Trees, surely among the most magnificent of all living things.
Some of the largest organisms on Earth, dwarfing all others
and these are the tallest of them all.
The deciduous and coniferous woodlands that grow in the seasonal parts of our planet
are the most extensive forests on Earth.
Their sheer extent stuns the imagination.
The barren snows of the Arctic.
A thousand miles from the North Pole and heading south.
This is the very first place that trees can grow.
To begin with, the conifers are sparse but soon they dominate the land.
This is the taiga forest.
There are as many trees here as in all the world's rainforests combined.
The taiga circles the globe and contains a third of all the trees on Earth.
It produces so much oxygen that it refreshes the atmosphere
of the entire planet.
At the taiga's northern extent,
the growing season can last for just one month a year.
It can take 50 years for a tree to get bigger than a seedling.
It's a silent world where little stirs.
But there are occasional signs of life, stories written in the snow.
The prints of an Arctic fox and the hare it might have been stalking.
A female polar bear and her two cubs.
Some animals are so difficult to glimpse that they're like spirits.
One could live a lifetime in these woods and never see a lynx.
The cat must roam hundreds of miles in search of prey
and may never visit the same patch of forest twice.
It's the very essence of wilderness.
With so few prey animals here, life for a hunter is particularly hard.
Creatures are scarce because few can eat conifer needles.
The moose is an exception.