Whiskers, Paws, Tail: The Best Wildlife Documentaries
Not long ago, it was vital for humans to know as much as possible about the habits and eating habits of animals. Today, even if your understanding of bears is limited to the fact that “bears really like honey,” nothing bad is likely to happen to you. And yet, at a genetic level, we have a keen interest in wild animals deeply embedded in us, just in case. These documentaries focus on our furry, feathered, scaly, and chitinous neighbors on the planet, who are as diverse as the number of offers at the roulette online casino catalog and can adapt to a wide variety of living conditions on Earth.
Earth: One Amazing Day
Earth is a unique planet that we share with other animals. Their lives, like ours, are subject to the rhythm of the sun. The South African serval is predominantly a nocturnal predator, but it sometimes goes out to hunt in the early morning as well. The Galapagos marine iguana doesn’t begin the day’s chores until the sun warms up its entire cold-blooded body properly. The bamboo panda spends almost all its time eating because its main food is bamboo, not the most nutritious plant, so it needs to eat a lot of it. And the newborn zebra in the African savannah this day has a tough challenge.
The colorful BBC movie tells the story of how sunlight affects the animal world of our planet. It’s one of the best works of cameraman Paul Stewart, who specializes in shooting wildlife. The movie was even in theaters, which rarely happens with documentaries about nature and animals.
Impossible Animals
The characters of the colorful documentary mini-series live in places where conditions are incompatible with life for many animals. In the deserts of South Africa, the sand heats up to 70 degrees celsius – for humans, it’s fraught with a decent burn. The Shovel-snouted lizard, on the other hand, has learned how to nimbly bury itself in the sand at depth, where it isn’t as hot as on the surface. In the prickly deserts of Madagascar, the lemur sifaka jumps from cactus to cactus and isn’t afraid of prickly thorns. In the dense tropical jungles of South America flutter amazing hummingbirds, which feed on nectar, and for this managed to develop a unique system for birds to fly. And in the cold waters of Antarctica, emperor penguins use an interesting method that allows them to swim at great speed.
British biologist and TV presenter Patrick Aryeh talks about the wonders of animal adaptation to different habitats. He recalls both well-known species and those you didn’t even know existed. But even when it comes to monkeys or bears, Aryeh surprises you by revealing little-known details about their structure and behavior.
Living With Wolves
There is a large pack of wolves in the Idaho Sharp Mountains Wilderness Area. This spring, one of the wolves gave birth to several cubs. For the time being, the cubs live in a separate den, and the mother does not allow anyone to approach the den, either strangers or her own. But naturalist Jemmy, who has been observing wolves for several years, decides to test the trust of the female wolf who she knows well, and at the same time to check how healthy the cubs are. Not without hesitation, she climbs into the wolf hole, wide enough for a slender woman to enter.
The project was conceived and directed by naturalist filmmaker Jim Dutcher in 1990. Along with his friend Jemmy, he settled into a tent camp near a pack he himself had assembled. The colleagues lived there and watched the wolves for six years. During that time, they gained a lot of important information about the habits and social life of the animals, which are usually considered just bloodthirsty and dangerous predators. Of course, we don’t recommend cuddling with wolves as the Dutchers did, but it’s useful to see the movie to better understand these interesting and very cautious animals.
Wings of Life
For millions of years, flowers have used beauty for its own purposes. In the rainforests of Panama, beautiful orchids grow on trees. Their main beneficiary is orchid bees. Male bees not only feed on the nectar of the flowers but also use their oils as cologne to attract females. In turn, the coryanthes orchid uses bees to reproduce, in a very intricate way that includes drowning and miraculously rescuing the insect. Other flowers need a specially adapted contactor, such as the hummingbird, which can extract nectar from very long tube-shaped flowers.
Disneynature’s vivid French-American project reveals the reproductive mechanisms developed in flowering plants over millions of years of evolution. There is an incredible abundance of flowers on Earth, they are very diverse, but they most often need outside help to reproduce. Bees, beetles, butterflies, and even some kinds of birds and bats provide it for flowers. The movie was directed by Louie Schwartzberg, a recognized master of nature observation and a pioneer in nature filming.
