Planet Earth: Great Plains

Somehow it escaped my notice that I missed an installment of Planet Earth, namely the seventh episode, entitled “Great Plains.” David Attenborough authoritatively informs the audience that the great irony about the earth’s open plains is that, while they seem at first to be eerily empty and quiet, they support the greatest gatherings of wild life on the planet. The reason for this is grass, which covers a quarter of the world’s land. The Central Asian steppe alone extends one-third of the globe. Bear in mind, though, that the inhabitants of the open plains are exposed to the elements – thunder and rain, wildfires, dust swirls and scorching heat or the arctic conditions of the tundra. The Great Plains, moreover, witness some of the largest migration on the planet. For instance, in Outer Mongolia, two million gazelle gather so that the females can birth their young together out in the open. A similar number of wilder beast herd on the East African savanna. Annually, five million snow geese return from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian tundra. Nesting on the ground, they are an easy prey for the Arctic fox, who steals eggs and buries some for later. Further south, wolves prowl the tundra hunting for caribou in the vast emptiness.

But the most numerous migration on land must be the swarm of one and a half billion Red-billed Quelea birds that flock over Africa’s savanna. On the North American prairie, bison have returned in large numbers, after human hunting had nearly driven the wild animal to extinction. Among colorful summer flowers on the grasslands of South Africa live ostriches and antelopes, while the long grass plains of India is home to elephants and rhinoceros, as well as pygmy hogs. The highest open plains is the Tibetan Plateau, home of the wild yak and wild ass, the pika (a relative of the rabbit, though it looks more like a chinchilla or hamster) and the Tibetan fox. The final sequence shows us African bush elephants marching through the parched savanna in search of a watering hole, which they must share with a pride of hungry lions. But, after a season of drought, rain will flood the plains and grass returns. Perhaps I have been spoiled by all the other marvelous nature documentaries I have recently seen, but I was not immensely impressed by this particular episode.