Discovery touts 3-night nature special
It's far too easy to get caught up in the little dramas of life. With the economy crashing, it's even easier to get caught up in the big dramas.
Yet every so often, it's worth turning off the phones, computer and lights to just sit back and marvel at what television can be. Discovery Channel's "Nature's Most Amazing Events," beginning at 8 p.m. May 29, is one of those rarities and features some of the most dramatic events on Earth, none of which concerns 401(k)s.
Done with the BBC, as was the exalted "Planet Earth," the three-night special takes a different tack. By now unfortunately, most of us are familiar with the haunting image of a starving polar bear clinging to an ice floe and searching for food. Though we see the hungry polar bear here, we also see how his environment changes over the year.
And therein is the magic. Each of the six hour-long films focuses on a different natural event. Given the vastness of the planet, how did the producers decide what should be captured?
"To be honest you have to think, 'What are the most incredible spectacles of wildlife driven by seasonal changes?' BBC supervising producer Karen Bass says. "If a Martian were stepping down on Earth, what would he want to see? That was the criteria. In terms of an event that actually unfolds, we wanted very charismatic creatures that would be drawn together. They begin to become a wonderful collection of A-list characters. The cameo parts are equally interesting. We wanted the great epic; the events themselves are epic, the melting of all that ice each year quite amazing in scale. The creatures are drawn into these events. You have intimate stories."
The first film on May 29, "Arctic Summer," shows what happens when almost 3 million square miles of ice melts fast. While the polar bears are threatened, the arctic fox, millions of birds and whales flourish.
Usually, we see a limited span of the Arctic, but in this we see the vastness of the landscape change. In February, the sun rises for the first time in four months, and a polar bear hunts against an orange sky.
The same night, "Grizzly Wilderness" focuses on the return of Pacific salmon. Annually, some 500 million salmon swim nearly 20,000 miles to return to their birthplace, spawn and die.
May 30 brings "Surviving the Serengeti," which features millions of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle migrating across the expanse. While they were shooting, the Serengeti's only active volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, erupted, and Bass could not believe their good fortune to capture that.
The crew shot more than 1,000 hours on 10 types of specialized cameras, even waiting to film an annual occurrence, the sardine run, that did not happen in 2007. But the world's largest marine spectacle happened the next year, and it is beautifully chronicled in the second film, "Army of Predators."
A school of sardines 15 miles long that moves around the coast of South Africa attracts its natural predators, thousands of sharks, 10,000 swooping gannets and 5,000 dolphins.
It's an astounding image. The millions of sardines move as one, and considering the attention they attract, it's as if they're an aquatic buffet.
Justin Maguire, a cameraman, shot this remarkable event. Like all the shooters who work on nature documentaries, he's had his close calls.
On this one, he worked on a small inflatable raft, which often filled with water.
"The sea changes quickly, really, from one moment," Maguire says. "We went out in what seemed like perfect conditions — a still, still, still sea. It was flat, and all of a sudden it was quite substantially rough seas."
The show is loaded with what its producers say are many firsts, including the first aerial footage of the migration of the Arctic narwhal whale. Another first occurs in the May 31 film "Kalahari Flood." Elephants, parched after a 40-mile trek in search of water, come upon a dirty pool. They gently swoop their trunks over the surface to skim off the potable liquid.
The final film, "Pacific Feast," on May 31, showcases the magnificent blooming of summer along the coasts in Alaska and British Columbia.
"You hope that people will get some sense of insight and hopefully wonder and hopefully come to respect and cherish our planet," Bass says. "You hope by showing and sharing these incredible places and creatures, people will be able to appreciate it and appreciate that we share it with these creatures and ecosystems. We can't take this for granted. We talk about creatures going extinct, and sometimes you think these phenomena themselves might be endangered if the climate itself is changing."
