Nature's miracle babies

The opening episode focuses on the efforts to breed some of the most critically threatened animals on earth and Martin immerses himself in the battle to breed and save that most iconic of endangered animals, the giant panda. He visits the Chengdu Panda Base in the heart of China where panda breeding is being taken to new levels. From there he travels to Zoo Atlanta where the challenge is proving much harder. Martin also follows the hard won battles of keepers at Jersey Zoo as they try to breed the most threatened primate in South America, the pied tamarin. He sees first hand in the Brazilian rainforest, the habitat destruction threatening this tiny, intelligent monkey and back in Jersey he helps to hand-raise twins rejected by their mother. We’ll also meet Behan, an Asian one-horned rhino at Whipsnade Zoo who’s coming to the end of an epic sixteen months pregnancy. With her baby weighing as much as a man, giving birth to such a giant baby proves to be an equally enormous challenge.

Martin goes to the Russian Far East on the trail of the rarest cat in the world; the amur leopard, where breeding in captivity could be their only future. He follows Colchester Zoo’s attempts to breed their leopards for the first time Martin also visits Kenya and follows a long running and hugely ambitious project aimed at re-introducing orphaned elephants back into the wild. We’ll also meet up with a family of three female gorillas who are desperately in need of a mate, and when a handsome young male arrives from France, there are high hopes they’ll see their first baby gorilla in over twenty years. Whilst over at Belfast Zoo we’ll meet Lily the lion cub, but she’s no ordinary leo. She’s a barbary lion, a species now extinct in the wild.

The world’s islands are home to some of the most threatened animals, simply because they exist nowhere else. Martin follows the plight of one especially threatened species on the Australian island of Tasmania; the Tasmanian devil, an animal that could be extinct in a generation because of a deadly facial cancer spreading through the wild population. We’ll also follow the koala dating game, where a scientific helping hand might save this species; there’s baby Styx, a bizarre and oddly beautiful aye-aye lemur, who’s fighting for her life at a breeding centre in the USA; the astounding behaviour of the mountain chicken, a giant frog from Monserrat who’s babies have the most unusual feeding habits; and the success story on the tropical paradise of Mauritius where the Mauritius kestrel, once the rarest bird in the world, has been spectacularly brought back through captive breeding.

Martin heads to Tenerife to meet the world’s rarest parrot, the Spix’s Macaw, a species now only surviving in captivity, but at Loro Parque, literally parrot park, the team are using a high tech approach to hand-rearing that is reaping rewards for this desperately rare and beautiful species. Over at the Duke Lemur Centre in Carolina we’ll follow the touching story of baby Rupert, a tiny sifaka lemur who struggling to survive. Only the intensive care of the keepers will bring him through. We’ll also meet critically endangered brush tailed wallabys whose tiny joey needs a surrogate mum if it’s to stay alive and save this species and we’ll also follow the most uplifting story of a group of 11 bald ibis chicks being taught to follow microlites and fly back to freedom on a breath-taking migration over the Alps.

In the final episode, we follow a breath-taking migration