David Attenborough narrates this ten-part survey of how birds evolved to fill nearly every environment on Earth, from the Antarctic ice to the Amazon canopy. Each episode builds around a single problem birds had to solve: how to fly, how to eat, how to attract a mate, how to raise young that survive. The camera work is the point, with slow-motion sequences catching a hummingbird's wingbeat and a bird of paradise mid-display, footage that took the crew years of fieldwork to capture in the pre-digital-camera era. Attenborough turns up in the field himself, standing beside lyrebirds mimicking chainsaws and camera shutters, and wading among flamingos on an African soda lake. The series moves from flightless survivors like the kiwi and ostrich to the aerial specialists, swifts that barely land and albatrosses that circle oceans, laying out the evolutionary logic behind beaks, feathers, and courtship rituals along the way. It remains one of the most thorough studies of bird behavior ever filmed for television.