Animals Up Close with Bertie GregoryIn the new National Geographic series Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory, National Geographic Explorer and BAFTA award-winning cinematographer Bertie Gregory (@BertieGregory) (pictured left), embarks on a new set of adventures to capture wildlife behaviors like never before. The six-part series will stream only on Disney+ from 13 September 2023.

Armed with drones, state-of-the-art gimbal-mounted cameras and underwater tech, Bertie follows individual animals for weeks at a time, building up an intimate picture of their daily battles. He and his team travel to the most spectacular corners of our planet — Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Botswana, Patagonia, Indonesia, and the Central African Republic — to take viewers deep into the natural world and showcase extraordinary animal lives.

In Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory, viewers will get the chance to see unique and rare moments, like humpback whales purposely disrupting the hunt of an endangered pod of B1 killer whales — just 100 are in existence — in Antarctica. Other standout moments include a male sea lion defending pups from a huge Galapagos shark and, by using a military-grade thermal imaging camera in Patagonia, Bertie and his team filmed a guardian shepherd dog defending his flock of sheep from a hunting puma.

Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory episodes:

  • PATAGONIA PUMA

Bertie searches the wilderness of Patagonia in southern Chile, hoping to find and film a female Puma that he first met four years ago when she was just a cub. When he finds her, she has two cubs of her own which she must feed and protect from the many dangers of this harsh mountain landscape.

  • ANTARCTIC KILLER WAVES

Bertie and the team cross the infamous Drake Passage, the roughest stretch of ocean on Earth, to reach Antarctica, where they witness and film the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. Known as B1s, they use an extraordinary strategy to hunt seals resting on ice. Bertie wants to find out why the B1 population is declining and film the other surprising ways they catch prey in their rapidly changing world.

  • BOTSWANA WILD DOGS

Bertie travels to Botswana to film one of the planet’s most successful land predators: the African wild dog. Despite their hunting super skills, wild dog population numbers are dramatically declining. By following a family pack with 14 young pups, he wants to find out what it will take for the next generation of these endangered predators to survive.

  • GALAPAGOS MARVELS

Bertie travels to the remote islands of the Galapagos to find and film three rare animal behaviours seen nowhere else on the Earth, each with an extreme challenge. He will face huge Pacific waves, shark-infested waters, and ultra-fast hunting sea lions on the rugged Galapagos coast.

  • ELEPHANT QUEST

Bertie is on a stakeout deep in the jungles of the Central African Republic, searching for the biggest and most secretive of the forest elephants: the tuskers, huge males with tusks that reach down to the floor. Working with a specialist camera team and local elephant trackers, he sets up a filming HQ high in the rainforest canopy.

  • DEVIL RAY ISLANDS

Bertie travels to Indonesia to dive amongst some of the most exquisite coral reefs left on Earth, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the reef’s most elusive predators: the mysterious devil ray. His best chance of finding one is to track down a huge annual spectacular, an anchovy feeding frenzy.

What: Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory

Where and when: Disney+ from 13 September 2023

WS