Big Cat Week

For 30 years, award-winning filmmakers and National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert have been filming, photographing and documenting the behavior of big cats in Botswana. Witness the Jouberts' journey as they follow lions and leopards through Africa's harshest climatic extremes, gaining unprecedented access and catching some of the most extreme cat sequences ever filmed.

After filming a wild female leopard for 17 years, filmmaker John Varty reveals an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of Africa's most secretive big cats. Leopard Queen follows the life of "Manana," a wild leopard whose territory spans the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. Manana is plagued by other predators that steal her kills, threaten her cubs and hold her hostage in the treetops. Yet despite the hardship of life as a female leopard, she survives for an incredible 17 years, an age few wild leopards live to see, and in the process, provides us with a greater understanding of this extraordinary species.

On the Great Plains below Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya, lions attack Maasai cattle, as they have for hundreds of years. And the Maasai warriors have hunted them in return so that now only about 2,000 remain in the country. If their numbers drop any lower, their populations will not be sustainable. Now the Maasai elders and chiefs are recognizing that the threat to the lions is also a threat to their way of life, and have forbidden the warriors to hunt them. National Geographic captures firsthand the struggle of these modern-day warriors, who are reinventing their traditions to help save the lions they once prided themselves on killing.

Naturalist Casey Anderson and his longtime friend and cat expert, Tyler Johnerson, set out to track one of North America's most elusive ghosts: the mountain lion. Armed with specialized camera technology, Casey and Tyler hope to document "never before seen" footage of mountain lions living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Aided by Tyler's keen hound dogs, the same strategy employed by leading cat researchers, Tyler and Casey get hot on the heels of this formidable and cunning predator - an animal capable of jumping vertically nearly twenty feet in a single leap and taking prey much larger than its distant relation, the bobcat.

American Cougar tells a unique story of a community of cougars whose skills are illustrated and tested as they struggle to survive in the severe landscape of the Northern Rocky Mountains. A determined team of researchers, lead by houndsman and researcher Boone Smith, mount grueling expeditions in attempts to gain precious scientific data. The story features F51, a young crafty female who makes her way through the winter, but is tested as she struggles to bring her unborn litter to a healthy birth after a cruel winter. The matron, wise F109, carries the key to crucial scientific data, but she's a ghost, and a true master of escape.

Caught on film for the first time three cheetahs are brutally attacked by two male lions.