Life: Birds

When we return to BBC’s nature documentary Life, the subject this time are birds. We witness again the magnificent dance of courtship performed by Clark’s grebes on the waters of Lake Oregon; a humming bird is shown in slow motion to view his rapid wing beats while he is hovering in the air of the Peruvian Andes to catch a female’s attention by waiving the flags at the end of his spatuletail; an enormous lammergeier is soaring through the air of Ethiopia’s Simien mountains at 15,000 feet, grabbing bones left over after griffon vultures devoured a carcass, then smashing the bones onto rocks so that he can swallow the fractures; red-billed tropicbirds marauded by imposing Man O’ War frigatebirds to steal their catch off Little Tobago in the Caribbean; most of the entire Atlantic red knots population resting on their flight from Argentina to Canada in the Delaware Bay so as to feed on stray eggs of horse-shoe crabs coming ashore with the highest springtide; flamingos nesting in Kenya’s caustic soda lakes; penguins climbing clumsily on the ash covered glaciers of Antarctica’s Deception Island only to search for their chicks among a 150,000 birds; pelicans on Dassen Island off the South African coast feeding gannet chicks to their own offspring; Wyoming sage grouse strutting their feathers while puffing their chest to impress the females; and if we’re talking about impressive feathers, we cannot overlook the beautifully flamboyant birds of paradise; but what struck me most was the sweetly artistic bowers (hut-shaped seductions parlors) colorfully designed by the Vogelkop bowerbirds in New Guinea – and in the special feature at the end we learn it took the team three weeks to catch the mere seconds of the bowerbirds mating. Certainly well worth watching!