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From the executive producer of Planet Earth and Frozen Planet comes a stunning new series that explores the dramatic world of predation as never before.

The Hunt

About the show

Nothing is certain

The contests between predators and prey are the most critical events in nature. The outcome of these interactions is seldom a foregone conclusion. For both sides, it is a matter of life and death.

This series takes an intimate look at the remarkable strategies of hunters and, in some cases, the hunted, exploring the challenges animals face and the tactics they employ. It is how animals respond to a particular challenge that determines whether they are successful.

The strategies of both predators and prey are shaped by where they live, so each episode focuses on one principal habitat, whether savannah, jungle or ocean.

Stories range from the desert lions that use the cloak of a sea mist to ambush oryx, to the killer whales that use teamwork and sonar to pinpoint prey in the open ocean, from the spider that alters its hunting strategy to match its prey to the octopus that walks across land to reach fish trapped in rock pools.

Confident and cinematic in style, The Hunt is a celebration of nature’s most determined, specialised and cunning predators and their equally cunning and elusive prey.

Gallery

Cheetahs are the fastest land animals on the planet, reaching top speeds of nearly 60mph – 10mph faster than the gazelle. In this shot, the gazelle is pronking – a high leap to show the predator it is fit and not worth chasing.

A polar bear launches itself out of the water at a bearded seal that had previously been resting up between fishing trips – the final act of a long, stealthy stalk through the summer drift ice.

A brown bear hunting for salmon in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. These bears get nearly 90% of their annual energy requirements during the few weeks of the salmon run.

For a cheetah, a successful hunt is all about picking the right target.

An Arctic fox scours a frozen coast in search of anything edible. These foxes do well in the summer when birds arrive in the Arctic to breed, but in the winter they rely on scavenging scraps.

A fledgling sparrowhawk chases a jay in a woodland clearing in autumn. Female sparrowhawks are much larger than the males and can capture larger prey.

A male Parson's chameleon with insect prey in tropical forest, Andasibe, Madagascar. Chameleons catch their prey with their long sticky tongues, which they can shoot out at 20km/h.

African wild dogs are pack hunters and have incredible stamina – they work by chasing down their prey over long distances. As one lead dog tires, another will take over.

A large male lion – Africa’s most heavyweight predator.

Humpback whale and killer whales, also called orca. Each year thousands of humpback whales migrate up Australia's west coast on their way to give birth.

A cheetah must stalk undetected within just 30m of its prey before it starts its sprint.

Alastair Fothergill, executive producer of The Hunt, sits beside a colony of black-browed albatross on Steeple Jason Island in the Falklands.

Polar guide Håvard Festø, producer Jonnie Hughes and cameraman Jamie McPherson capture the scene as the sea ice melts at the start of summer.

The harpy eagle of the South American jungle is a monkey-eating eagle, with talons as long as a grizzly bear’s claws.

Cameraman David Reichert filming a blue whale in the Pacific Ocean. The 90ft-whale – the largest animal ever to have lived on earth – dwarfs the diver.

The Abdopus octopus was only recently discovered by scientists on the coast of northern Australia. It’s the only octopus known to actively walk on land as it moves from rock pool to rock pool at low tide, hunting for crabs.

The South American army ant lives in colonies of up to two million individuals. The colony swarms by day and sets up camp each night in a tree, creating a nest out of the living worker ants.

Gotham, a domesticated Asian elephant, with his handler, Mr Jhaloo and cameraman Jamie McPherson, ready for another excursion into the forest to film tigers.

The lionfish uses its flamboyant patterns and fins to disguise fine movements from its prey as it edges ever closer, ready to strike.

An army ant raid discovers a katydid hiding in the leaf litter. Within seconds the ants overcome it. Within minutes they have butchered it and carry it back to their base.

Darwins’ bark spider in Andasibe, Madagascar. The Darwin’s bark spider can spray silk in one, long continuous line – sometimes spanning a distance of 25m.

Filming facts

Until now, only a handful of underwater shots existed of the planet’s largest predator, the blue whale. It took the crew 560 hours to capture a spectacular seven-minute feeding event on just one day.

To film the hotrod ant in the Namib desert, the crew had to withstand searing temperatures as the sand reached 70C – too hot to stand on and hot enough to melt the cameraman's boots!

It took two years to capture an orca hunting humpback whale calves.

A polar bear was filmed rock climbing 300m (984ft) up a cliff – the first time a polar bear has been filmed risking life and limb to get at bird chicks and eggs on a precipice.

The Australian abdopus octopus was only discovered in 2011 and this is the first time they have ever been filmed for broadcast.

The crew spent over 80 days in the field to capture the world’s smallest marine animal, the South American marine otter.

The Darwin’s bark spider has never been filmed before. This extraordinary creature can spray silk in one continuous strand and it is the toughest natural fibre on the planet – 10 times tougher than Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof jackets.

The Chiroteuthis squid typically lives between 700-2,000m (2,296-6,561ft) deep – the pressure at this depth is enough to snap human bones. They are blinded by white light so they had to be filmed in a refrigerated dark room.

The team

Sir David Attenborough

For the last 60 years, David Attenborough has been one of the world’s leading natural history film-makers, making landmark series including Life on Earth, Blue Planet and Galapagos 3D, which have been seen by billions of people across the planet. His extraordinary career has spanned black and white, colour, high-definition (HD) and 3D formats and his films have won multiple Emmys and British Academy (BAFTA) awards. David was knighted by the Queen in 1985 and was given Britain’s highest honour, the Order of Merit, which is limited to 24 people around the world. He has also received numerous other awards and is a fellow of the Royal Society.

In Britain, David Attenborough is considered a national treasure and has recently been voted Britain’s most popular trusted person. David’s films continue to push the boundaries of camera technology and CGI in factual storytelling. His latest ambitious multimedia projects include both apps and virtual reality, which both entertain and educate global audiences of all ages.

David joined the BBC in 1952 and within several years created his acclaimed ZooQuest series, filming wild animals in their natural habitat for the very first time. By 1965 he was Controller of BBC Two and responsible for the introduction of colour television into Britain. In 1973 he left BBC senior management to return to his passion of programme-making. The internationally acclaimed 13-part series Life On Earth was the most ambitious series that had ever been produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and created the famous ‘landmark’ format that continues to make the Natural History Unit world renowned to this day. Throughout the 1990s, David presented natural history series to huge global audiences, including Life in the Freezer (1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995) and The Life of Birds (1998). In autumn 2000, David presented State Of The Planet and a year later, The Blue Planet. In 2002, he presented the immensely popular Life of Mammals, followed by Life in the Undergrowth. In 2006, he narrated the much celebrated blue-chip series, Planet Earth, followed in 2011 by the seven-part Frozen Planet series for the BBC and Discovery.

In 2010, Sir David created the award-winning series First Life with Atlantic Productions for the BBC and Discovery Channel. The series took him back to the origins of animal life, and marked a new turn in his career by embracing the very latest techniques available in CGI and fossil analysis. It was the first factual series to ever win three Emmy Awards. Further projects with Atlantic have included the BAFTA-award winning Flying Monsters 3D (2011) and Natural History Museum Alive 3D (2014).

Sir David’s latest BBC series have included the landmark series Africa (2013) and Life Story (2014). The first BBC natural history series to be filmed entirely in ultra HD (4K), Life Story delivered the highest quality images ever seen in a wildlife documentary. Most recently, Attenborough’s Birds of Paradise (2015) saw Sir David offer his own personal take on one of his lifelong passions. He was the first to film many of their beautiful and often bizarre displays and has spent a lifetime tracking them all over the jungles of New Guinea and Indonesia.

Alastair Fothergill

Alastair Fothergill was educated at Harrow School and the universities of St Andrew’s and Durham. He joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983 and has worked on a wide range of the department’s programmes, including the BAFTA award-winning The Really Wild Show, Wildlife on One, The Natural World and the innovative Reefwatch, where he was one of the team that developed the first live broadcasting from beneath the sea.

Alastair went on to work on the BBC One series, The Trials of Life, with Sir David Attenborough. In 1993 he produced Life in the Freezer, a six-part series for BBC One celebrating the wildlife of the Antarctic, presented by Sir David Attenborough. While still working on this series, he was appointed head of the BBC Natural History Unit in November 1992, aged 32.

In June 1998 he stood down as head of the unit to concentrate on his role as series producer of Blue Planet, a landmark series on the natural history of the world’s oceans. In 2001 Alastair become director of development for the Natural History Unit.

In 2002 he co-presented Going Ape, a film that took Alastair to the Ivory Coast in Africa. He has produced Deep Blue, a cinematic movie of the world’s oceans and he was one of the presenters and executive producer of the innovative live broadcast, Live from the Abyss.

He was series producer for the Natural History Unit’s landmark series, Planet Earth, the ultimate portrait of our planet. He subsequently co-directed the cinematic version, Earth, to great worldwide acclaim.

He was executive producer on the Unit’s major landmark series Frozen Planet, a natural history of the polar regions, which aired to record audiences and critical acclaim in autumn 2011.

In addition to his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, Alastair co-directed two cinematic movies for Disney as part of their Disneynature label. One of these movies featured the big cats of East Africa and was released in the US in April 2011 and worldwide during 2012. The second movie featured chimpanzees and was released in the US in April 2012 and worldwide in 2013.

In November 2012 Alastair left the BBC to set up his own production company, Silverback Films. He is currently co-directing two further cinema films for Disneynature.

Alastair is fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, who awarded him their gold medal in 2012. He has honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham and Hull. Alastair lives in Bristol with his wife Melinda and two teenage sons.

Huw Cordey

Huw graduated from London University with a history and politics degree – not the typical background for someone working in natural history television – but a long passion for wildlife was rewarded with a job at Partridge Films, one of the leading independent natural history film companies in the 1990s. After three years with Partridge, making educational films for National Geographic amongst others, he went on to work with Mike Birkhead Associates, where he made two BBC Natural Worlds in the US; Badlands, which involved living in a trailer house in South Dakota for a year and becoming fairly intimate with prairie dogs, and Grand Canyon, which took another year in the field.

He joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1995 where he worked on long-running series like Wildlife on One and Big Cat Diary, as well as some of the Unit’s biggest blue-chip landmark series, including Land of the Tiger, Andes to Amazon, and Sir David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals. In 2003 he became part of the Planet Earth team under Alastair Fothergill, and produced three episodes for this hugely popular and multiple award-winning series.

Following Planet Earth he was appointed series producer of South Pacific. This six-part landmark series for BBC Two was the recipient of a number of awards, including an Emmy for best cinematography.

In 2009 he left the BBC to join Wild Horizons and, under Keith Scholey, was the series producer for North America – Discovery Channel’s first foray into fully funded blue-chip, landmark natural history programming.

In addition to his TV work, he has written and presented a number of radio programmes on subjects ranging from raccoons in Chicago to the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Huw has also contributed nearly a dozen pieces for Radio 4’s long-running news strand, From Our Own Correspondent.