Radio Times: Review by:; David Butcher

If you wanted to be super-critical, you might say parts of this series tend to look a bit like a lavish coffee-table book brought to life. Or that when we see cranes flying over a château in the Loire and geese gliding over a romantic Scottish ruin, the photography is so exquisite that it all starts to look a little, well, staged.

But really, it feels wrong to grumble. What we get is “our planet as never before”, as David Tennant reminds us at the start of each episode. Slow-motion shots of white horses charging through floodwaters in the Camargue, seen through a flock of flamingos, are staggering, even if they look as if they should be in an Enya video.

And there’s enough of the rough stuff, of nature red in beak and talon, to add a bit of edge to the proceedings: a golden eagle mobbed by crows; sand martins plucking mayflies from a sunlit river; and incredible footage of ospreys fishing in Finland. Plus, you’ll learn what it means for a stork to “whiffle”.

About this programme

1/6. Bird's-eye view of the natural world, joining the journeys of snow geese, cranes, albatrosses, eagles and other birds across six continents. Beginning in North America, snow geese face their biggest predator, pelicans glide under San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, bald eagles in Alaska swoop among brown bears, and on the Great Plains, cowbirds dive under the feet of fighting bison. Narrated by David Tennant.