The sights, smells, and sounds of the deep jungle; a giant moth with a foot-long tonque, an oversized tarantula that feast on chickens, and a band of chimpanzees capable of murder are just some of the headline acts viewers can look forward to in the upcoming PBS "Nature" mini-series

AS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER of "Nature," public television's longest-running natural history series. I weed through hundreds of documentary proposals each year. Some, like the idea for a film on "homicidal animals," merit an instant pass--at least for our series. For me, the best ideas are the ones that grab me from the get-go. That's how it was with the proposal for a mini-series on the jungle. It immediately conjured up all kinds of intriguing images. As series producer David Allen says, "'Unusual' and 'elusive' are the second names of almost all the creatures in the jungle, and our show is full of these moments." There is the first-ever clear image of a Sumatran tiger; as well as an infamous, giant moth with a tongue over 12 inches long; a bird that does the Michael Jackson moonwalk in the forests of Central America; a new species of tarantula fabled to eat chickens; a 10-ton killer tree; the first-ever monkeys to be discovered using tools; and chimps that murder. These are just some of the headline acts.

The world's jungles (which many people now refer to as the rain forest) are the Earth's most complex, diverse, and, quite possibly, valuable ecosystems. Although vain forests occupy less than seven percent of the planet's land surface, they contain at least half, and perhaps as much as two-thirds, of all species. Intriguingly, the forest canopy--virtually unknown until a few years ago--remains largely unsurveyed, despite the fact that the so-called "high frontier" is home to 40% of all plant species. Despite my enthusiasm, I did not merely want to tell the story of an ecosystem. What truly sold me--what I am sure really will grab viewers--is the story of research scientists at work, hacking their way through the undergrowth, flying through the forest canopy, and observing the behavior of such animals as gorillas and orangutans in a way that never has been done before. At its heart, Thirteen/WNET's "Deep Jungle," which airs April 17 and 24 and May 1 on PBS, is a classic adventure story.

This project, easily our most ambitious to date, presented enormous challenges--and resulted in startling new information. "Deep Jungle" producers tackled questions scientists have pondered for decades, from the origins of evolution to the search for new drugs to fight AIDS. Getting answers--while tracking elusive tigers, rarely-seen elephants, and very shy gorillas--took a core team of about seven people, as well as a flexible crew of cameramen, location fixers, soundmen, rope-riggers, balloonists, and scientists all working on different shoots, depending upon their individual expertise. All told, "Deep Jungle" involved more than 20 filming trips to 15 different countries, with each excursion lasting at least four weeks. The largest of the rain forests is in the Amazon basin of South America, which contains roughly two-thirds of the world's surviving tropical rain forests. Over half of all the world's species, including mammals, birds, lizards, and reptiles, live in the forest canopy, which is home to everything from jaguars, sloths, and monkeys to tree frogs and eagles. As you can imagine, just getting to some of these places, never mind finding and filming the animals that call them home, required enormous dedication--and luck.

Picture your last big family vacation. Remember how much luggage everyone brought, and what a nightmare it was getting through the airport--and then all the way to the hotel? Consider this: Each shoot for "Deep Jungle" meant hauling around more than 1,000 pounds of gear through a rain forest, with nary a skycap in sight. Filming the tigers in Sumatra involved a 10-hour trek into the forest, during which time crew members crossed the same river seven times and maneuvered several miles of precipitous jungle gorge. Today, only about 500 Sumatran tigers survive in the wild. Poachers sell their pelts for $3,000 and even their penises for $150. On that shoot, the task of finding and filming these endangered animals fell to researcher Jeremy Holden--who has been studying tigers for more than 10 years but who never has gotten but a glimpse of one--and wildlife cameraman Gavin Thurston. Together, the two men had the technology and the forest know-how to film the tiger once and for all. To increase the odds, the team set up six different motion sensitive cameras, each one triggered to record when the animal passes in front of an infrared beam. The cameras were primed to operate for weeks at a time, and to record anything that moved, day or night. While each had a range of about 10 meters, a single tiger's territory is about half the size of New York City, making this shoot one of the most ambitious projects ever attempted with this type of technology.

High-tech equipment increasingly is being used by jungle researchers to open new windows on hidden worlds. Even so, when Holden and Thurston attempted the first clear images of a Sumatran Tiger, they knew success was highly unlikely. There was one ray of light--the small chance the tiger would follow their tracks to check out their movements, and that is exactly what happened. A large male (judging by the paw prints) walked right in front of the camera the very first night, but the camera failed to work. Six traps and six weeks later, near the last day of filming, it happened again, and this time Thurston got the shots.

Why do we need to pay attention to the rain forests? It's simple. The jungle's biggest planetary job is as the great engine of one of the most basic and important biological processes--photosynthesis, which absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As "Deep Jungle" demonstrates, the Earth's rain forests systematically are being cleared. Indonesia alone is responsible for a quarter of their annual disappearance. The wild populations of the orangutan--Asia's only great ape--have halved in a decade, and appear all but doomed. There are an estimated 15,000 remaining.

Here at "Nature," we want to help viewers understand how the natural world works, to help them care about it, and maybe even want to protect it. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to let them look right into the eyes of the animals that populate that world. That is not always an easy task, especially when dealing with animals as mysterious as lowland gorillas, which are facing extinction due to large-scale commercial poaching and habitat loss. As imposing as these 6-foot, 400-pound animals can be, it is interesting to note that gorillas thrive on family, and they require companionship and attention in order to live. It has been said that the first gorillas captured died of loneliness. One of the gorillas' greatest champions is Italian primatologist Chloe Cipolletta. "Deep Jungle" followed Cipolletta as she first approached two of the Byaka's finest trackers, Nbanda and Ngombo, and asked for their help in leading her to the gorillas of Rwanda. At first, they thought she was crazy. Eventually, they agreed. The cameras are there when they see the first evidence: a single imprint of a gorilla knuckle in the dirt. The resulting footage--which follows Cipolletta as she gains the trust of these jungle beings--is very special. The researcher is one of only a handful of people who has managed to befriend a group of lowland gorillas. In the end, the film is as much about the relationship that develops among Cipolletta, the pygmy trackers, and the gorillas as it is about the science.

As with any natural history film, technology was vitally important. In some cases, our cameras found what the naked eye could not. During filming of the Sumatran tigers in the leech-infested jungle, scientists and the film crew were amazed to see bats swooping about the stalking cat. By carefully inspecting the low-light images, they were able to discover that the bats actually were swooping down to pick insects off the unsuspecting tiger's body. To capture such images requires the latest of camera technologies. Throughout filming, the stiffest challenge was shooting in extremely low-light conditions in dense rain forest, which mandated use of high-speed infrared cameras. For example, to see the flapping wings of a manakin (which beat six times faster than a hummingbird) necessitated a 500-frames-per-second camera (usual speed: 25).

Filming under such conditions also mandated more than a little finesse. Cinematographers like David Allen followed scientists up 150-foot trees, where they perched on platforms to await the action. On the ground in Peru, filmmakers crawled on hands and knees after snakes while using low wide angles and straight scopes. Capturing the gorillas required using the quietest equipment possible, which was where digi-cams shone. Shooting bees as they pollinated flowers meant strict attention to depth of field, which required massive infusions of light. At the other end of the spectrum, the skittish Darwin's moth would flit away instantly if even a hint of white light appeared, requiring use of infrared cameras. Yet, no matter how specialized the gear, it is worthless unless an expert is behind the lens. Luckily for us, everyone on the crew brought specialist wildlife filming skills that included living in, climbing through, and understanding the jungle.

"Deep Jungle" would not have been possible without the help of an enormous number of people. Some are well-respected scientists and researchers like Cipolletta, and some are not. A local Brazilian knew everything there was to know about nut-cracking monkeys long before the scientists did. Moreover, during a hunting sequence with the Byaka, Allen made fast friends with an ex-truck driver from New York City who had been living with the pygmies for more than 10 years. Still, the experts in the field proved invaluable, particularly when they came equipped with Superman-like abilities. Take canopy researcher Roman Dial, who performs his job 229 feet above ground--at the top of the tall rain forest trees. Using a cross-bow, Roman can move from tree to tree--staying up for days at a time. The subject of his research is not the wildlife, but the trees themselves. He believes they are the key to a better understanding of how the jungle works. Step one was to make a map of this new world, which he created using a laser beam, and a global positioning system linked to a computer to measure the volume of the jungle's trees and to plot the spaces between them. His technique turns complex vegetation into the first ever 3D-jungle map, which can take us on a virtual tour through the canopy. One of the most unusual experts we consulted during filming was Martin Nicholas, aka the real "Spider-Man." By day, Nicholas sells water treatment systems. In his spare time he is a tropical spider enthusiast. Using the "spider-cam," Nicholas set out to track down the legend of a chicken-eating spider with legs as thick as a man's finger--which he believes is some kind of unrecorded species of tarantula. While there are 800 known kinds of tarantulas, even the biggest only eat insects and small amphibians. So, while the idea of spiders dragging chickens round the backyards of Peru sounded absurd, it was enough to spur an enthusiast like Nichols--along with our cameras--halfway across the globe.

Perhaps the single most important members of the crew were the local trackers. Their expertise came in particularly handy in the rain forests of central Africa, where even the largest of all animals is famous for its ability to appear for a moment, and then melt back into the dense tangle of leaves. About all we do know about forest elephants is that there are hundreds of thousands of them. However, what they do in the forest, or where they go, largely remains a mystery. Until now. Thanks to Byaka pygmies, who once guided ivory hunters into the jungle by the boatload, biologist Steve Blake of the Wildlife Conservation Society managed to locate the elephants, who run away the moment they are spotted. To get Blake and team vet Mike Kock close to the giant jungle beasts without getting them killed by a 5,500-pound, charging elephant was a job that fell to a tracker named Mambelume, who turned out to be pretty handy with a tranquilizer gun. In the end, "Nature" captured the crew on an important, pioneering mission to place tracking collars on the elusive forest elephant. The 30-pound collars act like a mobile phone attached to a GPS. Twice a day, they beam the elephants' location via satellite to the Internet where the animals' journey will be plotted every day for two years. In time, we will solve the mystery of where the elephants go in the forests of the Congo.

While the science and research we uncover in "Deep Jungle" is indeed fascinating, for me, it is the people we feature that make the series come "alive. In true Indiana Jones style, archaeologists Rene Munoz and Charles Golden tramped through the jungles of Guatemala into an area where, for years, civil war had kept researchers away. While seeking lost civilizations, Munoz and Golden encountered dense jungle, inhospitable insects, and a strange building more than 1,000 years old, a fragment of the Mayan civilization. In the forests of Uganda, Africa, primatologist David Watts looked for the origins of politics and warfare in chimps. In Central America, Kim Bostwick discovered the Red Capped Manikin, and learned the secret of a peculiar dance. We went along with Phil deVries--the "bug guy"--off the East coast of Africa, to the Island of Madagascar, where he has been hunting for an infamous rain forest denizen, a creature that is legendary in the annals of jungle exploration. It is an extraordinary giant moth so bizarre that, at first, no one even believed it could exist. But deVries found it--by first locating a very special flower, an orchid that seemed to defy the laws of nature. The story started, actually, way back in 1862, when naturalist Charles Darwin examined this unusual flower that had everyone baffled. The flower hid its nectar at the bottom of a long narrow tube, seemingly making it inconceivable that any feeding insect ever could reach it. Darwin, however, famously predicted that somewhere in Madagascar there must be a gigantic moth with a tongue 12 inches long. Darwin's peers ridiculed him. Some 150 years later, deVries rediscovered the famous Comet orchid high in a tree--and "Nature" was there. The scientist was certain it would appear in the dead of night, so he rigged an infrared camera high in the tree. Again, as with any natural history film, luck was as important as skill. While hawk moths have 15,000 scent receptors and can pick up smells from long distances, it's a big jungle out there. Was he successful? Moreover, did the "spidercam" capture the freakish spider? Are there really such things as "moonwalking" birds? To find out, you'll have to tune in to "Deep Jungle."

Fred Kaufman is executive producer of the PBS series "Nature," which is produced by Thirteen/WNET New York.

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