness area that covers 217,088 acres (87,852 ha) of the state of Idaho. Managed by the U.S. Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it was designated the Sawtooth Primitive Area in 1937 to preserve the scenic beauty of the Sawtooth Mountains. On August 22, 1972 Public Law 92-400 designated the Primitive Area as the Sawtooth Wilderness and part of the newly created Sawtooth National Recreation Area. As part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, the Sawtooth Wilderness is an area where human development and use are restricted and people are to remain only visitors. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Sawtooth Wilderness has some of the clearest air in the lower 48 states.
Princess Royal Island is the largest island on the North Coast of British Columbia, Canada. It is located amongst the isolated inlets and islands east of Hecate Strait on the British Columbia Coast. At 2,251 square kilometres (869 sq mi), it is the fourth largest island in British Columbia. It was named in 1788 by Captain Charles Duncan, after his ship Princess Royal.
Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome, or overkill, is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa and red foxes in England.
The Greater Vancouver Zoo is a 49-hectare (120-acre) privately-run zoo located in Aldergrove, British Columbia, Canada. The zoo was established in 1970 as the Vancouver Game Farm. Since then it has undergone two name changes, being briefly renamed as the Greater Vancouver Zoological Centre in 1995, before it adopted its present name in 1999. As of 2023, the zoo is home to 180 animals, representing over 100 different species, including several orphaned, rescued and otherwise non-releasable individuals. The zoo's mission statement is "to inspire appreciation of our ecosystems and support conservation efforts by engaging the community."
A man-eating animal or man-eater is an individual animal or being that preys on humans as a pattern of hunting behavior. This does not include the scavenging of corpses, a single attack born of opportunity or desperate hunger, or the incidental eating of a human that the animal has killed in self-defense. However, all three cases may habituate an animal to eating human flesh or to attacking humans, and may foster the development of man-eating behavior.
Gordon John Buchanan is a Scottish wildlife cameraman, filmmaker and presenter. His work includes the nature documentaries Tribes, Predators & Me, The Polar Bear Family & Me and Life in the Snow.
Felidae Conservation Fund (FCF) is a California-based non-profit organization dedicated to preserving wild cats and their habitats. The organization supports and promotes international wild cat research and conservation by collaborating on field research projects, partnering with other environmental organizations, and developing community outreach and education programs.
Survival is one of television's longest-running and most successful nature documentary series. Originally produced by Anglia Television for ITV in the United Kingdom, it was created by Aubrey Buxton, a founder director of Anglia TV, and first broadcast in 1961. Survival films and film-makers won more than 250 awards worldwide, including four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA.
The history of wolves in Yellowstone includes the extirpation, absence and reintroduction of wild populations of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. When the park was created in 1872, wolf populations were already in decline in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The creation of the national park did not provide protection for wolves or other predators, and government predator control programs in the first decades of the 1900s essentially helped eliminate the gray wolf from Yellowstone. The last wolves were killed in Yellowstone in 1926. After that, sporadic reports of wolves still occurred, but scientists confirmed in the mid-1900s that sustainable gray wolf populations had been extirpated and were absent from Yellowstone as well as 48 states.
The ecology of the Rocky Mountains is diverse due to the effects of a variety of environmental factors. The Rocky Mountains are the major mountain range in western North America, running from the far north of British Columbia in Canada to New Mexico in the southwestern United States, climbing from the Great Plains at or below 1,800 feet (550 m) to peaks of over 14,000 feet (4,300 m). Temperature and rainfall varies greatly also and thus the Rockies are home to a mixture of habitats including the alpine, subalpine and boreal habitats of the Northern Rocky Mountains in British Columbia and Alberta, the coniferous forests of Montana and Idaho, the wetlands and prairie where the Rockies meet the plains, a different mix of conifers on the Yellowstone Plateau in Wyoming, the montane forests of Utah, and in the high Rockies of Colorado and New Mexico, and finally the alpine tundra of the highest elevations.
The grizzly bear, also known as the North American brown bear or simply grizzly, is a population or subspecies of the brown bear inhabiting North America.
Valerius Geist was a German-Canadian biologist and a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. He was a specialist on the biology, behavior, and social dynamics of North American large mammals, and well respected on his views of Neanderthal people and behavior.
Douglas H. Chadwick is an American wildlife biologist, author, photographer and frequent National Geographic contributor. He is the author of fourteen books and more than 200 articles on wildlife and wild places.
