Dancing with the Birds

Some of the world's most majestic birds display delightfully captivating mating rituals, from flashy dancing to flaunting their colorful feathers.

Deutschlands wilde Vögel

On Closer Inspection

"Without leaving his own garden, a man may know the world" - an abstract study of the wildlife found in every garden.

Birds of America

In the first half of the 19th century, the French ornithologist Jean-Jacques Audubon travelled to America to depict birdlife along the Mississippi River. Audubon was also a gifted painter. His life’s work in the form of the classic book ‘Birds of America’ is an invaluable documentation of both extinct species and an entire world of imagination. During the same period, early industrialisation and the expulsion of indigenous peoples was in full swing. The gorgeous film traces Audubon’s path around the South today. The displaced people’s descendants welcome us and retell history, while the deserted vistas of heavy industry stretch across the horizon. The magnificent, broad images in Jacques Loeuille’s atmospheric, modern adventure reminds us at the same time how little - and yet how much - is left of the nature that Audubon travelled around in. His paintings of the colourful birdlife of the South still belong to the most beautiful things you can imagine.

Birds of the Lakes Return

An excellent display of how humans can rehabilitate and restore an area where a heavy industry polluted the water so severely that it was unsuitable to sustain any kind of life. A a film showing how birds returned to an environment once devastated by industry. The lakes around the northern Slovenian town of Velenje, placed in the Central Europe, are geographic center of the film. They emerged as the land above the lignite mines subsided and the depressions were filled with water. The mines started operating at the end of the 19th century. In the mid 20th century a power plant was built that caused a severe pollution of the lake waters to the extent of the lakes not being fit for any kind of life. As a consequence many birds moved from these parts. After a long ecological restoration that started in the mid 1980s, life returned to the water. Gradually the birds returned as well, including some there were previously never observed in this area.

Výři

Ostrovy milionů ptáků

The Land of Jacques Cartier

Did Cartier dream of making a country from this land of a million birds? In his records of his exploration he certainly marvelled at seeing the great auks that have since disappeared from Isle aux Ouaiseaulx, the razor-bills and gannets that are gone from Blanc-Sablon, and the kittiwakes from Anticosti, all the winged creatures of all the islands which he described as being "as full of birds as a meadow is of grass". And that's not even counting the countless snow geese.

Mezi volavkami

Birdsong

Ornithologist Seán Ronayne from Cobh, Co. Cork is on a mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – that’s nearly 200 birds. Often joined by his partner Alba, he travels to some of the country’s most beautiful and remote locations to capture its most elusive species and soundscapes: the busy seabird colony of Skellig Michael; a native woodland free from road noise in the Burren; the corncrake stronghold of Tory Island; a solitary nest in the Donegal uplands. Along the way we get to know Seán, whose hypersensitivity to sound has proven both a struggle and a strength. At once inspiring and cautionary, Seán’s journey illustrates the beauty and importance of sound, and what listening can tell us about the state of our natural world.

Among Wild Birds

Finland’s first nature documentary. The filmmakers’ expedition leads them all the way to the Åland Islands and the Karelian Isthmus.

Volavky na Velkém Tisém

Pica Pica

In Pica Pica Kristersson invites the viewer to be enthralled for an hour and a half by the vicissitudes of magpie life. Opposing himself to the current nature films that tend to highly compress time in order to end up with a concentrated sequence of action-elements Kristersson leaves rhythm and tempo almost completely up to the magpies themselves. With great integrity he filmed the daily, social and emotional life of a species of birds that has many points of contact with human life. Thus, the movie offers us the oppurtunity to view our own everyday existence through other eyes, from a world right above our heads, but yet so far away.

Na bílých křídlech

In the Wake of the Flood

On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book's publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory--a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy.

Attenborough's Paradise Birds

David Attenborough tells the remarkable story of how these " birds of paradise " have captivated explorers , naturalists, artists, filmmakers and even royalty.

Black Cockatoo Crisis

Western Australia's iconic black cockatoos are in crisis. Their numbers have fallen dramatically over the past few decades and all three species in the south west of WA could become extinct in just 20 years unless something is done to protect their habitats. With the loss of the banksia woodlands on the Swan Coastal Plain to housing, Carnaby's Black Cockatoos have come to depend on the once vast exotic pine plantations on Perth's northern fringe.

All That Breathes

Against the darkening backdrop of New Delhi's apocalyptic air and escalating violence, two brothers devote their lives to protecting one casualty of the turbulent times: the bird known as the black kite.

The Song of the Earth

Is there a connection between animal sounds and the music that humans create? Using a surprising and wide variety of evidence from the animal kingdom -- including the humpback whale, the lyre bird, the siamang gibbon and the great reed warbler -- Sir David Attenborough seeks to prove that the origions of music lie in territory, emotion and sex.

Attenborough’s Journey

In honor of his 95th birthday, a look at Sir David Attenborough’s life and contributions to broadcasting and the natural world. Presented by BBC.