The Zambezi is known as the “River of Life” across southern Africa, but surviving by the river near Victoria Falls is not always easy. During the rainy season the Zambezi has a fierceness and a power that is deadly to both animals and humans. At the peak of the rainy season, almost 300,000 gallons of water cascade over the falls every second.

Despite the danger, many birds, reptiles, fish, and mammals call this area home. And a fisherman, known as Mr. White, has lived in a nearby town for 74 years, spending almost every day by the falls. NATURE joins Mr. White as he tells us Zambezi’s story — a story of the changing seasons and many moods of the river.

During the dry season, life gravitates to the river by Victoria Falls. As the sun beats down and the water level lowers, grass-covered islands above the falls are exposed. Families of elephants from the surrounding savannah flock to the Zambezi to make the river crossing. Predator and prey rely on the river for water, and pairs of bee-eaters and pied kingfishers dig nests in the exposed muddy banks. Fish eagles raise their young and teach them to hunt, and hippos crowd the waters.

Life flourishes, for a while. And then, months later, clouds gather in the sky and rising waters force many animals to leave. It is the rainy season, and Victoria Falls becomes magnificent again – her voice rising from a whisper to thunder.

Victoria Falls premieres Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 8pm (check local listings).

We have seen them dressed in costumes and dancing at circuses, living solitary lives at zoos or giving our children a thrill with a ride on their back. But the largest land animals live a life that is completely foreign to us when left to their own in the wild — one complete with battles and births, kidnappings and camaraderie. More than fifteen years ago, Martyn Colbeck began to document in film and photos the lives of African elephants. For the better part of two decades, he has grown particularly close to the elephant matriarch, Echo, and her close-knit family, who have never failed to astonish, amuse, and inspire him.

The family seems to accept Colbeck into their world, and perhaps even considers him one of their own. The result is that he can record unimpeded the gentle love, and tight bonds that elephants feel for each other. Colbeck’s film gives us a glimpse into the complex world of elephant society. We meet Echo and begin to understand the importance of such a majestic matriarch to her devoted clan. He shows us their language and ways of communication. And he captures remarkable scenes such as the rare birth of a crippled calf that the family desperately and collectively tries to help to its feet. The film causes us to question if this could be about more than simply survival. Is there a deeper emotion we have just been privileged enough to witness through Colbeck’s lens?

In scene after moving scene, Colbeck makes us fall in love with Echo, Erin, Enid, Ely, and the rest of this loving family. He conveys through his film and in a special interview with NATURE what complicated, powerful, tender, funny — and, yes, unforgettable — creatures elephants are.

To order a copy of Unforgettable Elephants, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Unforgettable Elephants was originally posted April 2007.

In a Tanzanian jungle, a scientist and a medicine man follow a chimpanzee in search of a cure for a deadly disease. On the plains of Kenya, a woman learns a powerful lesson about family — from a pair of elephants. And in the Florida Keys, an eight-year old boy with a genetic illness utters his first words, for a chance to swim with dolphins.

From the ancient world to the modern, human lives have been influenced by animals in matters that reach far beyond the food chain. Wisdom of the Wild illustrates some of the surprising ways in which animals help teach, heal, and strengthen people, in body, mind, and spirit.

To order a copy of Wisdom of the Wild, visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Wisdom of the Wild was originally posted December 1999.

Journey with Meg Ryan to the jungles of Thailand in search of the white elephant, a rare creature coveted by royalty — and threatened by extinction.

To Americans, a white elephant is a metaphor for an encumbrance, a worthless possession. To the people of Thailand, a white elephant is a highly unusual creature to be venerated, one that, along with the darker-hued members of its species, is facing escalating threats to its survival. To the actress Meg Ryan, an encounter with one is the culmination of a lifelong dream. NATURE gets a rare glimpse of the unique pachyderm in The White Elephants of Thailand with Meg Ryan.

The film presents elephants in their everyday contact with the people of Thailand, whose treatment of them ranges from adoration to exploitation. At the same time, we see them through the eyes of an American movie star — as the larger-than-life, awe-inspiring embodiment of childhood dreams.

Online content for The White Elephants of Thailand with Meg Ryan was originally posted February 2002.

NATURE explores the unusual problems created as the struggle to give Asian elephants a home is fought worldwide.

They have a history of captivity that stretches over 200 years. They participate with humans in a surprising array of professions, including tourism, construction, and performance. And their gigantic footsteps may disappear from the face of the earth.

The enigmatic subjects of NATURE: The Urban Elephant, Asian elephants are losing territory to the inevitable process of deforestation. Industrialization all over Asia has hurt the mahouts, or elephant drivers, so that the trained elephants and their riders are being driven into major cities such as Bangkok to earn a meager living receiving donations and food from curious tourists.

Elephants forced into a captive life suffer emotionally, physically, and as a species. In “Safe Haven” one woman explains why created a santuary for retired performing elephants after giving up her own circus career.

Join The Urban Elephant’s trunk-raising salute to these talented, intelligent, and troubled creatures that we have just begun to understand.

To order a copy of The Urban Elephant, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Urban Elephant was originally posted November 2000.

Who can resist the magnetic allure of a baby? The presence of little ones of any species invariably generates instant attention and concern from onlookers. In fact, it seems that both humans and animals are hard-wired to find youngsters adorable. The practical and essential reasons why the very young have an ability to play on our heart strings are explored in Baby Tales.

Baby Tales demonstrates how young animals learn and develop, and examines the role of “cuteness” in helping to forge and solidify bonds between mother and offspring. Many newborns in the animal kingdom are entirely dependent upon their mothers — and sometimes their fathers, as well — for survival. And, especially in the wild, nurturing and protecting the young can require enormous effort, courage, and self-sacrifice. The cuteness of offspring creates a strong visual bond that helps evoke a caring response in parents, which must spend months, if not years, feeding, protecting, and teaching their young to survive on their own.

To order a copy of Baby Tales, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Baby Tales was originally posted March 2001.

What would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night and found Earth’s largest land animals trampling your most treasured possessions? If you are a farmer in Northeast India, answering that question is no idle game — it is a matter of survival when a wild Asian elephant herd wanders out of its forest home in search of a meal, stomping through the rice fields that provide your food and livelihood. If you are lucky, the huge invaders are scared away by torches and noise. But the confrontation can turn deadly: Each year, wild elephants kill up to 300 people in India.

India’s elephants are locked in a fierce competition for food, water, and living space with the nation’s fast-growing human population. Over the course of the twentieth century, India’s population has almost doubled to more than 950 million people. In their search for living space, India’s settlers have cleared all but ten percent of the elephant’s traditional forest homelands.

Some Indians, however, have been taming elephants for more than 5,000 years. In The Elephant Men, NATURE follows a venerated elephant trainer named Dr. Krishnamurthy and several of his young trainees, or mahouts, in their travels 1,500 miles from their homes, as they aid a beleaguered village in the northeastern state of Bengal. To get the inside story on the making of The Elephant Men, NATURE Online spoke with filmmaker Harry Marshall.

Harry Marshall: In His Own Words

“In the opening scenes of the film, you see an elephant charging the camera, and then you see some people with torches. That wasn’t set up; all that really happened. If you look closely, you’ll see me run across the camera — with an elephant 20 yards behind me. I was chased by a wild elephant absolutely hell-bent on killing me!

“The villagers had told us not to run. They said, “When the elephants come, stand your ground and face them down, shine your lights at them, and they will stop.” So that’s what we did. And when the elephants came, we stood our ground, and the entire village ran away. We were left standing there. Finally, I said, “Run!” We took off rather too late.

“It was dark. I tripped and fell, and everything went black; then I was surrounded by a kind of golden light that was bathing me from everywhere. For the first few moments, I thought I had died. I was very irritated. But then I realized that I had fallen into an irrigation ditch, and the light was from my camera lamps, which run off direct current and so were still burning underwater. I spent half an hour hiding in the ditch with just my nose poking out of the water and one very angry elephant looking for me.

“At one point, I felt something grab my arm. I was afraid it was a trunk, but it was Alphonse Roy, the cameraman. Now Alphonse is only 5′2″, so he was really on his tiptoes in the water. And the first thing he said to me was, ‘Shall I take a [light] meter reading?’ I thought that was a funny thing to ask.

“Dr. Krishnamurthy is something of a legend in elephant circles. He’s been working as a wildlife vet for over 50 years. He was the inspiration for the whole film. He’d been asked to go to North India to solve the problem of rampaging elephants and capture them. It seemed like an extraordinary thing to ask a retired 70-year-old man to do, but it’s because there is a crisis — and he’s the only man who could sort it out.

“Elephants have been used [as beasts of burden] for centuries. The first recordings of men and elephants working together date back to 3,000 or 4,000 B.C.E. The traditional work of elephants was timber extraction and hauling. It was the ultimate beast of burden, but now there are [few] forests left [in India]. Elephants were once used in warfare, but no longer. Up until the middle of this century, an elephant was the ultimate status symbol. A maharaji might have a stable of 20 or 30 elephants to show off, but these days he’ll have a Rolex watch or a Maserati.

“Elephants have been losing their place in Indian culture, and the number of mahouts has dramatically declined. You have to be careful not to break that golden chain, because the whole tradition is passed down orally. There are no written instructions. The training of elephants does exist in Sanskrit texts that were written over 2,000 years ago, but the mahouts are all basically illiterate. Dr. K is a walking library of elephant knowledge.

“Obviously, seeing an elephant being trained — having its will beaten out of it — is not pleasant. But I’m not there to moralize, I’m there to make a film, and to document what has happened there for thousands of years.

“How long it takes to train an elephant varies. The younger the elephant is, the easier it is to train. The smaller elephants can be done in three weeks. It’s going to take months if the elephant is older and has killed three or four people, like this one very large tusker [we filmed]. He took so long to train that we ran out of time on our schedule and had to leave. Of course, with the bulk of the elephants, the training never stops, because they have an infinite capacity to learn.

“The bond that develops between an Indian and his elephant is as deep as any bond that exists. Dr. K’s relationship with the elephant he called ‘The Inspector General’ went on for 20 years. As he says in the film, after it had been in a fight with wild elephants, he used to stand on its tusks and remove broken bones from its head. The elephant has a grave that Dr. K visits as you would visit the grave of a brother or friend. When I asked how he felt, he broke down. His voice expressed the depth of his emotion.

“Dr. K became a wildlife vet as a freshman in university. Not many people enjoy living in the jungle, sleeping rough. He just took to it like a duck to water. They say that great elephant trainers, great mahouts, aren’t made, they’re born. Dr. K has an intuitive touch with elephants. And thanks to him the tradition will continue. He has many disciples who sit at his feet and hear his stories.

“The population of Indian elephants is rising. In India they can’t just be culled the way they are in Africa, where there are no religious considerations. The skills of people like Dr. K are going to be called upon even more in the years to come. Elephants are going to be used to control elephants. The domestic ones will be used to help control the wild ones. Elephants are peaceful herbivores when they’re left alone. But when a farmer empties a shotgun full of rusty nails into its trunk and the trunk goes septic, that elephant becomes a homicidal maniac.

“There are still elephants living peaceful lives, as they have for millennia. We just came back from South India. We are making a new film with Dr. K called ‘The Elephant Mountain,’ about Anaimalai, which means ‘elephant mountain.’ It’s a place where elephants live in peace. We’re going to observe a wild herd in a pristine setting for a whole year.”

Harry Marshall, the founder of Icon Films, was born and spent his childhood in South India. He received an MA from Oxford University. He was nominated for a Best Director Emmy for his film TIBET AND THE END OF TIME. Currently, he is at work on a series for PBS about the Brazilian Amazon.