Nature has built its legacy on making the distant feel immediate—turning the lives of wild animals into stories that land with human weight. Nature: Parenthood, the new five-part series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, does exactly that, following animal families as they raise their young against steep odds across grasslands, freshwater worlds, oceans, jungles, and the peril-filled terrain of “The Greatest Adventure.” Filmed over three years on six continents and in 23 countries, the series frames parenting as both a biological imperative and a high-stakes gamble shaped by habitat, predators, and an environment increasingly altered by human activity. Premiering Wednesdays from February 4 through March 4 on PBS (and streaming on pbs.org/nature, YouTube, and the PBS App), it’s as much a global field report as it is a meditation on what it takes to get the next generation to the starting line.

At the center of the project is Jeff Wilson, series producer and one of the directors, who describes Parenthood as “an extraordinary celebration of one of life’s great challenges: raising young.” That celebration is built on the meticulous, often invisible labor of wildlife filmmaking—patience, rigorous planning, and the kind of fieldcraft that allows cameras to be present without becoming part of the story. Across the episodes, the series captures astonishing strategies and behaviors: wild dogs trying to marshal unruly teenagers in the Zambezi; a frog father scaling Amazonian trees with tadpoles on his back; an orca mother in Australia teaching her young to hunt blue whales; an orangutan spending years instructing her offspring in jungle survival; and burrowing owls defending an underground home with an eerie rattlesnake mimic. The result is a portrait of dedication and sacrifice that feels both alien and deeply recognizable.

Wilson’s perspective is grounded in a lifetime of proximity to the natural world. Raised in Kenya as the son of two wildlife conservationists, he developed an unusually intimate knowledge of wildlife and landscape early on—knowledge that helped launch his career at the BBC Natural History Unit in 2001. He joined Attenborough’s Life of Mammals and, in a first assignment that reads like a rite of passage, was sent back to Africa to live in a cave with elephants. Since then, Wilson has worked in more than 65 countries across all seven continents, documenting behavior in some of the planet’s most remote places. In this conversation, we talk with him about what it takes to film fragile parent–offspring relationships without interfering, how science and storytelling shape what ends up on screen, the emotional toll of witnessing life-and-death stakes in the field, and what Parenthood reveals—about animals, about us, and about a rapidly changing world.

What was the spark for this series for you? Was there a specific animal-parenting moment that led to the idea for this?

The spark was a series we made in 2001 called The Mating Game. And clearly, what comes after mating is the parenting process. While we were making that series, we realized there was an unbelievable amount of fascinating, never-seen-before material—sequences that revealed the intimate relationship between a parent and its young.

I’ve built my career on strong fieldcraft when working with wildlife. I come from a conservation and biology background, and the people I work with—especially at Silverback—are nature nerds first, and cinematographers and directors second. What I came to understand is that the relationship between a mother or a father and its offspring is incredibly fragile. If you’re trying to film it, you need the very best fieldcraft to put yourself in the right place at the right time, without disrupting what’s happening.

I realized I was surrounded by an amazingly talented group of people, and that we could apply our knowledge of the natural world to tell really powerful stories—stories that only come from patience, skill, and being positioned to witness that intimacy. That kicked off the research process: “Okay, let’s back ourselves. Let’s go out there and see what we can do.”

Speaking of the research process—what was pre-production like? Did you consult with a lot of experts beforehand to set up your shots? (And pardon the birds.)

Yes—always. We spend about a year, just over a year, piecing the scripts together. A huge part of that is opening up our black book of scientific contacts and researchers around the world, and spending time discussing and brainstorming with them.

We talk about the science, the research opportunities, and also what they’re observing in the field. Sometimes our stories come from published scientific papers. Other times they come from observation—serendipitous moments in nature that aren’t part of a big data set, but are still real and meaningful. When that happens, we go into the field with the researchers and build on the observation to see whether the behavior is repeatable, and whether it’s something we can actually achieve on film.

A great example is the matrophagy sequence in The Greatest Adventure—a Namibian social spider. The scientist we worked with, a South African spider researcher, had written papers on matrophagy. (Matrophagy is when the young eat the mother alive—the sequence you see in the film.) They’d replicated it in the lab, but no one had really taken the time to witness it in the field. We spent most of a year talking with her about the conditions under which it would happen, the seasonal timing—yet no one had ever filmed it in the wild. That’s where the adventure of our work really comes alive: trying to achieve something nobody has captured before, grounded in rigorous science.

Another example is weaver birds ejecting their chicks from nests under heat stress from climate change, in the grasslands episode. That had been witnessed a few times, but not properly documented—certainly not written up in papers. When we were there, we observed and filmed it repeatedly, and the data we gathered is now useful for the scientists’ future work.

You chose a number of habitats—grasslands, freshwater, oceans, jungles. Why those, and what did that progression let you say about parenting?

Great question. When you make a film, you’re trying to build a world where the audience understands the context of the challenge. We felt the best way to do that was to choose key habitats where parenting comes with uniquely different pressures.

In grasslands, for example, many animals face a constant dilemma: do you provide for your young, or do you protect your young? Of course, every parent wants to do both—but if you live on an exposed plain with predators everywhere, and you survive by eating grass or vegetation, then moving your young to find food can expose them to huge predation risk. There’s always that yin and yang.

We chose oceans largely because of the challenge—and the contrast. About 90% of animal life in the oceans doesn’t parent at all. They spawn eggs, release them, and once they hatch, that’s it—everything fends for itself. But then there are animals like octopus, dolphins, and the killer whales we filmed off Western Australia hunting blue whales, where there is significant parental investment. When most of the environment isn’t built around parenting, the species that do invest often stand out as having social intelligence that goes beyond what the setting “normally” supports. That contrast makes for powerful storytelling.

You shot for three years, across six continents and 23 countries. What was the hardest to shoot logistically—and what was the hardest on an emotional level?

Logistically, freshwater can be incredibly difficult. I’m thinking particularly of the team filming trichomycterid gobies in the Dominican Republic. It’s a fish father who builds a nest at the very top of a waterfall, hoping that’s the safest place to raise his young. But being up there exposes him to storm surges—big rains that send water charging down the valley—so he can get swept over.

From a filming perspective, the challenge is outrageous: you’re trying to film a fish—literally a fish out of water—climbing a waterfall, keeping the lens dry, working at height, day after day, soaked by spray. Then when you finally reach the top, you have to switch to underwater filming and cover the whole sequence from top to bottom. It’s extremely demanding.

Another major logistical challenge was the orca hunting sequence—finding a pod that is teaching its young how, when, and where to hunt blue whales. You’re operating in an area about the size of Texas off the coast of Australia. Being in the right place at the right time is like finding a needle in a haystack. And when you do catch up to the orcas, they can move at speeds that leave an underwater cameraperson behind in seconds.

We ended up designing a bespoke underwater gimbal system that let us hang a camera off the boat and keep pace—without destroying the camera from drag, and while staying stable alongside the animals. That solved part of the problem. But honestly, just finding the behavior in the first place was incredibly hard.

Emotionally, speaking from personal experience, it was spending time with lion cubs in the Kalahari. Watching the parents throw themselves into the ultimate commitment of parenting—taking on prey like buffalo and even confronting much larger mammals—was extraordinary. But it became heartbreaking when we filmed a mother lion dying, leaving her cubs behind, and the cubs witnessing it.

As filmmakers, we’re trained to be objective—to document, not intervene. But it’s difficult not to feel emotionally involved in situations like that. It hit hardest in the edit, because you can really see the emotions in the cubs’ faces and body language—and you understand that their primary provider is gone.

Wildlife filmmaking means balancing intimacy with non-interference. This is a two-part question. First: what rules did you set for proximity and technology like drones (if you used any)? Second: you plan behaviors in advance, but animals don’t cooperate—do you go in with a Plan B?

They absolutely don’t read the script.

On the first part: I’m glad you asked, because this is incredibly important to me and to everyone we work with. We start from the standpoint that we’re there to observe behavior. The moment we cross the line—where our presence changes the behavior we’re filming—we’re not doing our job properly.

That’s especially true with parenthood. The relationship between a parent and its offspring is so fragile that disturbance can have catastrophic consequences: parents can abandon young; young can flee and fail to find their way back. So in pre-production we brief everyone on the same priority: we recognize how delicate this is—how do we use time, patience, and technology so that we don’t insert ourselves between parent and offspring?

Sometimes the answer is simply time. When we filmed lowland gorillas in Gabon, it was almost like a slow trust-building process. You spend seven weeks in the jungle, showing up every day with the camera. If you’re not welcome, you keep your distance. You come back the next day. There’s no shortcut—that’s fieldcraft.

Technology-wise, when we need close proximity, we design methods that minimize disturbance. Camera traps are a big part of that. A good example is the burrowing owl sequence in Arizona, which we filmed alongside a leading burrowing-owl scientist in his 70s who’s been studying them for 50 years. We knew we wanted footage from inside the burrow, so we inserted our camera traps a year before we ever turned them on—so the owls would become completely comfortable with the camera being there.

That’s the conviction: we may want the shot, but we don’t just show up and shove a camera into a burrow. We plan for it a year in advance. And we build redundancy—some burrows weren’t occupied when we returned, but we had enough setups to succeed. In fact, the audio captured inside the burrows is now being used by scientists writing a paper on communication between chicks and parents.

On the second part—Plan B—yes, always. There are two ways to approach it. The best wildlife filmmakers can observe what’s happening in front of them and adapt dynamically in the field. I’m a big believer that we shouldn’t storyboard sequences too tightly, because it narrows what people think is possible. Anyone who spends time in the natural world knows there’s more magic in what you stumble into—serendipitously—than anything you could script in a minute. Our attitude is: magic will happen, regardless of what the script says.

That said, in planning we categorize shoots as low-risk or high-risk. If a shoot is high-risk—the behavior is hard to capture—we try to film it in the first year, so we can go back in year two or three and build on what we learned.

That’s often why these productions take three years. If you’re trying to film something like mother turtles “singing” their hatchlings into the water, and there’s a flood the year you go, you won’t get it. But the behavior is still worth capturing—so you plan to return. And that’s exactly what happened with that sequence.

With Sir David Attenborough narrating, his iconic voice sets expectations. How did you calibrate the storytelling so it felt emotionally resonant without being overly anthropomorphizing?

Great question. I’ve been very fortunate to work with Sir David for almost my entire career—about 25 years. One of the great things about working with him is that he’s very keen to be involved in the storytelling and scripting from very early on—often from the point of commission.

By the time we reach final scripting, David is already well aware of many of the sequences we’ve captured. It always staggers me how much research he does in the background to ensure the words we’re helping him shape are factually accurate and resonant. He’ll take the script we develop with him, and then rework it into his own voice.

And we have ongoing conversations—David, myself, and the other producers—about where the limits are between anthropomorphizing and factual observation. It’s more nuanced than people think. Most people who spend time with animals will tell you that refusing to acknowledge emotion can actually be a disservice, because many animals clearly have developed emotional lives and ranges.

Are they the same emotions humans experience? I don’t think we’ll ever fully know. But many animals do experience emotion. So while anthropomorphizing used to be treated as a dirty word, I think scientific understanding has become more nuanced. The internal debate is always: how far can we take it, and what evidence supports it? And it doesn’t always have to be formally documented science—observation matters too.

If you’re watching a lowland gorilla interacting with her one-year-old, teaching it how to eat different fruits, and the young one is messing around and clearly frustrating the parent—there’s no doubt that mother gorilla is experiencing frustration. It’s written all over her face. So I don’t have a problem with anthropomorphizing in the right context, when it’s grounded in what you’re actually seeing.

While watching Parenthood, it struck me that there could be so many fitting titles. Three popped into my mind: The Difficulties of Parenting, The Wonders of Parenting, and Being a Parent Is the Best Thing Ever. Which do you think fits the series most?

As a parent myself, I’d cross number three off. There are times—and we all have to admit it—that parenting isn’t the best thing ever. I know you and Alison are parents too. There are times when it’s god-awful.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t wonder. And I liked your second option: the wonder of parenting. Regardless of how difficult parental investment is—whether you’re an animal or a human—you can’t escape the fact that there is still wonder.

Wonder is an emotion that comes from learning something new and being amazed by it. No human parent is an expert—despite what some self-help books claim. And I think the same goes for animals. The circumstances of raising offspring change day by day, whether you’re animal or human. So wonder is possible in any moment.

It may not always be pleasant—if you’re dealing with a poonami, the wonder might be… fecal-based—but it’s still wonder. And I think a really fitting title would be The Wonder of Parenthood.

Scientific Inquirer: I’ll close with a boilerplate question: what would you like your audience to take away from the series?

I’d genuinely like people to understand that investing time and effort is one of the greatest joys of being a parent. And being on the receiving end of someone else’s time and effort is one of the greatest joys of being a child.

What I want audiences to see is that those joys are the same whether you’re a spider, a lizard, a lion, a gorilla, or a trichomycterid goby—or whether you’re in the middle of New York City raising children there. The aim of these productions is to remind people how wondrous the natural world is, but also how small the differences are between us and the animals we share the planet with.

If you look hard enough, observe closely enough, and spend time watching nature, you’ll realize we have far more in common with other animals than you could ever imagine.

One more question popped into my mind. You do so much traveling—you’re in so many environments, on the front lines of change. Do you see the effects of climate change when you’re shooting films like this?

All the time. I’m always reluctant to say you witness climate change on any single shoot—but if you’ve been going back to the same places for over 25 years, you can’t miss it.

You notice the difference between arriving in Nunavut in northern Canada 15 years ago and arriving again last year, which I did. The sea ice levels are significantly different. If you’re Kenyan, like I am, and you go back home, you notice that lakes and watering holes you knew as a child are no longer there. And when we talk about climate change, it isn’t only the absence of things—sometimes it’s the flooding too. The Rift Valley floods are part of that story as well.

One of the most staggering signs I’ve witnessed is the undermining of traditional knowledge—knowledge held by people who’ve lived in these places for millennia. It used to be that you could rely on local expertise to tell you where animals would be, what season, and under what conditions. Now it’s increasingly hard to find anyone who can predict that with confidence.

That’s one of the most tangible ways to communicate climate change: people who know these landscapes intimately are finding that their accumulated knowledge is being disrupted by the growing chaos of a changing climate. And for wildlife filmmakers, that makes it increasingly difficult to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment—which is 99.9% of the craft—because everything has become far less predictable.

COVER IMAGE CREDIT: Prasenijt Choudhury