600 kilos of pure friendliness – a sea cow, or manatee, is not exactly a paragon of beauty. However, they are without doubt the friendliest giants that inhabit the crystal waters of Florida’s rivers and shores. They spend most of the daytime eating water plants. Females selflessly care for the young – of others as much as their own. Aggression is completely alien to these animals. It is only during the mating season that things take off: it is not rare for several males to pursue one female and it sometimes takes weeks till she chooses the future father of her offspring.
But the world bears a lot of dangers for the manatees – and the young Hamilton gets to experience this firsthand. Already as a baby he lost his mother in a boat accident, which he himself survived with severe injuries. After two years in a manatee hospital, he is finally released – just on time for another near-death experience: the poisonous algae. But Hamilton is a go-getter, and his outstanding will to survive brings the film to its touching happy ending.
For the first time, a team of filmmakers has managed to observe a manatee for three years. As a result, the footage astounded even the experienced researchers of the Sirenia Projects. Besides, the gorgeous images of sea birds, alligators and dolphins depict the astonishing eco-system of the Gulf Coast and Florida’s crystal clear rivers.
One summer my life changed forever when a little fox cub visited my urban garden whilst I was watering the lawn. I thought this might have been a one-off fascinating close-up encounter, but later the cub returned and this time brought its siblings along, and together they explored, played, and tu...
We are in a secret spot in China: Giant Panda Valley. Here, after many months of preparation, a group of pandas are about to be released into the wild, thanks to Eric Bairao Ruivo. He runs Beauval Nature – a foundation devoted to re-introducing rare or endangered species into the wild around the ...
Wild dolphins in the Red Sea tolerate a group of scientists and filmmakers as if they were dolphins and allow to film behavior that has never been watched...