Wild Arabia

Few places on earth evoke more mystery and romance than Arabia. Now for the first time we are able to enter the forbidding wilderness and reveal a magical cast a characters. From snow-white oryx that inspired the myth of the unicorn to long-legged jerboa leaping 10 times their own body length through the star-filled Arabian nights. Horned vipers hunt glow-in-dark scorpions while Bedouin nomads race their camels across the largest sand desert in the world.

In a remote corner of southern Arabia one mountain range holds a remarkable secret. Swept by the annual Indian Ocean monsoon the Dhofar mountains become a magical lost world of waterfalls and cloud forests filled with chameleons and honey-badgers. Off-shore rare whales have not bred with any others for over 60 thousand years and green sea turtles come ashore in their thousands, shadowed by egg-stealing foxes. Heat-seeking cameras reveal, for the first time ever, striped hyenas doing battle with Arabian wolves. While local researchers come face to face with the incredibly rare Arabian leopard.

Huge changes have swept across Arabia since the discovery of oil and the Arab relationship with nature has changed too. This is summed up by the changes to camel racing, now an ultra hi-tech sport. Arabia's animals now live alongside a very modern society but Arabia's people are now using technology to protect nature: dugongs are fitted with satellite transmitters; hunting falcons chase down radio-controlled planes and the World's first carbon-neutral city is being built in the very heart of oil country.