Welcome to an island full of strange places and bizarre animals. This ambitious and intimate portrait of Madagascar reveals a fascinating but fragile land unlike anywhere else on Earth. This series explores the extraordinary wildlife and dramatic landscapes of one of the world’s largest and strangest island. Lying just off the coast of Africa Madagascar is a land of misty mountains tropical rainforests and weird spiny desert scrub. Here the wildlife has evolved in splendid isolation to become bizarre and totally unique. The great mystery of Madagascar is why it has such a unique and varied flora and fauna – a diversity of life that makes even the famed Galapagos Islands pale by comparison. What is it that makes Madagascar so different from the rest of the world? This series finds clues from Madagascar’s extraordinary animals plants and landscape to discover how the island’s remarkable past has produced its intriguing present like the Tsingy – a series of jagged limestone peaks that have cut off animals in isolated gorges allowing them to evolve into their own unique species. On the east side of the island rugged mountains rise dramatically from the palm fringed Indian Ocean. Travelling from the highest mountains where trees are few and it’s cold enough for frost through the lush cloaking rainforests down to the tropical coast discovering the ring-tailed lemurs the jewelled geckos and the giant predatory wasps. So what is it that has made this narrow eastern strip in particular so rich in life? South of Madagascar is home to its most extraordinary landscapes – from forests of ‘upside down’ trees to alien ‘spiny deserts’. In stark contrast to the east this is a place that’s bone-dry for most of the year yet it’s extraordinarily rich in wildlife. Here only the toughest and most opportunistic survive and some of the strategies to survive here are ingenious. This DVD follows the long dry season of this landscape to see how life copes as it waits for the brief rains. Narrated by the Sir David Attenborough with extras including Attenborough’s Giant Egg and Lemurs of Madagascar this series brings the weird wonderful and beautiful qualities of the island to DVD and Blu-Ray.
