Black bears sleeping in our basements, baboons breaking into our kitchens, coyotes snatching our pets out of our backyards - wild animals are moving into our space. As humans continue to build and expand cities and suburbs around the world, animals are losing their homes and inching their way into ours. Join NAT GEO WILD and National Geographic Channel on a different kind of adventure - into our cities, our suburbs and the outskirts of our towns - to witness which creatures are lurking in the shadows and which ones aren't afraid to stand out in the streets. Join us as we take a journey into our Urban Jungle.
Guided by big cat tracker Boone Smith, Urban Jungle takes a closer look into cities across the planet including Moscow, New York and Mumbai, which humans consider their own, but have become overrun with wildlife. Urban Jungle will premiere as a simulcast tonight, Aug. 3, at 8 PM ET/PT on
NAT GEO WILD and
National Geographic Channel and internationally this winter.
Boone begins his journey in the most densely packed city in the world - Mumbai. Most residents don't see the leopards prowling the streets of Mumbai at night. Using night vision cameras, Boone exposes just how close these big cats come to city doors and that some leopards will travel more than 4 miles into the city to find the pounds of meat they need per day to survive.
"This is mind-boggling ... there are great big apartment buildings and skyscrapers," says Boone about Mumbai. "And we're talking about a leopard. We're not talking about maybe a deer that wandered into town, or a rabbit, or a rat, or a stray dog. This is a wild leopard in the middle of the city. This is not supposed to ever happen."
Mumbai isn't the only city bustling with invaders. In the heart of downtown Manhattan, rats are a typical sight, and city dwellers learn to get used to them. But what they don't always notice are the red-tailed hawks scanning the packed streets like snipers. When a hawk spots its desired prey - which can be an animal twice its size - it swoops down at 100 miles per hour to catch it. And humans are stocking the streets with pets - potential prey for the hawks. Then, travel west with Boone to Chicago, where coyotes roam the streets and backyards. With the use of GPS technology, Boone demonstrates how researchers discovered that coyotes have adapted to city living. The animals now do their hunting at night, instead of getting caught in broad daylight.
In suburban Lake Tahoe, where there have been more than 1,000 reports of black bears over the past year, Boone uses heat-sensing cameras to track the bears and the warm "dens" they are drawn to - and sometimes these "dens" are our homes. Whether in Chicago, New York, Cape Town or Mumbai, one thing is for sure: Wild animals have made themselves at homes in our cities and towns. And the more they learn to adapt to city living, the more they will thrive. Wherever we take over the wild, its creatures can take it back, creating an Urban Jungle.
Premiere episodes include:
Urban Jungle: Downtown (Featuring Chicago, New York City and Mumbai) Premieres Sunday, Aug. 3, at 8 PM ET/PT Boone ventures into the heart of the most crowded cities on the planet, to uncover a hidden world where predators and prey collide - outside our windows, above our skyscrapers and under our feet. He tracks coyotes through the streets of Chicago, stakes out leopards on the back roads of Mumbai and rappels off a bridge to find a massive swarm of bats in Austin. Throughout, he reveals the skills of the greatest urban survivors - from hawks targeting squirrels in the streets of New York City, to scorpions hunting in the kitchens of Las Vegas, to pythons on the prowl in the sewers of Bangkok. We'll discover what it takes for creatures to make it in the big concrete city and what stakes are at risk if they fail.
Urban Jungle: Suburbia (Featuring Moscow, Lake Tahoe and Cape Town) Premieres Sunday, Aug. 3, at 9 PM ET/PT Think your quaint neighborhood is free of prowlers? Think again. Boone takes us to the white-picket-fenced suburbs around the world to track the creatures that are fighting for supremacy in our backyards. Only the adaptable survive here - those that learn to take advantage of our manicured landscapes. We'll see Boone track street dogs around Moscow, crawl under vacation homes with denning black bears in Lake Tahoe, and dodge golf balls and boxing kangaroos on the golf courses of Australia. He shows us how animals are reaping the rewards of our suburban paradise - taking back what was once theirs.
Urban Jungle: Outposts (Featuring Victoria Falls, Dutch Harbor and Cape Cod) Premieres Sunday, Aug. 3, at 10 PM ET/PT Looking past the industrial wastelands and crowded suburbs, Boone tracks down cougars, shadows elephants as they slam into the small Zimbabwe town of Victoria Falls, crosses a bridge on the Zambezi River overrun by burglarizing baboons and ventures into one of the only towns on Earth where eagles are known to attack humans - Dutch Harbor, Alaska. He shows us where great white sharks are coming back to our beaches, where radioactive wolves are claiming back the death zone of Chernobyl and where brown bears are being kept at bay. When it comes to human-animal conflict, the stakes are nowhere higher than at these outposts, surrounded by wilderness, where all species assert their right to survive.
Urban Jungle is produced by National Geographic Television (NGT) for National Geographic Channels (NGC). For NGT, executive producers are Karen Bass and Geoff Luck. For NGC, executive producer is Allan Butler. Geoff Daniels is executive
Vice president and general manager of Nat Geo WILD. Heather Moran is the EVP of programming and strategy for NGC.
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NAT GEO WILD HD, launched in 2010, offer intimate encounters with nature's ferocious fighters and gentle creatures of land, sea and air that draw upon the cutting-edge work of the many explorers, filmmakers and scientists of the National Geographic Society. Part of the National Geographic Channels US, based in Washington, D.C., the networks are a joint venture between National Geographic and
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