I remember watching Life on Earth, hosted by the wonderful David Attenboroughginsen when I was a child. (Thank god it wasn't on a channel with commercials, otherwise verboten.) His knowledge and quiet manner pinched me every time I witnessed him chatting about the wildlife in a place I'd never seen before. His commentary on the natural world was second to none, and I learned about things like the Bowerbird and how a lion likes to bite at the neck of a weakling for the quickest kill.
There is a new kid on the block of nature programming. It's called Planet Earth (see), and it's fucking wonderful. Apparently filmed painstakingly over five years, in environs you can't even imagine, I have flitted from the transformation of the New England seasonal forest to the depths of the ocean in never-before-seen records of our beautiful, natural world.
I've seen the Russian Lynx, a vertical posture phalanx of the Sand Dollars off the California coast, the Dumbo Octopus (my new favourite), the Great White catching a seal so fast that they needed car-crash cameras to film it, ducklings leaping ten feet from the nest to the leaf-covered ground below, the Vampire Squid replete with bioluminescent decoys the likes of which not very many of us have ever seen, the night-blossoming Baobab in Madagascar...
It's simply tremendous and beautiful, and I intend to buy it for every small(ish) child I know.
There is a new kid on the block of nature programming. It's called Planet Earth (see), and it's fucking wonderful. Apparently filmed painstakingly over five years, in environs you can't even imagine, I have flitted from the transformation of the New England seasonal forest to the depths of the ocean in never-before-seen records of our beautiful, natural world.
I've seen the Russian Lynx, a vertical posture phalanx of the Sand Dollars off the California coast, the Dumbo Octopus (my new favourite), the Great White catching a seal so fast that they needed car-crash cameras to film it, ducklings leaping ten feet from the nest to the leaf-covered ground below, the Vampire Squid replete with bioluminescent decoys the likes of which not very many of us have ever seen, the night-blossoming Baobab in Madagascar...
It's simply tremendous and beautiful, and I intend to buy it for every small(ish) child I know.