David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III: From a crocodile attacking deer, a great white shark circling its prey and a rhino looking for food in urban Nepal… critics and viewers hail ‘utterly staggering’ first episode
- First episode aired on BBC One last night and was hailed by viewers on social media
- The Daily Mail’s Christopher Stevens hailed 97-year-old Sir David’s ‘supernatural touch’ in a glowing review
Critics and viewers hailed David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III as ‘utterly staggering’ today, as stunning pictures from the show revealed nature in all its glory.
Britons took to social media to hail the new BBC production, which hit TV screens last night.
One said on X: ‘Good grief – Planet Earth III is utterly staggering viewing, remarkable and completely humbling to watch. Just amazing talent involved in the making and production – a joy.’
Another wrote: Planet Earth III first episode was as brilliant as you’d expect. The images they capture are stunning. The message underlining it about how we need to be custodians of the world we live in vital.
The Daily Mail’s Christopher Stevens hailed 97-year-old Sir David’s ‘supernatural touch’ as he give the programme a glowing review.
Pictures released by the BBC included stunning shots of a crocodile surprising a group of deer in Sri Lanka, a rhino looking for food in urban Nepal and a great white shark circling a seal in South Africa.
A group of chital deer in Yala Park, Sri Lanka, attempt to flee as a mugger crocodile bursts out of a waterhole that it was hiding in. The animal had excavated a wallow to lurk in – a unique hunting strategy
A rhino is seen lumbering along a busy town street in Sauraha, Napal, as it looks for food. The image is one of many stunning scenes in new BBC programme Planet Earth III, the latest project fronted by Sir David Attenborough. He tells viewers: ‘This rhino is not lost. He’s on a journey to find food. But to get to it, he must travel through a new and alien world’
READ MORE: Attenborough really does have a supernatural touch: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Planet Earth III
Writing on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, another user wrote: ‘If you haven’t seen the first episode of Planet Earth III and can catch it on iPlayer, it is a triumph.
‘One of the very best hours of natural history TV that I’ve ever seen.’
A fourth said: ‘*Essential viewing* for anyone who cares even a tiny bit for our children’s futures Planet Earth III review – David Attenborough creates yet more majestic TV’.
A fifth wrote: ‘I say this every time, but I pay my licence fee for Planet Earth and Sir David Attenborough. I sit here in sheer wonder and heart break in equal measure. What are we doing to our planet?’
The image of the rhino was taken in the town of Sauraha in Nepal. On the settlement’s doorstep is Chitwan Sir David tells viewers:
‘This rhino is not lost. He’s on a journey to find food. But to get to it, he must travel through a new and alien world.’
Locals are seen running out of shops and bars to film the animal as it walks along the road, looking for foliage to eat.
Sir David adds: ‘Across the globe, animals now have to contend with one dominant species. The rules of the game have changed – to survive in the human world.’
Another image released by the BBC shows a wandering garter snake displaying its forked tongue in Canada.
A surly-looking South American maned wolf treads gingerly through a wild setting in Brazil in another image from Planet Earth III. The bizarre fox-like animals eat fruit and help sustain the grassland by spreading seeds of plants, thereby increasing fertility
A great white shark is seen circling a seal off the Robberg peninsula in South Africa. When fur seals spot a shark, they will band together to move the predator and drive them away
Also seen is a tiny flamingo chick struggling in the waves on Mexico’s Yucatan Coast.
BBC crew working on the series broke the golden rule of wildlife film-makers to ‘never intervene’ when they saved wildlife from plastic litter and fishing nets.
Planet Earth III’s producer Matt Brandon told The Times: ‘I think the rules are changing. What we’re seeing now is that many of the things that our crews are witnessing around the world are no longer natural.’
Nick Easton, who produced and directed two of the eight episodes, added: ‘Not intervening in a hunt or saving an animal that might become food for another animal — that still applies as far as I’m concerned.
‘And often that is what we’re filming: it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. But so often now we’re coming across animals that are suffering as a result of unnatural factors.’
In one scene from the documentary, camera crews decide to help local rangers on Raine Island, a remote island 75 miles off the Australian coast, to carry some turtles to the sea after becoming exhausted in the hot weather.
But this is not the first time a BBC crew will have intervened in rescuing the animals they were tasked with filming.
In 2016, a crew saved a group of penguins and their babies on an Antarctic shoot for David Attenborough’s show Dynasties.
Viewers took to X to hail Planet Earth III. One said it was ‘utterly staggering’, while another said it was ‘essential viewing’
A tiny flamingo chick is seen struggling in the waves on Mexico’s Yucatan Coast in Planet Earth III. Tropical storms are said to be threatening the survival of both eggs and chicks
Sssmile: A wandering garter snake shows its forked tongue to a BBC camera on Canada’s west coast in Planet Earth III, Sir David Attenborough’s latest series
A garter snake takes a breath before taking the plunge to hunt in the coastal waters in British Columbia, Canada
An Arctic wolf is seen on Ellesmere Island, Canada. The remarkable animal can withstand the region’s months of darkness and temperatures that plummet as low as -50 degrees Celsius
A sea angel – a form of sea slug – is seen swimming in the nutrient-rich waters of Russia’s White Sea
Green turtles are seen returning to the sea after nesting on Raine Island,
A logger sea head turtle cruises in the open ocean in another stunning scene from Planet Earth III, David Attenborough’s new BBC series
A Caribbean flamingo feeds its young chick on its nest on Mexico’s Yucatan Coast, where hypersaline lagoons provide sustenance and protection from predators
In one episode following the story of emperor penguins living in bitter -76F (-60C) conditions the programme’s director Will Lawson and cameramen Lindsay McCare and Stefan Christmann came across an unexpected challenge.
They were devastated when they found a group of birds had fallen over the edge of a chasm after a white-out and were trapped with their young.
The crew took a ‘unanimous’ decision to dig an escape ramp in deadly cold temperatures to save them from almost certain death.
Director Lawson said at the time: ‘We opted to intervene passively. Once we’d dug that little ramp, which took very little time, we left it to the birds. We were elated when they decided to use it.
Southern right whales are seen in the Golfo Nuevo off Peninsula Valdes, Argentina. Each year the area hosts the world’s largest breeding group of these whales
A man with his bicycle in western Uganda pauses as a chimpanzee passes. The primates survive in remnant forest patches. They have limited wild foods and so forage among crops and fruit trees, meaning they have to compete with people for food and space
A female oriental pied hornbill in the nest after sealing herself in with mud. For two months, her only link to the outside world is her partner who brings her food.
‘There’s no rule book in those situations. You can only respond to the facts that are right there in front of you.
‘As you can imagine, we only show a fraction of the real trauma and difficulty that the animals go through – it was a very hard thing to see.’
Planet Earth III is a follow-up to Planet Earth II, which was released to great acclaim in 2016.
That came ten years on from the first installment in the series. It was just the latest in Sir David’s decades-long career, which began on screen with Zoo Quest in 1954.
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