Tonight, Discovery premieres the “Congo” hour of Africa (10 p.m. ET), its seven-part collaboration with the BBC. In the Feb. 11 behind-the-scenes episode, we’ll see just how difficult it was to capture the first footage of a teenage chimp who uses four different tools to hunt for honey, and what happened when a cameraman decided to spend a night in a tree trying to film unpredictable forest elephants.

It took a crew a three weeks to track the honey-hunter chimp. “Trying to film primates, monkey and apes, in forests, is one of the hardest things on the planet to do as filmmaker, because you’re on the ground, and they think, ‘Gosh, I feel like going over there,’ and they jump through the trees. But by the time you get there, they think, ‘Actually, I don’t want to be here, I want to go back to where I was,’” Mike Gunton, Creative Director of the BBC Natural History Unit, tells EW. “It’s 100 percent humidity, God knows what temperature. You’re tripping. And the bugs. A lot of it’s in the head: If something happens that gives you a good shot early on, it can take you a long way and you can put up with it. But if you spend two and a half weeks without getting any shots at all, that’s the hardest. I don’t want to get the little violins out. But I didn’t go on that shoot, so I can say it.” Watch a sneak peek below. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Discovery

Tonight, Discovery airs the second installment of Africa (10 p.m. ET), its seven-part collaboration with the BBC. The cameras turn to the Savannah, and like the region itself, the hour runs the extremes. Let’s start on a happy note, with a clip in which narrator Forest Whitaker truly outdoes himself. For the first time, cameras caught daredevil agama lizards in the Serengeti hunting for flies on sleeping lions. Watch it below. “The wildebeests arrive, they eat and poop out tons and tons and tons of dung, and all these dung flies live off the dung. Lions eat the wildebeests and live on these rock outcrops called kopjes, and on these kopjes also live these agama lizards,” Mike Gunton, Creative Director of the BBC Natural History Unit, explains to EW. “The lizards are quite rubbish at catching flies, so one way of doing it is to actually climb up onto the backs of the lions and steal the flies off their faces. Of course, it takes real nerve.” You need to see this. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Discovery Channel/BBC

Tonight, Discovery debuts Africa (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. ET), a seven-part collaboration with the BBC four years in the making, in which the team behind Life captures never-before-filmed species, animal behaviors, and natural wonders. The first hour, “Kalahari,” features the giraffe battle that has already gone viral thanks to the preview clip below. “That fight only lasts a minute, but when we shoot it at 1,000 frames a second, it’s like watching a boxing match in slow motion. They’re not just slugging it out, they’re almost working out their moves,” says Mike Gunton, Creative Director of the BBC Natural History Unit. “The young guy’s just going for the traditional hammering of the other guy on his rump, and the old guy’s going for the legs. I loved the fact that he knows he’s going to get hit, so he waits and ducks at the last-minute, and he actually goes for the solar plexus, like a boxer, and that’s what makes the young guy [fall]. We all thought, Ohmygod, he’s dead. He was out cold for three or four minutes before he finally got up. You’ll never look at giraffes the same way again. That’s one of the things that’s key about the series: Africa is a well-known place. A lot of people have filmed in Africa, so it was very important for us to try to say to people, ‘Actually, there’s a whole side to Africa that you just don’t know, and actually, all the things that you think you know about Africa — giraffes behave differently, rhinos behave differently, there’s a places in the desert with the biggest underground lakes.”

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