Having had the good fortune to have been brought up in Britain, I was never short of excellent nature documentaries to watch on television. I must have seen thousands of them over the years. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched cheetahs chasing gazelles, lions hunting wildebeest, and polar bears padding over the frozen wastes. It’s remarkable what you we can observe from the comfort of our own living rooms.
In a perverse way, though, the sheer number and quality of nature documentaries on television inevitably means that some of the Wow! factor has gone. When David Attenborough first sat amongst the gorillas, my whole family, and an entire nation, watched spellbound. But nowadays you can catch up-close-and-personal documentaries about gorillas pretty much any week on one channel or another. We’ve seen it all before.
But, this week, sitting watching yet another BBC Nature documentary with my dad, I experienced a true Wow! moment. I mean it literally: both my dad and I actually said “Wow!” We saw an animal neither of us had ever seen in action before do something truly amazing. I was, quite frankly, shocked (and a little embarrassed) that I had not known about its remarkable behaviour. And, to top it all, it was a British animal (although, it turns out, there are numerous species which perform this remarkable feat)…
Fortunately, the BBC has made the clip in question available online. [Postscript: The video is not available outside the UK, apparently. This YouTube video covers the same subject matter.]
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be Wowed! I give you the sexton beetle [Nicrophorus vespilloides]:
It is famously said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the sexton beetle is now officially my favourite member of that inordinately vast order.
This via Open Culture: Peter Greenaway’s 53-minute exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin. The film is structured around 18 separate tableaux, each focusing on another chapter in the naturalist’s life, and each consisting of just one long uninterrupted shot. Other than the narrator’s voiceover, there is no dialogue.
CG animator Richard Spence recently uploaded a 3-minute sequence he created of Sir David Attenborough explaining the entire history of life on earth. You’ve probably seen the sequence before, but this version is in high definition, without an annoying YouTube logo in the corner.
I just came across two delightful animations about Charles Darwin made by London schoolchildren. I’m sure they must have done the rounds in the science blogosphere before, but I somehow missed them.
The films describe two fictitious conversations between Charles Darwin and the real-life London Soho barber William Willis, with whom Darwin really did converse on the subject of dog-breeding. Although the conversations are fictitious, the events described in them are pretty accurate.
The conversations, as you will see, take place immediately before two key events in Darwin’s life:
Reminiscing about his father, Charles Darwin’s son Francis wrote:
In the evening, that is, after he had read as much as his strength would allow, and before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song “Ar hyd y nos,” which he went through correctly;
Ar hyd y nos—better known to us heathen English as All Through the Night—is a classic Welsh folk tune. Perhaps Darwin was familiar with it having been brought up near the Welsh border.
I think it’s delightful that we know which tune Darwin used to hum to himself. Especially since it is such a wonderful, moving tune:
I’ve always admired Aubrey Manning‘s BBC television programmes about the making of the British landscape, but, to my eternal shame, I must admit that I never before took the trouble to find out who he is!
It turns out that Manning is an extremely distinguished biologist, who wrote the book on ethology.
Drawing my brief trawl of the web to learn more about Manning, I came across a wonderful five-part YouTube video conversation between Manning and fellow ethologist Richard Dawkins. The video takes the format of a cosy chat between two scientists who clearly have great respect for each other (warning: the video contains an unscheduled appearance by a cat):
This is wonderful television. Except that you tend not to get this sort of thing on television these days, because clever people talking to each other is no longer seen as good television.
I do so much prefer it when Dawkins talks about actual science like this, rather than pursuing his relentless god-bashing. I think he’s far more effective at getting his message across when he takes this approach. I suspect, from what he says in the video, Manning might agree.
Around this time of year, on my daily drive home from work, I am sometimes lucky enough to see one of Britain’s natural wonders: flocks of starlings wheeling in the sky above Chat Moss between Liverpool and Manchester. There are sometimes a couple of hundred of them. The displays can be pretty spectacular, but nowhere near as spectacular as in this remarkable video of starlings above Otmoor in Oxfordshire, filmed by Dylan Winter:
As Richard Dawkins explains in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the starlings’ remarkable aerobatic ballet results from each bird within the flock following a relatively simple set of rules. The birds’ wonderfully complex flight patterns emerge from the cumulative, simple actions of the individual birds, in a similar way to water’s wetness and turbulence emerging from the relatively simple interactions of individual water particles.
In my opinion, the fact that such complex behaviour can emerge from simple sets of rules does nothing to detract from the displays; indeed, if anything, I would say that it adds to the Wow! Factor.
The University of Cambridge Zoological Museum is currently displaying artist Tolly Nason‘s cast glass sculpture installation Seeing the Light: Finch by Finch, which is based on the beaks of Darwin’s Galápagos finch specimens. It’s pretty cool.
While I was there, I managed to take a short video (observe Michael Barton making an appearance in the background):
One of the more useful developments in podcasting in recent years has been the publication of full, unexpurgated versions of interviews as supplements to the podcasts in which they originally appeared in edited format. This gives people who were interested in the edited interview the opportunity to delver deeper into the subject.
I am glad to note that this very useful development is starting to be adopted with video interviews. Richard Dawkins’s official website recently published on YouTube full versions of interviews Dawkins conducted as part of his recent documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the series, which was rather light on Darwin, and rather heavy on God-botherer bashing, but I found the following unedited interview with Steve Pinker very entertaining (despite my general disdain for evolutionary psychology):
Richard Dawkins scared of scorpions: who’d have thought it?
I was delighted to see a couple of brown hares boxing in the field in front of my house this morning. It’s something I haven’t seen since my childhood. My view wasn’t quite as good as this:
I am frequently asked if I know where to obtain a copy of the 1978 TV drama series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin. I do now: it’s on YouTube. Enjoy it while you still can!
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