Earth's Natural Wonders

- Season 2

(2018)

For wildlife and humans, often largely dependent on it, surviving in extreme conditions requires extreme measures, evolutionary adaptation and crafty tricks. Thus in Arctic Canada, native women harvest clams a few days a year, when the shifting icebergs-to-break-off can be drilled into at low tide to harvest from temporary caves on the then dry sea floor. In Japan, the northernmost non-human forest primates eat the soft tissue just beneath tree bark and make best use of thermal springs. All of them are threatened by the environmental challenges to each biotope, such ...

Life in regions with extreme natural conditions often depends on well-adapted animals, which may be key to the cultural heritage of native peoples. For nomads in Siberia, it depends on herding reindeer which is most risky in the annual migrations between summer and winter pastures. In Australia, training as risky helicopter pilot is a desirable career for white farm-boys to drive the herds on dry plains, but also combined whit the traditional knowledge for Aboriginal hunter tribes in northern wetlands used also for conservation of their fearsome predator-prey, ...

On one of the Danish Far Oer islands, the about thirty men gather annually for a single harvest, during a six days window, of a rare seasonal delicacy: eggs on steep cliffs of the storm petrel, a risky job which exacted several deaths. In Brazil's Mato Grosso Amazonian rain forest waters, a small tribe's shaman and his retired father preside from the use a poisonous wood to sedate fishes to be caught in huge nets, while evading predators, to nourish the warriors for a religious day-long dance to earn the spirits' favor. In northern Ethiopia's Tigray, isolated orthodox...