Special: Oprah's Magnificent Obsession

17:03And he jumped back and tried to share his oxygen mask. And then his oxygen cut out. So suddenly we were about to have two fatalities. So we made a decision. We plummeted through the air and got down to a safe altitude. And everyone was OK. But I just kind of went from elation of, my God, I'm seeing Everest at summit level, to thinking we almost lost two people's lives. Wow. It was pretty stressful. Well, you know, as I said, I'm really in love with this series and in love with what you all were able to do in showing us our planet. What does it feel like to be a part of it for yourselves? Well, an enormous privilege, really, because I think we all feel that it's probably one of the biggest productions we'll ever work on.

17:44The scale and ambition of the series, as you can see, is immense. So there were how many photographers for how many years in how many countries? Well, it was about four or five years, 60 countries, 200 locations, 40 cameramen. I mean, it's breaking all records... Yeah. ...for a natural history series. Well, this next clip will have you asking yourself, how on Earth did they do that? It's one of the most precious, tender and intimate scenes on the planet Earth.

18:14A giant panda nurses a week-old baby one thousandth her size.

18:25Her tender cleaning wards off infection. This is the first footage of a wild baby panda.

18:40She won't leave this cave for three weeks.

18:46not while her cub is so utterly helpless.

18:53Four weeks old and the cub is still blind.

19:05A cub is so helpless, it needs complete devotion. If the mother gives birth to two cubs, she must choose which to nurse and which to abandon. No wonder the panda has become the living symbol of the peril of extinction. Well, never before seen. How'd y 'all get that footage? Chinese cameraman spent many months trying to get close to that mother, And she just tolerated him. But it takes a lot of field craft to be able to get a trust of an animal like that. Yeah, because normally they don't want you coming near their babies. That's right. Now, here's an extraordinary annual event, a 3 ,000-mile marathon that ends with the birth of a million babies.

19:51Snow geese. They winter along the Gulf of Mexico, and in spring they fly the entire length of North America to reach the Arctic tundra.

20:04Five million birds make this journey every year. Exhausted and starving, they touch down inside the Arctic Circle. Geese can nest in relative safety, yet this female must incubate her eggs for three weeks. And the whole time, she'll be vulnerable.

20:32Waiting for the geese all winter, an arctic fox.

20:52The colony is well defended. No easy pickings here.

21:07The geese lay more eggs than the fox can possibly eat, but the nesting season is short, so she stashes much of her plunder for winter when the geese have gone. In a marvel of timing, all the young emerge within a day or two. A million goslings. The fox is still gathering all she can get. Its appetite is bigger than its mouth.

22:05One will have to do.

22:10Not all food is stored.

22:17She has seven mouths to feed.

22:25As their appetites grow, the mother must work constantly to raise her family. Only fat, healthy cubs will survive the Arctic winter. See, you feel bad for the fox taking the geese, and then you see that the fox has seven mouths to feed, and so you're like, OK. All right, OK, I guess a little geese-ling had to give up his life for the fox. So you said you felt a special connection, Johnny, right? That fox. Were you there? That's right, yeah, I was there. And to begin with, for the first week or so, that that fox would run away from us and was quite frightened. And then after a matter of time, she just came closer and closer and closer, and eventually she'd just be sort of 10, 15 feet away, and she'd curl up and go to sleep.

23:10And, you know, we have dogs at home and things like that, and you just feel a connection with them because they're canines. And then eventually she brought those tiny little cubs out right in front of us and suckled them there in front of us. And you suddenly realize you've gone from her sort of running away to her completely sort of trusting you enough to be around the babies. And it feels very special when you have that relationship with an animal. Yeah, but when she was taking the baby geese things, didn't you say, just take one, don't you need three? I know. Well, the thing is that they only feed on those geese for one month when they're there, and the rest of the year, the 11 months, the rest of the year, they've got not much else to eat, so she needs to take as much as she can and store it.

23:45Yeah. And so then they can feed on it later on in the year when there's nothing else. Yeah. I always think about the working moms in our culture who are out. That's the working mom doing what she can to feed her family.

24:00The Pacific coast of North America. One grove of California redwoods contains three of the tallest trees on Earth. This one is more than 300 feet tall, the height of a 30-story building. Age commands respect.

24:25These forests existed before the Swiss Alps or the Rocky Mountains were even raised.

24:35This giant in Sequoia National Park is the largest living thing on Earth. Known as General Sherman, it equals the weight of ten blue whales. Higher up in the mountains nearby, bristlecone pines, the oldest organisms on planet Earth. Some have been here for 5 ,000 years. They were alive before the pyramids were built. They were already 3 ,000 years old when Christ was born. Who knew that the oldest and tallest living things on Earth are really right in our own backyard? That's so amazing. Well, I've not been able to stop talking about this next story. You truly have to see this or you would never believe it.

25:29This bullet ant is in its death throes. Spores from a parasitic fungus have infiltrated its body and mind. Its infected brain directs the ant upward. It's so disoriented, it clings to the stem with its mandibles. When the sick are discovered, workers carry them far from the colony and leave them to die. Why? Watch the head. Like something out of science fiction, a parasite begins to grow from the ant. After three weeks, deadly spores will burst from the alien. Any ant nearby risks infection. and the same fate. He was the producer of that sequence. How on earth did you all get to capture that? Well, it was extremely difficult.

26:27In fact, that was a sequence that I'm probably most proud of because I've tried it before and failed. And I got the best people involved, the best consultant. And it really was literally a case of a consultant going out to the rainforest and actually looking around the floor for distressed ants. Now, if you've been in your back garden and looked for an ant that's looking a little bit off, you know, You know, that's not very easy. So, you know, it was a four-week shoot, and we had, I think he found two distressed ants, and that little chap was one of them. Now, my thing is, though, I never understood, why does the ant, the ant gets crazy, literally, it's an ant gone crazy.

27:01The ant's gone crazy because it ate the wrong spore. It ate something that drove it crazy. What happens is this, I mean, I like the way you and your producers refer to the sequence as the insane ant sequence. Yes, they go, yeah. I'll remember that. Well, what happens is that the spores are floating in the air. and they land on the ant, and the spore has a little corkscrew drill, and it drills through the exoskeleton. So it must be teeny-tiny, can't even see. You have to look it through a microscope. So the ant's totally unaware of this. The spore goes into the body and then infects its brain, and then it starts to control the animal like real-life alien, as you say.

27:35It's sort of ironic that Sigourney Weaver was narrating this. Now, this is what's so amazing about the animal world. This is why it's so great to watch your family. Because that little... Because it's ants to elephants. I mean, one of my other favorite things is the elephants swimming underwater. that you show in the first series, so it's from elephants to ants. But so the other ants know that ant is crazy. Yeah. So they say, let's get him out of here. Yeah. Well, you know, in this particular case, it is very bizarre that something as seemingly, you know, unintelligent, perhaps, if you like, as an ant, can sort of, like, recognize the symptoms of this...

28:09this...this fungus infection in another ant and actually remove it from the colony, because if the ant... Stays in the colony. It affects the whole... It affects the whole... It affects the whole colony. In fact, we saw whole colonies destroyed by this fungus. Whole of them. Everywhere you looked on the trees and branches, were tiny little ants with... With this thing coming out of their head? Yeah, but they had already happened. So what we wanted to do was get that moment where the... That's because the other ants didn't catch the crazy ant fast enough. They've only got themselves to blame. Yes, with that.

28:38In Africa, millions of animals share a dangerous and epic journey for survival. For some of them, it's a death march. It's the dry season in southern Africa's Kalahari Desert, up to eight months with no rain.

28:55Thousands of elephants begin a desperate search for water. Buffalo join the great trek. They're all heading for the swamps of the Okavango, a vast inland delta, and the end of the line for Africa's fourth largest river.

29:18In such weather, a calf could get lost. They've fallen far behind. The calf is blinded by sand.

29:36It follows its mother by sound alone. The stragglers catch up, but another calf is not so lucky. Thirsty and exhausted, it follows its mother's tracks in the wrong direction.

29:59As the herd reaches the oak of Ongo, so does water. It began as rain, a thousand miles away, and took nearly five months to arrive. Birds are the first to arrive in any numbers.

30:21Behind the birds come buffalo. After weeks of marching, their trek is coming to an end. This is an Africa rarely seen. A lush water world.

30:49I love seeing those elephants swimming, and as I was watching that, I was like, where is the camera? And how, who is in the water with the elephants as they're rolling all around? We're just very fortunate to work with a lot of brave cameramen and people like Mark and Doug, and I know that Doug's been in the water close to hippos and polar bears and whales and things, and yeah. But how...the cameraman who shot that, how did he know they were going to go under the water? Because they're coming to a big area of water, they're thirsty, and he knows that they're going to drink, so... I didn't know elephants could swim underwater.

31:22That's the first time I've ever seen that. Have you ever seen that? I've never seen that before. Never seen that before. It's just incredible. It's like they're playing. Incredible footage. Incredible footage. So what you're about to see right now has been called the holy grail of filmmaking. Let's look at this. A snow leopard, the rarest of Himalayan animals. On these treacherous slopes, only the snow leopard has a chance at such agile prey. A female with young offers an easier target. Large paws give her a firm grip. And that long tail helps her balance. A snow leopard hunt has never before been filmed.

32:22Her cub will not eat today.

32:28For the leopard, the snow offers cover and a second chance. Snowfall dampens the sound of her approach and lets her get within striking distance. Only desperation would drive such a forlorn attack. Somewhere far below, she finally found success. She can drag prey three times her own weight, But it's a grueling climb. It will be a year before the cub has the strength and skill to kill for itself. In these fabled mountains, the snow leopard is almost mythical. Seldom glimpsed by humans, for its remote world is seldom visited.

33:24Mark Smith is a cameraman who captured that history-making footage of the snow leopard. How did you get that? Well, it took a long time. We had, um, on that trip, we had six weeks searching in the mountains up in northwest Pakistan, close to about 30 miles from the Afghan border. It got to the last day of the trip, and we were due to be airlifted out of this valley by the Pakistan Air Force. And we went up to this place, and she was up here asleep. And this Markor, the goat, was about 200 metres away, asleep down there. And we thought that if any time you were ever going to get the shot, this was the time.

34:03But she was asleep, and we had to wait throughout the whole day for her to wake up, just hoping that she would wake up and... Why didn't you go, hey! People we were with were saying, yeah, maybe we could just chuck a stone at her. So you're not allowed to interfere. Exactly. Yeah, you couldn't really do that. And, I mean, in the end, at about... I mean, it was literally the last hour of the last day, and she woke up, she looked down, she saw this Markle and did that amazing chase. And... And you got the chase. Got the chase, yeah. It's like Hugh was saying earlier, it feels like a privilege. Yeah, it's amazing.

34:36Did it change your respect level? Because, as I say, as I've watched it, I've watched the whole series, my entire respect level, not that I didn't respect animals or respect the Earth before, but it's changed my view of our world. This series does give a global picture of the whole planet, and it does refer to the problems, the challenges, and the threats that the planet is facing now. Yeah. Actually, when I was watching the series, I only remember feeling this a couple of times in my life, like when I was out on safari or in... or you're out on the Great Plains, and just as far as the eye can see, there's nothing but sky and land, or you're sitting in a truck and, you know, there's a, you know, pride of lying in front of you, where you have a sense that, yes, you are human, and yes, you are on the earth, but the earth doesn't just belong to you, where you really recognize that we share this planet with others.

35:28So I will have to say that, you know, a lot of people aren't going to get on safari, but this watching this series is the next best thing to that. You feel like you really do understand how you're a citizen, but you're a citizen in a global village of other animals. And so watch with your families. It's just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on television. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Discovery. Thank you. And thanks to the Helenette Group for their aerial footage. Thank you. Up on the roof. Bye, everybody.

36:12Join me next week for another Oprah show, The Podcast. And I thank you for listening.