The Fang & Fin Hour

The baby moose was stuck in the mud at the edge of Watts Lake in Alberta; Marlin Perkins was nosing his shiny red canoe through the cattails and saw the problem. Thwuck, thwuck, thwuck -- Perkins, in hip-high rubber waders slogged through the sludge, grabbed the mooselet around the rump and pulled it free. Next problem: How now to get Perkins out of the mud? Tooth-&-Claw. One rubber wading boot may still be mired on the shore of Watts Lake, testimony to the way that Marlin Perkins, 59, director of the St. Louis Zoo, gets into the act in each weekly episode of NBC's Wild King dom. Last Sunday's "Cattail Country" also had Perkins skimming around the lake in an airboat helping Government conservationists on a duck-banding roundup; on the same show Assistant Jim Fowler was in the Grand Tetons watching a beaver repair a broken dam and following a wet mink on a muskrat hunt.

There was nothing Disneyish about the goings-on -- no frogs dancing the frug, no kissing coots. When a leopard set out to stalk a wildebeest in a recent episode, the victim all too surely was brought to earth. "If you are going to show the truth," said Kingdom's Producer Don Meier, "you cannot avoid the proposition that tooth-and-claw battles take place every day in the wild kingdom. We would be doing a dis service to our viewers if we glossed that over." Realism has paid off. Wild Kingdom, carried on 185 NBC stations, stands a few points ahead of its nearest com petition, the American Football League game of the week. But filming wildlife in the veld is dicey business at best. Expeditions have fanned out to Africa, India, South America, Australia, Alaska and Canada for this season's footage, and 12,000 ft. of film are required for every 1,000-ft. program: "An animal does not usually do the same thing twice," explains Meier. "You can't say to your actor, 'O.K., today you walk up and lick the stump.' "

Seismic Rumble. A tireless field man himself, Perkins accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on an expedition to hunt down the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas, returned with the disappointing news that the big tracks had been made by foxes and other small animals, whose imprints subsequently melted into scary giant forms. Jim Fowler, 34, the apotheosis of Jungle Jim, spent a month in Africa putting together a documentary on elephants. A television first for an upcoming Kingdom show: Fowler's recordings of elephant stomach rumblings, which are seismic.

By sticking to zoological fact and staying clear of zoos, Wild Kingdom has made aficionados of those who know best, the zoo keepers themselves. "I catch it as often as I can," says Zoo Designer Robert Everly. "It touches bases all around the world. It is very earthy. And it is good."

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