Galápagos (Blu-ray)

If you can’t book a cruise today, watch this breathtaking series instead, and you’ll see what astonished Darwin when he visited the islands in 1835: Blue-footed boobies showing off their feet in the world’s most colorful mating dance. Surfing sea lions. Diving lizards. And the giant, century-old tortoises for which the islands are named. Nowhere else on Earth can you see such incredible diversity of life, now captured for you in this gloriously filmed three-part series from the BBC and National Geographic. “Even if you don’t have HDTV, you’ll be swept away by the pin-sharp quality of wildlife images you won’t find anywhere else on Earth.”—Daily Mirror. “Typically awesome BBC wildlife footage”—Independent.
 

The inspiration behind Darwin's theory of evolution, the Galapagos Islands are a living laboratory - a geological conveyor belt that has given birth to and seen the death of many species of plants and animals. Presented in a pioneering new visual style combined with exhilarating cinematography, this series examines the spectacular variety of wildlife and evokes the different characters of the islands. As the western islands rise up from the sea offering a chance of life, the eastern islands sink back beneath the waves guaranteeing only death. Between the two are the middle islands; fertile, lush land in its prime that contains an incredible diversity of life. Nowhere else on the Earth are the twin processes of creation and extinction of species so starkly apparent... see it all unfold before your eyes.

Born Of Fire - The series begins with the birth of the islands and an exploration of what makes them unique. They were born out of volcanoes and are plumbed directly into the heart of the planet – 1,000 km off South America they are at the centre of many different ocean currents which bring an extraordinary mix of life to their shores and they are constantly changing.

This is one of the most volcanically active regions on earth with well over 60 eruptions in the last 200 years. The team captured the latest eruption of Sierra Negra when a huge column of smoke was cast in the sky and over a million cubic metres of lava were shed per hour on the first day.

As for the wildlife, the mixture of cold and warm waters support a wide range of marine creatures, including vast shoals of hammer-head sharks and the distinctive Galapagos garden eels. For land animals, getting to Galapágos is a lot tougher. Those that have made it had to cross the open ocean on rafts of vegetation, swept out from the mainland on flash floods.

The Islands That Changed The World - When Charles Darwin visited the Galapágos Islands on 15 September 1835, his experiences and studies of the unique environment would change the understanding of life on Earth. With dramatic reconstruction and stunning wildlife images, Galápagos explores the hidden side of the islands, revealing why, more than any other place, they are a showcase for evolution.

Through their movement on continental plates, they have spread into a group of islands each with its own character, ocean currents and climate. Life on the islands has been forced to adapt to change or die.

Tortoise shells have changed shape to fit the island they inhabit; flowers have become yellow to attract the only bee that made it here; finches have turned into warblers; and cormorants have lost the power of flight – trading it for streamlining and a magical life searching for fish in the sparkling Galapágos waters.

But not all life here is confined to the Galapágos. Frigate birds come from miles around, sperm whales visit the waters to breed and human visitors also come to see the environment that changed the course of history.

Forces of Nature - The geological forces at work in Galapágos are complex and unpredictable; so too are the many ocean currents that unite here.

Among the 13 islands and over a hundred rocky outcrops and islets, nowhere is more unforgiving and more unpredict¬able than the island of Fernandina, crowned by the most active of all volcanoes. Yet female land iguanas are forced to climb over 1,000 metres to its summit to find the only warm, soft sandy patches in which to lay their eggs.

The ever-changing islands, with eruptions occurring every few years, make it hard to find a foothold. But mangroves are inventive pioneers, their salt-tolerant seeds settling on unforgiving lava terrain to create dense labyrinths of vegeta¬tion which are crucial nurseries for fish, offering precious shade from the equatorial sun. Even on the most exposed shorelines, fur seals find daytime shelter in lava grottos, formed by volcanic lava flows.

The remotest island, Roca Redonda, is little more than 300 metres tall but it still forms an important platform for nesting seabirds. Like all the other islands, under-sea exploration reveals that it’s just the summit of an enormous undersea volcano.

“...a quite brilliant new wildlife seriesa quite brilliant new wildlife series ... What an array of truly bizarre creatures...” -Express On Sunday

“...Breathtaking landscapes and the incredible tameness of the islands’ wildlife made perfect backdrops for the BBC’s new three-part series, Galapágos...” Stuart Winter, Express On Sunday “...stunning...” -People

“Galapágos was a revelation. Living up to the high standards of natural-history camerawork, this had a painterly beauty, but its defining character was the narration of Tilda Swinton, which treated the words as if they were poetry and gave the whole film a haunting feel ... This documentary also showed that geography is not a dusty thing of latitudes and isobars, but the study of a profound mystery.” - Daily Telegraph

“Essentially a well-shot nature programme with a bit of history thrown in...” -Guardian

“Galapágos works on two levels - three if you count the drama-documentary on the arrival of Charles Darwin that ... commences just a few minutes before this breathtaking opening instalment concludes. At its simplest it is a story, rather well and thoroughly told, of the geology and natural history of the Galapágos Islands ... we may be familiar with the diversity of the animals - finches, tortoises, iguanas - but we have never before seen them photographed in such intimate, crisp, digital clarity. This first episode has some especially striking sequences of sea lions fighting and surfing, of one cutting through a school of fish, and an eerie one of iguanas diving 30 feet to graze on algae on the ocean floor. This is glorious to behold.” -Financial Times

Spanish discoverers named the islands after the huge, saddle-shaped shells of the native tortoises. Galápago means saddle.