David Attenborough travels to the Pacific Northwest coast of North America to examine the art of the Haida, the Gitxsan, and the Kwakwaka'wakw, peoples spread across what is now British Columbia, Alaska, Washington, and Oregon. The episode centers on the totem pole and the carved wooden mask, objects built around crest figures like the crooked beak of heaven that give the film its title, and on the potlatch ceremonies where rank, myth, and material wealth were displayed together. Attenborough treats the carving traditions as a formal visual language, reading the stylized eyes, joints, and beaks the way another critic might read perspective in a painting, and connects the art directly to the salmon-based economy and clan structures that made such elaborate, labor-intensive objects possible. Museum pieces and works still held by community carvers appear alongside the totem poles standing in village sites, giving a sense of both the historical record and the living practice. It is one entry in Attenborough's seven-part survey of tribal art traditions worldwide.