All but invisible, the snow leopard waits. On great cliffs across the valley, bharal males fight viciously over mating rights. They neglect to eat. Many are injured. The snow leopard bides its time until nightfall when it will prey on the weak.

December is freezing and bleak in the Rumbak valley of Ladakh, northern India. Five thousand metres up, the air contains only half the oxygen of a breath taken at sea level. On the rain-shadowed northern side of the Himalaya, few plants grow. Much of the landscape is vertical.

Little Hua Mei is an international star. Born at the World Famous San Diego Zoo, her birth was cause for celebration in the United States, China, and around the world. Still, it wasn't simply Hua Mei's birth that made her special, for panda cubs have been born here before. But attempts to keep them alive have always led to disappointment. Hua Mei is different because she survived, the first baby Giant panda ever to thrive in the United States.

Hua Mei's birth is the culmination of an extraordinary behind-the-scenes story which deserves its own place in the spotlight. In a unique collaboration, experts from the U.S. and China have spent years studying panda breeding, behavior, genetics, diet, endocrinology, and ecology. Together, they are struggling to unlock the mysteries of panda reproduction and to restore the precious panda population. Perhaps little Hua Mei will be a key to the puzzle, a bridge to the future. For now, she has become a symbol of hope for her own species and for all the critically endangered species on the planet.

In the film The Singing Apes we follow a researcher, Dr. Björn Merker, in pursuit of gibbon song and behavior in the wild. Our journey takes us through the rainforests in India, Thailand, Borneo, Java and Sumatra. In these virgin forests we meet with six different gibbon species.