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3/10 - Mammals

This series just keeps getting better. There's no shortage of beautiful footage - a galloping sengi (aka elephant shrew) is one of the stars tonight - but for me it comes alive when it's at its ugliest. Last week, the komodo-versus-water-buffalo encounter was gruesome, but it's equalled by this week's set-piece showdown between hyenas and lions. First, a pride of lions bully a lone hyena away from their kill, lashing out with their claws and snapping their blood-stained jaws. At this point you expect the hyena to slink away suitably chastened, but no, she calls her mates before returning mob-handed and taking on the lions. What follows isn't pretty. To call the look on the lions' faces "cheesed off", as the hyenas finally force them away, would just about cover it. It's one of many brilliant scenes. Mammals are the theme, starting with the marvellous Weddell seal of Antarctica (which has an oddly human-sounding call, like a drunken football fan shouting "Yay!") and progressing via reindeer, meerkats and elephants with poor parenting skills to the mating contest of the humpback whale - the most massive battle in all of nature.