Liz Bonnin talks about her Alaskan adventure
Presenters Matt Baker, Liz Bonnin and Steve Backshall on heading to America’s largest state for its wildlife ‘summer feast’
For most of the year, Alaska is an icecovered wilderness where animals struggle to find enough food to survive, but for a few weeks every summer, the region explodes into life as the temperature climbs.
The annual salmon migration, where 300 million fish swim from the ocean to their spawning grounds hundreds of miles inland, attracts a host of predators and they’re all desperate to eat as much as they can while they have the chance.
With bears, wolves, eagles and many more species all getting in on the act, there’s plenty going on and Countryfile presenter Matt Baker will be bringing us all the action in Wild Alaska Live on BBC1 on two evenings this week.
‘The salmon go on an amazing journey,’ says Matt, 39. ‘After months of waiting, everything happens at once in the summer. We thought the best way of showing people at home the scale of this natural phenomenon was to follow it live.’
Matt will be based in the Tongass National Forest in Southern Alaska, while his co-presenters Liz Bonnin and Steve Backshall will be heading even further into the wilderness.
In the North Pacific Ocean, Steve, 44, will follow walrus, orca, and humpback whales as they hunt salmon at the start of their journey, and
Liz, 44, is travelling to the wildest part of Alaska, the Katmai National Park, to watch bears and wolves in their natural habitat.
‘Liz is going to the middle of nowhere and
Steve will be abseiling down the side of a glacier to take a closer look at what’s going on in the ocean,’ says Matt. ‘I’m a little bit jealous of them both!’
Here Matt, Liz and Steve tell us more about the animals they’re hoping to see...
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