Nature's greatest spectacles revealed in new Attenborough series

Nature's Great Events is scheduled to be shown on BBC One later this year. Each of the six programmes features a different event set in one of the world's most iconic wildernesses. Episode one, entitled The Great Melt, follows a mother polar bear and her cub making their first journey on to the Arctic sea ice in search of prey Photograph: Jason C Roberts/BBC

Episode three looks at great migrations like that of the annual journey made by wildebeest through Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. The series, made by the BBC Natural History Unit, used high-definition cameras and 'cutting edge' aerial, underwater and ultra slow-motion filming techniques to capture the footage Photograph: Owen Newman/BBC

Stories of animals told in the series include these grizzly bears in Canada's snow-covered mountains; baby elephants struggling to survive against drought and lion attack in Africa; humpback whales hunting as a team; the world's largest concentration of dolphins and sharks gathering off the coast of South Africa and polar bear families navigating their precarious way on ever-thinning ice Photograph: Paul Zakora/BBC

Episode four, entitled the Great Tide, examines the world's largest marine spectacle – the sardine run off South Africa's eastern coast, which attracts the planet's greatest concentration of predators. Super-pods of these common dolphins up to 5,000 strong, thousands of sharks and huge Brydes whales feast on the sardines, as gannets rain down from above Photograph: Chris Fallows/SplashdownDirect.com/BBC

Episode six, The Great Feast, shows how the arrival of the summer sun along the coastal waters of Alaska and British Columbia triggers an explosion of plant life greater in scale than even the Amazon rainforest. The feast draws in huge amounts of wildlife – including billions of herring, Steller's sea lions and humpback whales that migrate all the way from Hawaii Photograph: Hugh Pearson/BBC