Mutual Of Omaha's Wild Kingdom

Marlin and Jim demonstrate how to handle dangerous animals of the zoo and the wild.

An analysis of the miracle of flight from the soaring condors of the Andes to the backward-flying fairy terns of Midway.

The famous performing chimp show at the St. Louis Zoo and a close look at its most appealing star attractions.

At the base of Devils Tower near Horse Heaven Pass in Wyoming, is a wilderness city populated by the ....prairie dog.

The great tropical rain forest supports life at all levels. Fowler captures the largest mammal of the Amazon Jungle.

The world-famous trained animals of the St. Louis Zoo present a "command performance".

A story of the community of wildlife living in a mountain valley, reigned over by a puma who lives at the head of the pass.

Marlin and Jim set out to separate fact from fallacy among many popularly held ideas about the animal kingdom.

Marlin and Jim rate the I.Q.Õs of the gorilla, chimpanzee, baboon, orangutan, gibbon and ring-tailed monkey.

Marlin and Jim take us into one of the wildest areas of the natural wild kingdom in the U.S. -- the vast Everglades.

Marlin and Jim go island-hopping around the world.

Odd creatures, strange ways and hard-to-believe wonders of the wild kingdom.

Is it possible there is a place, yet untouched by the Space Age? Along with cameraman, Warren Garth, and a ranger of the South American National Parks, Marlin Perkins visits such a place and meets it primitive inhabitants, the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. These gentle people live in the distant past, hunting with arrows they've made themselves and drawing on stone and skin surfaces. Marlin interviews the hunters at their camp and records their conversation and beautiful music. Observing the women and children as they anxiously await the hunters' return, he realizes that the gap of developmental levels around the world cannot change the basic sameness of people everywhere, even here, in this "lost world" of the Kalahari Bushmen.

Comparisons and contrasts are drawn as Marlin and Jim analyze the behavior of the lion in his natural habitat in Africa and in the zoo.

Even under searing temperatures of 120 degrees or more, life tenaciously takes hold in the Sonora Desert. This American Southwestern region is an arena of daily competition...between animals, plants and insects, struggling to survive the extremes and severities of the desert's environment. It's truly a "survival of the fittest," and a ruggedly beautiful adventure. Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler are there observing as predator hunts its prey, be it the grey fox, badger or sidewinder snake. Then you'll be part of the intense excitement as a peccary...the only true wild pig in the United States...becomes the target of Marlin's capture gun, which shoots a harmless, sleep-inducing drug into the animal. The peccary is then tagged, so that its habits may be more carefully studied, and that life, under the difficult circumstances of the Sonora, may be more clearly understood by man.

Rivers of fire and erupting volcanoes in British East Africa have created a crater called Ngora Ngora, which shields the great herds of African wildlife from the advances of man. By plane to the top of the crater and by jeep into the crater, we study one of the truly last strongholds of the wild kingdom.

Many animals dwell in the wild kingdom that literally are 'poles apart' in structure, habits and adaptations. In the laboratory and in the wild, Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler explore and explain such extreme contrasts such as: the slow heartbeat of the elephant and the rapid beat of a mouse; the alligators' jaws built to crush and a tropical bird's beak built to pry; birds that migrate and birds that 'stay put'; a bird that flies a mile a minute and a sloth that travels a food a day.

What happens to the creatures living in the wilderness when their natural habitat is destroyed? Some die out...others move to a new home, and some like the coyote and opossum have journeyed far beyond their original range. Others move in, attracted by food or by the elimination of their natural enemies. Camped in a wilderness area on the fringe of civilization, Marlin Perkins explores the why and hows of this cross-migration.

The odd ways some animals move.