For more than 40 years, Sir David Attenborough has given voice to the natural world, producing and narrating BBC documentaries that shine a spotlight on the flora and fauna that make the Earth such an endlessly fascinating and amazing place. Marked by a unique intimacy and empathy, Attenborough’s ventures are the gold standard of their non-fiction field. With Mammals, he adds another triumph to his peerless legacy, investigating the myriad ways that mammals strive to survive and thrive on this ever-changing planet, a task made more complicated by their interaction with the most advanced and dangerous mammal of all—the human being.
Premiering on July 13 on BBC America and AMC+, Mammals is a six-part docuseries led by Attenborough’s distinctive commentary, and it adheres closely to the template that the esteemed broadcaster, writer, and author has pioneered for decades. Anyone familiar with Planet Earth or Blue Planet will feel right at home with Attenborough’s latest, whose episodes are guided by a unique theme and get up-close and personal with a variety of creatures across the seven continents. From the blistering cold of the Arctic tundra to the sweltering heat of the African desert, this gorgeous and mesmerizing journey around the globe finds majesty in the specifics of everyday animal life, all while subtly elucidating how mammals’ ingenuity and tenacity, loyalty and competitiveness, and viciousness and compassion make them a lot like us.
Attenborough’s series begins in the dark, with a female Zambian leopard stalking baboons in a tall tree, her efforts as patient as they are ruthless. Mammals’ night-vision footage of this hunt is so awe-inspiringly striking that it immediately sets the tone. As Attenborough explains, back when dinosaurs roamed the land, mammals were mostly nocturnal as a means of avoiding fearsome predators and the sun’s oppressive heat. This led many to develop heightened senses that allowed them to persist in the face of difficult conditions, such as the fennec fox, whose giant ears grant it extraordinary hearing that’s vital to pinpointing the beetles, lizards, and gerbils that live under the Saharan sand, and upon which it wants to feast. It also lets it detect the far-off calls of potential mates, which is crucial come January when the breeding season begins.
The quest for food and sex are at the forefront of Mammals, whose most amusing moment may be the sight of a cow dispassionately watching a pair of large hairy American armadillos chase each other around a pasture (the female producing “an irresistible perfume”) before finally engaging in some furious humping. Entrancing details are everywhere in the series’ wide-ranging installments, whether it’s a brief shot of a leopard wiggling its tail while checking out the numerous items on its proverbial menu, a pack of hyena cubs rolling around in the Northern Tanzania dirt with their mother, or Trinidadian bulldog bats using an echolocation-powered process in which they rake the surface of the sea to catch fish in the dark—“literally a shot in the dark” that’s depicted in stunning slow motion.
One-fourth of all mammal species on Earth are bats (which date back to the dinosaur eras), and in Austin, Texas, Mexican free-tailed bats emerge on a nightly basis—all 1.5 million of them!—from beneath the gaps in the underside of the Congress Avenue Bridge. A panorama of this phenomenon is as eye-catching as it is par for the course in Mammals, as there’s rarely a vignette that doesn’t deliver a remarkable feat or skirmish. Those include Tanzanian hippos battling for supremacy of a wading pool during the dry season (which has made water a scarce, and thus hot, commodity), and Namibian giraffes squaring off in a fight that involves swinging their elongated necks into each other with a ferocity that would cause them to overheat were it not for the dense network of blood vessels beneath their brown spots that expand (and release heat) when their body temperatures rise.
Such incredible tidbits are found throughout Mammals, and that extends to the show’s portrait of mankind’s impact on its mammalian brethren. Development of the landscape (in particular, via the construction of cities) and the domestication of animals are crucial components of these episodes, and they illustrate—in a manner not unlike Attenborough’s Our Planet—the enduring importance of protecting wild species so they don’t go extinct and our ecosystem continues to flourish. That said, for every instance of humans doing something harmful to the animal kingdom, there are also examples of them working to make coexistence a permanent reality—as in Costa Rica, where so many howler monkeys die from electrocution when traversing power lines that some experts have strung together rope alternatives to ensure their safety.
In these snapshots, mammals’ ingenuity, courage, and adaptability prove the key to their survival, and in that regard, Mammals creates parallels between its subjects and their homo sapiens counterparts. At the conclusion of each episode (and in the entirety of its seventh), the series presents a peek at the behind-the-scenes work that went into producing its material, and those sequences are stark examples of its directors, camera operators, and wildlife experts’ own teamwork, cleverness, flexibility, and creativity—all qualities that are consistently celebrated by this enterprise. The determination and resourcefulness necessary to make a show such as this is in tune with mammals’ own quests to eat, to nurture, to propagate, and to persist, and Attenborough and company suggest such analogies with a gracefulness that’s in keeping with the show’s gentle spirit.
Connecting Mammals’ multiple concerns is ultimately Attenborough himself, whose narration is at once eloquent, amusing, and charming—not to mention impassioned, as he frequently laces his oration with comments about the need to defend these animals’ ways of life lest we jeopardize the future of our home. Even at the age of 98 (!), he remains the non-fiction steward of the planet, celebrating its countless marvels in order to entertain, educate, and forewarn. His latest is another feather in a cap overflowing with them.
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