The Wild Episode

The large blue butterfly is both beauty and the beast. Beauty because ... well, it's a pretty little butterfly. The beast because it's also such a master of deception, infiltration and predation it could be the model for the monster in a sci fi horror movie. Welcome to the world of a butterfly that's like an insect combination of the cuckoo and the wolf. And spends a chunk of its life pretending to be ant. Sometimes, Nature gets weird ...

Asia is the place to go if wild cattle is what you're after, and of them all the banteng (bos javanicus) has perhaps the most interesting story to tell. A beautiful, magnificent animal, as much a part of wild Asia a tigers or orang-utans, and - like them - endangered by human activity. But the banteng is different in one important respect: it has a large, wild population living in a country outside its natural range. Living in a place Nature never put it ...

Part two of two - and the amazing Steller's sea cow (Hydromalis gigas) finally makes an appearance, as the wheels come off the Great Northern Expedition and Vitus Bering and Georg Steller discover a Lost World. Astonishing wildlife abounds, but will not abound for long now that it must share its island home with a handful of shipwrecked sailors ...

Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) was one of the most amazing animals to share the world with modern humans. To tell its story is going to take two episodes - and this first of them, to be honest, doesn't even feature the sea cow itself. But it does feature Vitus Bering and Georg Steller, two men who would share with that gigantic creature an extraordinary tale of exploration, survival, death and extinction. Oh, and there's a load of other amazing wildlife involved as well ...

Vikings! Monks! Poetry! Plus, a bird that is next to impossible to see, but almost impossible not to hear. The corn crake (Crex crex) has one of the most distinctive voices in the natural world, and for centuries - even as its population in the UK has plummeted - that voice has been a symbol of the bird itself ...

This Wild Episode is all about what was once the rarest insect in the world - the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Dryococelus australis) - and the bizarre story of how it escaped extinction, pulling off one of the most amazing tricks of species survival the world has ever seen ...

The first Wild Episode is all about a shark, but not just any shark! No, this is a giant shark that lives longer than any other vertebrate, eats just about anything it can find and loses its eyesight because its eyes are being eaten ...