Saturday Morning Documentary: Echo: An Unforgettable Elephant

Alright, this is my last BBC Natural World episode, so no more David Attenborough and nature at least for the time being.  The documentary episode follows the journey and life of Echo, an African elephant and the matriarch of a family of elephants.  Using older footage taken in the ’80s as flashbacks to her earlier life, we get a very intimate and fascinating look at what we discover is a very special elephant.

Echo, named so because of the echo on the tracking device researchers put on her collar many years ago, has been through a lot.  She’s given birth over 5 times and one of the baby elephants has trouble walking for three days.  As David Attenborough explains through his as usual fantastic narration, other elephant mothers would have left their young to die while they went in search for food and water.  But Echo stays with her child, urging him to stand on his legs, and when he does, you can’t help but hold your breath as it looks like he’s about to do it.  Great cinematography and story.

However, Echo is dying.  After her natural death, a new leader needs to take over.  Will the lessons she taught her children and her grandchildren be enough to help them survive one of the worst droughts in area’s history?

More than anything, the episode is and feels like a biography of the legacy of this special, intelligent elephant.  Her death impacts not only her family but the researchers who had spent decades studying, observing, and befriending the animal, and reminds us of humans’ roots to the Earth.

Echo, largest elephant, with Enid, one of her daughters, and her newborn struggling to walk

Saturday Morning Documentary: BBC Natural World: Africa’s Dragon Mountain

In South Africa, there’s a long chain of mountains known as the Drankensberg, or Dragon Mountain.  Here in this somewhat harsh yet somewhat green landscape, a type of African antelope called the Eland roam.  At first glance, it looks like the Eland are out of place in the colder, grassy valleys and hills of the Dragon Mountain and should be instead in the African savannah, but as we find out, there is much grass and food to be found here.  At the same time, though, dangers are everywhere: jackals, vultures, but even deadlier is the weather. If it rains too much, the soil is diluted and the nutrients are lost from the grass.  This forces the herds of Elands to navigate up and through the mountains, constantly in search of food.

This is the focus of most of the film.  From time to time, it will also mention and show other creatures in the area such as ice rats and baboons, which are interesting too.  It’s only at the end of the film with the help of a helicopter do we really get a grasp of how far the Elands have trekked — their paths etched along the green mountainsides, going miles on end.

Cool documentary, even without the help of awesome David Attenborough narrating.  Who knew antelope could actually be kind of interesting?

Elands on Dragon Mountain

Saturday Morning Documentary: BBC Natural World: The Dolphins of Shark Bay

Yet another episode of Natural World, this is about a family of Bottlenose dolphins living in a bay in northern Aussieland.  Puck, mother of already 8 children, is pregnant again with what will probably be her last.  She and her baby face dangers in the quiet waters though, because of, as you may have guessed, sharks.  Tiger sharks come to the waters for a few months during the year to feast on dolphin young and dewgongs (all I could think about when they were talking about dewgongs was the Pokemon…).  Samu, the baby dolphin, then faces challenges like adapting to the water, breathing, hunting, and the possibility of getting separated from his mother.

I don’t really have much else to say about this episode other than that it was another well-made, well-filmed, high def. work from the BBC.  And dolphins!  Yay!  What’s not to love about them?

Samu on top, and Puck

Saturday Morning Documenty: BBC Natural World: Panda Makers

Okay, so Panda Makers doesn’t sound as cool as Monkey-Eating Eagle but at least it lives up to its name.  And if you like pandas, there’s plenty of OMG-I’m-dying-from-cuteness! in this episode of Natural World.

Because of the endagerment of giant pandas, folks in a city in China started a breeding program consisting of raising 300 pandas in captivity and then releasing them into the wild in the hopes of increasing the population.  This, of course, is controversial because, as David Attenborough (YES!!!!) explains, many captivity breeding programs around the world have failed and some people are arguing that all the money and time being spent on the pandas could be used to protect or save a different species.  However, consider the alternative: doing nothing and letting the panda population slowly become overwhelmed by humans.  It’s worth a try, right?

The footage, as usual, is fantastic.  We get right up close to lots of pandas in the captivity as well as some in the wild.  There’s a tense scene with a female in a cage who is ready to mate but she, along with the male she is set up with, don’t seem to be able to get the hang of it and start to get frustrated, leading to some aggression.  At one point, there’s also footage of a live panda birth, which frankly surprised me as the baby panda suddenly popped out, slippery and squealing.  I didn’t know baby pandas slipped out so easily like that!

What I like best about this episode is, like Planet Earth, there is a gentle nudge of conservation and environmentalism — much more prevalent for obvious reasons in this episode.  Coupled with cute images of panda cubs, it’s impossible not to feel for the furry little creatures (and if you don’t, then hooray, you’ve successfully become an android!).

And last but not least, watching this reminded me of one of my sister’s cats named Panda, named so because of the two black circles around her eyes.  Panda panda!!!!  I miss that cat.

Panda cubs with workers at the centre

Saturday Morning Documentary: BBC’s Natural World: The Monkey-Eating Eagle of the Orinoco

With the strings of success the BBC had with Planet Earth and Life, I guess it was only natural (pun intended) that they produce more series on wildlife.  The first episode of Natural World was last year about the Himalayas, which was actually pretty interesting.  It was narrated by David Attenborough, the same guy who narrated both Life and Planet Earth and I assumed he was narrating Natural World as well.

Don’t be mislead by the awesome title of this one.  Yes, there is such a thing as a monkey-eating bird but there is no actual footage of any killing of its prey. Instead, the hour-long episode follows a baby Harpy eagle living in the jungles of South America as it grows up.  There is footage of the parents bringing back dead Capuchin monkeys to give to its young but nope, no wild goring, attacking struggle between bird and monkey.  How disappointing.

Also disappointing is the fact that Attenborough doesn’t narrate this one.  It’s done by one of the filmmakers/scientists who follows the chick and studies it,  and although he’s a decent narrator, he does kind of get borderline neurotic (“There’s rain!  But what about the chick?  Is it alive?????”).

There doesn’t seem to be much conflict/difficulty for the baby Harpy eagle to grow up.  At one point, the father doesn’t return for a few days and both the mother, who has been staying in the nest with the chick, get hungry.  But then he comes back.  All is good.  More exciting is when the team rapels up the tree to install a camera of the nest — since their view from outside the tree isn’t that great — and the birds attack the crew members.  That’s really the most attacking there is in the episode.  (SPOILER ALERT!  The crew was fine.  No one died, though that would’ve made for some good TV).

Altogether, I found myself more interested in the toucans that lived next door than the Harpies.  Maybe they were just prettier to look at.  Hmm.  Maybe I’m shallow like that.  Anyway, the Harpies, a species I knew nothing about before I saw this, seem vaguely interesting.  That’s about all I got to say.

Next time, put in some monkey-eagle action and you’ll get this viewer, and I’m sure many more, interested.

Harpy eagle in flight