Wild Africa

A look at the dramatic extremes of the African continent. This episode focuses on a variety of wildlife living high up in the mountains of Africa, including the bizarre gelada baboons of the Ethiopian mountains who settle disputes by pulling faces, and the rare, rat-catching Ethiopian wolves whose cold, alpine home is under threat. Plus the elephants which feast on heather in the shadow of Mount Kenya.

Filming in and through the thickets and grass, traveling from woodlands to the open plains, Wild Africa explores the mystery of how and why this energy-rich world recently evolved and discovers the many ways in which animals and plants have capitalised on it.

As a whole, Africa is a dry continent with deserts dominating the landscape. Wild Africa explores how these deserts were created, and the amazing ways in which animals and plants have evolved to cope with the meagre and unpredictable rainfall, intense solar radiation, shortages of food and lack of shelter. By traveling through the African deserts, Wild Africa reveals that given enough time, a diverse variety of animals and plants can make a living in even the harshest conditions. Beginning in the Sahara, Africa’s driest, youngest and most extensive desert, we head south to the Kalahari, a more forgiving desert fed by occasional monsoonal rains. Then traveling west, through the older, drier Karoo before completing the journey in the Namiba, Africa’s most ancient desert where an amazing collection of life is sustained only by coastal fog.

Africa’s coasts were formed by the break-up of Gondwanaland 100 million years ago. They define the familiar shape of this special continent, and touch on a variety of environments including deserts, mountains, forests, wetlands and savannahs. Wild Africa takes us back in time to witness the birth of Africa and also carries us on a spectacular journey around the edge of the continent.

Plants amazingly dominate this green world by employing poisons, recruiting defensive armies, feeding off the dead and using animals for pollination and seed dispersal. For predators this world presents exceptional challenges, not only in finding prey in such a tangled place, but in how to deal with the toxins that so many animals and plants are laced with. Over the millenia, rains have come and gone, rivers have snaked and weaved, an infinite number of trees have grown and fallen, while grasslands have been swallowed and reborn. With every change, there has been a new opportunity for a vibrant life, from gentle forest elephants to tiny multicoloured killifish. The green heart of Africa is a bubbling cauldron of evolution, a giant experiment with life.

Just as Africa constantly throws-up mountains which intercept moisture-laden clouds from the oceans, so the changing landscape also creates grooves and basins which channel and gather the precious moisture that falls on the high ground. Fresh water, light and warmth are the three fundamental elements that engender life. Rarely in Africa do these three come together, but when they do the continent explodes with life. Traveling from mountain streams to raging torrents, and from lakes as big as seas to seasonal floodplains, Wild Africa takes us on a journey which explores how animals and plants have invaded and exploited Africa’s many waterways. Water has intrinsic character. Whether gentle and nurturing or violent and erosive, stagnant and restricting or liberating and life-saving. Wild Africa reflects these moods through breathtaking imagery and the emotion of sound.