 For the first Natural World of the year we visit New Guinea and its birds of paradise, those feathered beings that look like they've raided a make-up box. The boy birds, anyway. The females are brown and boring, and could have escaped from a British back garden. It's their menfolk who have evolved to be bright and shiny, with the kind of fancy plumage not normally seen outside of a Las Vegas show.
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 A strong candidate for the most beautiful program ever to air on American television. The National Parks is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved for everyone. The series traces the birth of the national park idea in the mid-1800s and follows its evolution for nearly 150 years, chronicling the addition of new parks through the stories of the people who helped create them.
 In 1995, the first gray wolves were transported from Alberta, Canada to Yellowstone National Park, to repopulate the sprawling landscape with the species, absent for more than 70 years. The following year, a second wave of wolves was brought to the park from British Columbia, Canada; five of them were released together, and they were named the Druid Peak pack. Since the arrival of those first immigrants, wolves have thrived in Yellowstone -- and none more dramatically than the Druids.
 Alaskan Killer Shark uses cutting-edge camera technology to create stunning visuals and capture the behaviour, environment and science of the rarely documented sub-Arctic Salmon Shark. An evolutionary predecessor of the great white, the salmon shark is sleek, fast and enormously powerful. Once a year, thousands of these sharks descend upon Alaska's frigid waters to feast on salmon returning to spawn. The salmon shark has an unusual adaptation for surviving in this hostile environment - its circulatory system helps keep the shark warm in the ice cold water. This enhances the shark's speed, muscle power and endurance, making it a formidable hunter.
 Life-and-death contests between hunter and hunted have been filmed for BBC television in an entirely new way. Predators, a series of six half-hour films starting on 4 May, uses miniaturised cameras mounted on the hunters themselves to show the chase from their perspective. The series also uses action replays and computer animations, allowing it to analyse the tactics of predator and prey from every angle. It shows that both are often evenly matched, with no room on either side for the slightest mistake.
 In a sleepy lagoon off the coast of Japan, behind a wall of barbed wire and "Keep Out" signs, lies a shocking secret. It is here, under cover of night, that the fishermen of Taiji engage in an unseen hunt for thousands of dolphins. The nature of the work is so horrifying, a few desperate men will stop at nothing to keep it hidden from the world. But when an elite team of activists, filmmakers and free-divers embark on a covert mission to penetrate the cove, they discover that the shocking atrocities they find there are just the tip of the iceberg.
 Every so often a giant emerges on the stage of science, someone who transcends the narrow boundaries of a particular line of research and alters our perspective on the world. E.O. Wilson is such a man. Ant expert E.O. Wilson has spent his career studying tiny creatures. Yet what sets him apart is his ability to step back and see the grand scheme of things. Newly appointed to Harvard, Wilson ignores charges by molecular biologists that his work with ants is mere "stamp-collecting." He goes on to discover ants' extraordinary means of communication, which opens up whole new areas of study.
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