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.

Life: Primates

Of the family tree of life, there is one branch that perhaps has the greatest fascination for us humans – and that’s the one on which apes and monkeys swing. This final installment of BBC Life explores the world of primates, some of the most intelligent, curious, social and quarrelsome in the animal kingdom. A troop of some 400 Hamadryas baboons encounter a rival troop in a violent clash on the Ethiopian plains, stealing females and settling old scores. Japanese Macaques, the most northerly living monkeys, have learned to evade the bitter winter cold by lounging in thermal springs of Yamanouchi Valley, a privilege held by females and their young. In the Congo, the silverback Gorilla warns off other males through vocalization and beating his chest, while spectral tarsiers, with their large eyes and large ears, communicate with piercing calls to warn against danger and to return stragglers. Ring-tailed Lemurs in Madagascar use scent not only to mark their territory but also to prepare for mating, as males approach a female in heat by waiving their furry tail rubbed with odor.

Female Phayre’s leaf monkeys help rear each other’s young as long as it retains its bright orange fur. A female orangutan will raise her young for nine years by passing on the skills to survive in the rainforest of Sumatra. The most southerly living non-human primates are the chacma baboons of the South African Cape Peninsula, who collect shark eggs among seaweed on the lowest tide. White-face capuchins hammer clams on mangrove roots along Costa Rica’s coast to exhaust the muscle and the shell opens, while their cousins, brown-tufted capuchins in Brazil, use hammer stones as tool to crack open palm nuts. However, our closest ancestor, the Chimpazees have improved their tool use even further. For, in West African Guinea, they dip twigs to gather ants, strip palm leaves as pestle to crack the nutritious palm heart, and use stone anvils on which to crack nuts without breaking the kernel. I hardly need to repeat that I adore this show. It’s a pity this was the last episode, but it certainly was a worthy end to one of the most excellent nature documentaries ever produced.

Life: Plants

In the struggle for survival plants are perhaps even more inventive than animals devising solutions to the challenges of life. Unlike all other living creatures, plants require light to thrive – due to photosynthesis. While the rainforest would seem the most prosperous place for plants to live, they need to grow from the shades of the forest floor toward the light beyond the canopy. And if you cannot grow, you must climb, using adhesive pads or sharp claws or swirling coils. While bamboo can grow some 90 feet in just as many days, bristlecone pines grow over centuries at altitudes of several thousand feet – some being as old as five thousand years, the oldest living things on earth. To feed, the sundew uses sticky droplets on its tentacles to ensnare mosquitoes emerging from boggy waters, while the venus flytrap locks insects within their clambshell leaves. In the Antarctic cold of Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, the richea produces nectar in the sun’s warmth to lure birds into pollinating the flowers. Even cleverer is the sandhill milkweed in the spring meadows of Florida, which defends itself from the onslaught of monarch caterpillars by spilling latex drops from its veins; yet once they pupate into butterflies, they, too, cannot resist the flowers’ nectar. But the most manipulative of plants enslave their pollinators, like the heliconia in Dominica, which forces the purple-throated Carib hummingbird, with its long curved beak to return time and again, by carefully rationing the amount of nectar.

They say the apple never falls far from the tree, but plants have contrived ingenious strategies for dispersing their seeds – so as to avoid competing with their offspring for space (think of helicopter seeds). The brunsvigia is carried along by the wind, stem and all, cartwheeling across the South African desert and casting about seeds. In Borneo, the alsomitra produces a ball-sized pod with seeds that glide hundreds of feet through the air on wafer-thin wings. The saguro cactus can survive the extreme conditions of Arizona’s Sorona desert by flowering in the cool of the night to attract bats, while its sweet fruits attract doves, tortoise and ants that will disperse its seeds miles away. On Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea, dragon blood trees survive with their bizarre shape (a thick trunk with branches that wave out in an upside down parasol) as their leaves catch drops of the occasional morning mist; while the desert rose has a hardy bulbous trunk that stores water. Mangroves can even stand the saltwater tides because their warty pores filter most of the salt and breathe in air when they are exposed. And grasses have created such a bond with one particular animal, that human civilization would have been impossible without wheat and rice. The entire episode is a feast of variegated hues, sunflowers, foxgloves, bromeliads and orchids. To capture the life of plants, the program uses extraordinary time-lapse photography, sometimes inventing new techniques in the process. And as a bonus, the backdrop features stunning footage of starry desert nights and aurora borealis. Truly, this is a must watch!

Life: Creatures of the Deep

Life on Earth began in the Ocean Deep – and some of the most ancient life forms on our planet are marine invertebrates, the topic of this installment of the most astonishing nature documentary so far produced. We return to the hydrothermal vents (seen in Planet Earth) around which it all began. It is there that Pompeii worms survive the scalding, volcanic heat, together with white crabs and enormous tube worms. When krill rise up at night from the abysmal depth to the surface in the Sea of Cortez off Mexico to feed on plankton, they attract shoals of predatory sardines that in turn attract hundreds of Humboldt squid that herd the fish as a pack and grab their meal with dangerous tentacles. Underneath the Antarctic sea ice in springtime life flourishes in a colorful garden of starfish, sea urchins, and nemertean worms. A sight so incredible, it’s almost unearthly! Then there’s the huge fried-egg jellyfish hunting among a swarm of 100,000 Aurelia jellyfish, using its tentacles like harpoons to catch prey. Another amazing scene shows hundreds of thousands of armor-plated spider crabs marching to the shallows off South Australia to molt their old shells and to mate enthusiastically while they’re together in such vast numbers. But then they are under threat from a stingray that is so choosy it only catches the softest shelled crabs.

The highly intelligent cuttlefish (who have the largest brain size relative to its body among invertebrates), the chameleons of the sea, can quickly change the color of their skin, flashing different colors, not just as warning or camouflage, but also deception – for instance to mimic the color of a female, confusing a larger male, and allowing the smaller one to mate on the sly. We also revisit the 14-ft. Pacific giant octopus off the coast of British Columbia that sacrifices her life caressing her only hatch of a hundred thousand eggs to protect them from algae and fish. The struggle for survival proves itself, again, when a large sun-starfish feeds on her deceased body, gets trapped by spiny sea urchins, and comes under attack from a king crab that amputates one of its arms. In sheer awe, we witness a coral reef forming around the rusty hulk of a shipwreck, feeding and fighting, and spawning after the November full moon. The program ends with the most wondrous splendor of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on earth. I can only repeat myself: watch the series!

Life: Hunters & Hunted

With the next episode of BBC Life we return to the world of mammals, focusing this time on the struggle for survival, the never-ending fight between predator and prey. David Attenborough informs us that because most hunts actually fail, what makes mammals so remarkable is their adaptability, their ability to continually devise and revise new strategies. We revisit some favorite scenes, such as the three cheetah brothers hunting together for zebras and ostrich at the foot of Mt. Kenya; the bottlenose dolphins corralling a shoal of leaping fish by stirring up rings of mud in Florida Bay; chital deer and gray langur monkeys warning each other in Bandhavgarh, India, of an imminent attack by a Bengal tiger. It’s a great pleasure to see these beautiful scenes again.

Nevertheless, the new footage in this episode isn’t any less impressive: young stoats playing wild games to practice stalking, chasing, ambushing in the English countryside; unbelievable slow-motion capture of greater bulldog bats fishing in a stream in the rain forest of Belize; the cutest ibex kids learning to bound along the precipitous cliffs above the Dead Sea to outwit cunning foxes; a dozen Ethiopian wolves, high up in the mountains, hunting separately (rather than in packs), while the dominant female guards her litter; bears feasting on the spawning salmon run along the Alaskan coast; orcas snatching stray elephant seals off the Falklands, but only a single female knows how to catch a seal pup inside the pool along the shore. Truly a must see!

Life: Insects

Before saying, “ew, gross,” consider that this is BBC Life, one of the most astounding nature documentaries you have ever seen. But, yes, this time the subject is about insects. We are privileged to view – up-close and in magnificent detail – ants, flies, bugs, beetles, bees, butterflies, stick insects, praying mantis, and vast clouds of mayflies, all in their natural surroundings. Some of the highlights include a stag beetle climbing 80 feet up a tree trunk in Chilean Patagonia, hurling male rivals with his enormous jaw horns to find a mate; millions of alkali flies in California’s hyper-saline Mono Lake eating algae under water, living unchallenged until phalarope birds stop over on their winter migration; a swarm of bees defending their colony’s honey combs to the death from a sweet-toothed black bear cub; a South African oogpister (Afrikaans for “eye-pisser”) beetle hunting for ants, until they all bite his ankles and drive him off, then firing off formic acid (digested from the ants) to ward off an inquisitive mongoose; a female Japanese red bug feeding her nest until her death, including demanding new arrivals from another mother who failed to provide for her nymphs; huge Dawson’s bees killing each other in rolling brawls over females emerging from their burrows in the desert ground of Australia’s outback; a colony of several million grass-cutter ants in Argentina, carrying blades of grass to their subterranean metropolis where they farm fungus gardens from which they feed themselves; a female damselfly mating within one day of her adult life, while black winged males battle for her favor in southern France, after which she needs to lay her eggs under water, while evading hopping hungry frogs; an astonishing billion monarch butterflies migrating from as far north as Canada’s Lake Erie to hibernate in a small patch of forest high up in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. You have to see it all to believe it! It’s miraculous!

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!

Life: Fish

Part four of BBC’s marvelous nature documentary “Life” is all about fish! The opening shot? Oh ... my ... gawd ... !!! A surfer riding a wave, then the camera zooms out, until we can barely see the guy at the foot of a wave five or six times his height! Wow. Astounding! Naturally we are privileged to witness beautiful underwater shots of rich reefs and their even more vibrant habitants. I was gazing in amazement at sea dragons, sea horses, stargazers and stingrays off the coast of Southern Australia; flying fish soaring above the water on their elongated fins to evade their predators; the tiny rock-climbing goby intend on colonizing the waterfalls of Hawaii; mudskippers excavating deep burrows in the soft Japanese sediment to hide from predators and to lay eggs inside a sealed chamber; convict fish digging a labyrinthine underground tunnel work in the south western Pacific for an extended family of, well, juvenile convicts; the quarrelsome sarcastic fringehead fish aggressively defending his found shell along the colorful Californian coast from an attack by an octopus; a shoal of sailfish (the fastest swimmers of the seven seas) shown in slow motion catching a bait ball of sardines; various sharks and myriads of other fish. Simply stunning!

Life: Mammals

The third installment of BBC’s breathtaking nature documentary “Life” is all about mammals. As always, this show offers astounding images of the Earth’s environments. For that alone it’s worth watching. But this episode also shows us the life, habitat, and behavior of some darn fascinating creatures: a rufous sengi (elephant shrew) in equatorial Africa running for her life; an aye-aye (lemur) on the prowl for food at night in Madagascar; meerkats nodding off on a warm day in the Kalahari Desert; coati, a South American kind of raccoon, rummaging for food in a gang of forty; fruit bats flying in their millions across the Congo forest through a thunderstorm on a full-moon night to Zambia; a clan of spotted hyenas attacking a pride of lions to steal their prey; a Weddell seal, the only mammal able to survive on Antarctica, the most hostile environment on Earth, feeding her youngster while shielding him from a blizzard; millions of reindeer trekking across the Arctic tundra; polar bears competing over the huge carcass of a bowhead whale; and forty-ton humpback whales (the largest animals on earth) rivaling with each other in a heat run for the favor of a single female. Just incredible.

Life: Reptiles & Amphibians

A week or two ago I mentioned the introductory episode of the new BBC nature documentary, Life, once more narrated by David Attenborough. The first proper episode concerns reptiles and amphibians. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the tiniest gecko walking on water without ever sinking; an inch-long pebble toad bouncing like a rubber ball off a rocky cliff when ambushed by a tarantula; a single South-African male bullfrogs digging a channel to save the entire tadpole population in the pool; a basilisk lizard skittering over the river water to avoid get caught by a buzzard; a female chameleon catching beetles with her tongue while looking for a mate in the Namib desert; thousands of male garter snakes competing over women; caimans trapped in pools of a vast Brazilian swamp. And when you’re talking about reptiles, you’re obviously going to talk about Komodo dragons – the largest reptiles in existence. Just how marvelous this show is we learn when we witness a group hunt of these dragons, felling a water buffalo with their venomous bite – a hunt never before captured on film. Need I urge you to check this out? No, I don’t.

Challenges of Life

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there’s a follow-up to BBC’s Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and it’s simply called Life. Oh, boy, oh, boy, am I thrilled about this new series!!! The theme is survival, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s death. This introductory installment focuses on the challenges of life, the spectacular strategies in the struggle to survive. (Note, incidentally, that the phrase “Survival of the Fittest” is not from Darwin’s Origin of Species.) There are so many magnificent moments in this episode: Venus flytraps feasting on flies trapped in her sweet leaves; male stalk-eyed flies fighting over who has the largest, well, stalk; a tiny strawberry poison frog carrying her tadpoles one by one high up a bromeliad tree into the waterpool between its leaves; an ever color-changing chameleon catching praying mantis with its tongue; two grebe birds performing a magnificent dance of courtship; a gruesome scene of a flailed chinstrap penguin sinking to the ocean floor after a leopard seal catches it skittering across broken ice; a school of flying fish escaping an attack by a group of sailfish; bottlenose dolphins stirring up silt in circles to trap a shoal of fish; some two dozen killer whales outwitted by a remarkably agile crabeater seal; a 14-ft. Pacific giant octopus laying a hundred thousand eggs and then starving herself to death while tending to her brood until they hatch; hippopotami fighting for overlordship and the right to mate; three cheetahs felling an ostrich together; and tufted capuchin monkeys cracking large nuts, that they had first peeled and let dry, with a large stone on a rocky surface. Truly awe-inspiring!

Planet Earth: Ocean Deep

BBC’s Blue Planet and Planet Earth are, as far as I know, unsurpassed nature documentary series. I’d reiterate this ad nauseam if I had to, but please watch this show if you at all can. There’s nothing like it, if you enjoy the genre. Really magnificent. So it’s with some sadness that I have to tell you that we’re already at the series end with one more episode ... and what a grand finale this one is! For this last installment, we’re visiting the deep waters of the open ocean and get to see dazzling shots of several schools of hundreds of divine dolphins trapping tons of mackerels into bait balls attacked by sheer water birds from the surface; two-ton manta rays (devilfish) gliding through the night while feasting on baby sailfish; shoals of bait fish swarming around a whale shark as a shield against the predatory yellowfin tuna; and a great many other varieties of shark (such as the whitetip).

The true wonders of the deep, however, are the weirdly alien creatures that dwell deep in the ocean’s strange and dark waters ... sea spider shrimp, saw tooth eel, dumbo octopus, vampire squid, sea urchins, monk fish, spider crabs, isopods, albino squat lobsters, giant tube worms, nautiluses, ocean sunfish, sea turtle, sailfish... I’m always impressed by images of the towering chimneys of hydrothermal vents at the earth’s molten core blasting black clouds of sulfide smoke. Other than that, of course, we get to see colorful coral reefs, the most majestically, gargantuan blue whales, and countless schools of variegated fish. So, please, do yourself a favor and check out this spectacular series. Preferably the U.K. version with David Attenborough’s narration, and not the Sigourney Weaver voice over. Fortunately, there’s a follow up series, called “Life”! So, you’ll be hearing more about that very soon. Be prepared!

Planet Earth: Seasonal Forests

Picture going south from the arctic circle ... and the first living organism you will see is likely to be a tree, then two, three, and more, and suddenly ... a forest! Soon the conifers of the taiga dominate the landscape. If you guessed I’m talking about another Planet Earth episode, you guessed right! Naturally we’re shown marvelous scenes this time around of snow-covered boreal forests, giant redwood trees covered in mist, incredible time-lapse images from space of North America turning red in fall, and the wondrous, nocturnal bloom of the primordial baobab tree.

Furthermore, this episode features a hilariously grotesque moose gnawing on pine needles; a gluttonous wolverine ravaging the cadaver of a caribou; black vultures, grey owls, and mandarin ducks; the mass emergence of the (17-year cycle periodic) magicicadas; squirrels, lemurs, pine martens, adorable pudus (deer) and the cutest codcods (a wild cat); gray langur monkeys feasting on the flowers of the mahuwa tree in India’s teak forest, while chital deer warn them about stalking Bengal tigers; a nearly ethereal lynx wandering in the arctic snow; and once more the majestic Amur leopard (the rarest cat on earth) that we saw in the beginning of this magnificent series!

Planet Earth: Shallow Seas

“Shallow Seas” is the title of the next episode of BBC’s Planet Earth, about the seas surrounding the continents on the fringes of the tectonic plates, and which contain the vast majority of marine life. Naturally, I can only marvel at the superb satellite images of continental shore lines. But the true wonders are found under water: the countless shoals of colorful fish swimming through bountiful coral reefs; sea urchins, star fish, and minute pygmy seahorses butting heads to claim their territory; banded krait snakes teaming up with trevally and goat fish hunting for prey; turtles, sea lions, seals, dolphins, stingrays, and sharks; primordial sirenian sea cows herding on the sea grass meadows in Australia’s Shark Bay; most of all majestic humpback whales singing to each other on their journey from the equator to the arctic sea! Surely by now you’ve downloaded the series or got yourself the DVD set, because this really is a show you can’t afford to miss.

Planet Earth: Jungles

The eighth installment of BBC’s Planet Earth is about jungles. They cover only 3% of the land surface, but are home to about half of the world’s species. (Incidentally, a great argument from nature against any Malthusian complaints about overpopulation!) This time we’re feasted on many beautiful panoramas of the rain forest’s canopy covered in vaporous mist. Additionally, the episode features scenes of decay, moulds, fungi, larvae, ants affected by parasitic spores; a crab spider dangling from its silken threads inside a carnivorous pitcher plant to feed on ant corpses and mosquito larvae; bright green or yellow frogs with bulging eyes, some red or yellow, others blue-veined; elephants, buffalos, hogs and bongos (the antelopes, not the percussive instruments) in the Congo forest; monkeys of all shapes and sizes, swinging from tree to tree, branch to branch, playing and searching for food; the nocturnal colugo (flying lemur) gliding through the rain forest on the island of Borneo; and the magnificent mating dances of the birds of paradise in New Guinea. Perhaps the most astounding and disturbing scenes come at the end when we’re shown how the largest known tribe of chimpanzees is raiding their neighbors’ territory, brutally molesting a young female first and then celebrating their triumph by cannibalistically sharing the carcass of a young male chimp, a gruesome ritual David Attenborough refrains from explaining.

Planet Earth: Ice Worlds

After an episode about deserts, it’s only natural that Planet Earth moves towards the worlds of ice and snow. Our entry into the Antarctic continent is marked by giant cathedrals of ice. We learn that 90% of the Earth’s ice is found on the South Pole and that even at the height of summer just about 3% is not covered in ice or snow, and that is mostly exposed rock at the northern-most peninsula. We witness the splendor of the Midnight Sun and of Aurora Australis. In addition we’re shown a great many magnificent animals: humpback whales harvesting krill in their “net” of bubbles; herds of walruses; “half a ton of mad hairy cow not to be trifled with” also known as muskoxen; polar wolves, foxes, and rabbits; emperor penguins marching almost a hundred miles inland; crane birds from New Mexico raising their chicks in the tundra; petrels preyed on by skuas; and ducks feeding on mussels through permanent holes in the arctic ice. We see more of the polar bear with her two cute cubs the likes of which you’ve never seen. And we also get a glimpse of what lies ahead as more and more of the ice caps melts due to global warming: a male polar bear unable to find firm footing has to resort to swimming. In this new environment, he is remarkably adept! But however well he swims, he cannot go on indefinitely – out in the open ocean, without food, he will drown if he doesn’t find land in time. Fewer polar bears will survive as a result of the changing climate.