Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

This documentary tells the story a young polar bear's epic migration through the icy waters of Hudson Bay and his subsequent adventures on land, where he must spend the ice-free season. It is his first summer alone without his mother to guide and feed him. His struggle to survive is set against the biggest environmental story of our time: climate change. The stunning images were taken with more than eight different kinds of cameras including, for the first time, a polar bear collar-cam; a remote control Truck-cam; a mini Heli-cam, and several underwater cameras.

Nearly a generation after the acclaimed Blue Planet documentary was released, David Attenborough returns to narrate this groundbreaking sequel/reboot. Blue Planet II focuses more heavily on mankind's influence on the world's oceans through both global pollution and climate change. This series features a variety of revolutionary segments never before seen in a video documentary. One Ocean Footage of marine life in different environments around the north, beginning with a tropical coral reef which has medicinal properties for dolphins, and is used as a tool by tusk fish. In Japan, a shipwreck is home to the Asian sheepshead wrasse, which can change gender, while in the polar north, walruses struggle to find ice floes for their pups to rest on as climate change takes its toll on the environment.

Fly across iridescent tropical reefs, brush through a cloud of a million jellyfish, visit an alien world where the closer you look, the more you see, where the tiniest creatures support the greatest predators... We think of reefs as exotic, distant places with little or no connection to our everyday world. Yet every reef is a living city beneath the sea with a parallel existence to ours, distant yet undeniably connected. Reefs are hotspots of biodiversity as vital to life on earth as the rain-forests. They have been shaping our shorelines, literally forming islands and mountains, for millions of years. The fossil record shows that given time they have recovered from all of earth's major extinction events. Even reefs pulverised by atomic blasts at Bikini Atoll have regenerated. Yet within our lifetime reefs have come to face their greatest threat...

On a vast plateau cradled in the heart of the rocky mountain range lies two million acres of unspoiled wilderness, never farmed and never fenced. Canyons, lakes, rivers and mountains, a refuge for magnificent animals and a spiritual sanctuary for generations of Americans, all resting on the largest super volcano in North America. This is Yellowstone, America's first national park, a raw and powerful beauty that truly comes to life through immersive 3D.

The documentary series gives a bird's-eye view of South America, as condors soar along the Andes, scarlet macaws explore the heart of the Amazon and hummingbirds and vultures see the continent's greatest sights. It is a journey that includes Machu Picchu, the Nasca Lines and the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Santiago. In Patagonia, giant petrels shadow killer whales as they hunt seals by stranding their huge bodies on the beach. At Iguassu Falls, dusky swifts dive through the cascades to huddle in communal roosts while hummingbirds bathe below. In a secret Andean location, condors soar in flocks over 40-strong and scavenge on casualties from herds of fighting guanacos. Elsewhere, a mother condor gently pushes her youngster to the edge of a 200-metre cliff, as flight school begins. Deep in the Amazon, macaws seek medicinal clay. They are joined by a host of secretive jungle animals, including spider monkeys and tapirs, all after the same remedy. In Peru, condors soar over fighting sea lions waiting for causalities and on a mass exodus north, birds converge on the Panama Canal. In Costa Rica, black vultures descend on turtles as they lay their eggs in the sand and pick off the eggs that ping-pong through the air.

The great flood in the Okavango turns 4,000 square miles of arid plains into a beautiful wetland. Elephant mothers guide their families on an epic trek across the harsh Kalahari Desert towards it, siphoning fresh water from stagnant pools and facing hungry lions. Hippos battle for territory, as the magical water draws in thousands of buffalo and birds, and vast clouds of dragonflies. Will the young elephant calves survive to reach this grassland paradise? The experienced mother elephants time their arrival at the delta to coincide with the lush grass produced by the great flood.
In a TV first, the programme shows the way they use their trunks to siphon clean water from the surface layers of a stagnant pool, while avoiding stirring up the muddy sediment on the bottom with their feet. Lechwe swamp deer, zebras, giraffes, crocodiles and numerous fish and thousands of birds arrive in the delta. And, in a phenomenon never before filmed in the Okavango, thousands of dragonflies appear - seemingly from nowhere - within minutes of the flood arrival, mating and laying eggs. As the flood finally reaches its peak, elephants and buffalo, near the end of their epic trek across the desert, face the final gauntlet of a hungry pride of lions. In a heart-wrenching sequence, a baby elephant is brought down by a lion in broad daylight.