Wildlife Documentaries
BBC Planet Earth.
Experience the Planet Earth as never before with groundbreaking footage from the BBC…….. For those of you who have not had the opportunity to watch this series, it is definitely well recommended! Planet Earth DVD is a BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough (see The Life Collection DVD) and produced by Alastair Fothergill. It was also the first of its kind to be filmed almost entirely in HD format. Some sequences, particularly in episodes 6–11, are notable for their potentially disturbing content. Examples include a lone elephant being brought down by lions. This was filmed in Savuti, Botswana.
This specific episode deals with the region of savanna, steppe and tundra and looks at the importance of grasses in such treeless ecosystems. These vast expanses contain the largest concentration of animal life. The final sequence depicts the African savannah and elephants that are forced to share a waterhole with a pride of thirty lions. The insufficient water makes it an uneasy alliance and the lions gain the upper hand during the night when their hunger drives them to hunt and eventually kill one of the pachyderms. Planet Earth Diaries explains how the lion hunt was filmed in darkness using infrared lights.
Planet Earth is quite simply the best wildlife series ever produced. Following the similarly monumental achievement of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, this astonishing 11-part BBC series is brilliantly narrated by Sir David Attenborough and sensibly organized so that each 50-minute episode covers a geographical region and/or wildlife habitat (mountains, caves, deserts, shallow seas, seasonal forests, etc.) until the entire planet has been covered on this amazing dvd set. The premiere episode, “From Pole to Pole,” serves as a primer for things to come, placing the entire series in proper context and giving a general overview of what to expect from each individual episode. Trying no to be overtly political, the series maintains a consistent and subtle emphasis on the urgent need for ongoing conservation, best illustrated by the plight of polar bears whose very behavior is changing (to accommodate life-threatening changes in their fast-melting habitat) in the wake of global warming–a phenomenon that this series appropriately presents as scientific fact. With this harsh reality as subtext, the amazing tv series proceeds to accentuate the positive, delivering an endless variety of natural wonders, from the spectacular mating displays of New Guinea’s various birds of paradise to a rare encounter with Siberia’s nearly-extinct Amur Leopards, of which only 30 remain in the wild.