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Earth's Natural WondersSeries 1The making of Earth’s Natural Wonders

Photographs taken during the making of the series.

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The Raja Ampat archipelago consists of thousands of islands, where local children quickly learn to swim among the coral reefs

Local people in Raja Ampat, Indonesia

  • The highest mountains on earth give birth to great rivers of ice – glaciers – which slide downhill under the pull of gravity
  • Everest's glaciers are forever shifting, cracking as they flow downhill to create deep crevasses and unstable blocks of ice
  • Khumbu Icefall is the most notorious glacier, presenting climbers with a maze of ice blocks which can collapse at any moment
  • Capturing the work of Everest’s specialist sherpas, the Icefall Doctors, required crew able to film in extreme environments
  • Heading across the richest reefs on earth to hunt manta rays – not to kill them, but to tag them with radio tracking devices
  • The Raja Ampat archipelago consists of thousands of islands, where local children quickly learn to swim among the coral reefs
  • To film local conservationist, Ronald, tagging a pregnant female manta, the camera crew has to stake-out the sea bed
  • Conservationist on a mission to track a pregnant manta ray, to find out where these mysterious creatures go to give birth
  • Rocky outcrops at the edge of the falls are exposed, giving fishermen access to fishing pools – if they know how to reach them
  • Crocodiles, hippos and elephants steer clear of the edge of Victoria Falls, making these pools near the lip safer for fishing
  • During the rainy season, Victoria Falls is the greatest curtain of falling water on the Earth (8000 tonnes per second)
  • Bullet ants may have the most painful sting of any insect, and to prove themselves, boys wear mitts containing 100s of ants
  • Maasai farmer and warrior Richard must stop elephants from raiding the village crops, without harming them
  • The Sundarbans is the biggest mangrove swamp in the world and contains valuable honey – but the forest is stalked by tigers
  • The swamp has the greatest concentration of man-eating tigers on Earth, and for those venturing in, they are a constant threat
  • Local people living in this vast mangrove swamp supplement their income by hunting for honeycombs in the forest
  • The wetlands have been a haven for animals since the last ice age – now an ancient breed of bulls is ranched for bullfighting
  • Camargue Cowboys ride an ancient breed of horse to round up the bulls they ranch for bloodless bullfighting in nearby arenas
  • Fishermen live for months on floating platforms to exploit the rich fishing of this vast – and astonishingly deep – lagoon
  • Bagan fishermen deploy nets at night and use lights to attract shoals of fish that swim in the bay’s deep water during the day
  • The bay is over a kilometre deep and is the only place where whale sharks – the largest fish on Earth – live all year round
  • Whale sharks swim to the surface to feed near the fishing platforms – it’s the only time the crew can capture them on camera
  • To film nest collectors, the crew rigged ropes to the ceiling of vast caverns – some big enough to fly a jumbo jet through
  • To reach valuable bird nests, collectors use a delicate web of ladders hanging in mid-air – often working higher than Big Ben
  • Children build a close relationship with horses on the steppe, and many train to race this small breed adapted to rough terrain

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