We learn from a small polar bear family, a sow and her two cubs, that their icy habitat is being threatened by a warming environment that is making food harder for them to find. But that bad news aside, the three are a charming little family with mama bear in the lead sweeping her head from side to side in a never-ending search for food with the two cubs close behind, stumbling over each other in their own never-ending search for a good time.
We follow a small herd of elephants struggling across the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, on their annual journey to the Okavango delta, a trip of 500 miles or more through some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet. The elephants are without water and shelter the entire way and must endure not only the withering exposure to the elements, but they are being relentlessly tracked by a pride of hungry lions as well.
The ragged group of lions eventually isolate an adolescent pachyderm, and the audience witnesses a hair-raising sequence shot at night with an infrared lens. The big cats swarm the unfortunate elephant and actually bring him down in a heart-rending display of feral panic.
Heading southeast from the arctic and sub-Saharan Africa we move to the calm, bathtub-warm Indian Ocean and travel along with a humpback whale and her calf on a 4,000-mile trip to Antarctic waters where a freezing spray can result when the bulky yet lithe cetaceans breech in the frigid seawater. The whales fatten up on large swarms of krill on their way south, and they will need the extra bulk to survive in the less hospitable Antarctic.
