Natural History

Natural history is an interesting topic to study although whatching the documentaries can be quite challenging. Today I decided to buy a piece of documentary result and as a result I have struggled to stay awake for over two hours. It is not that I do not like these documentaries and it is not that I have not slept enough but simply that by their very nature early documentaries make staying awake a challenge. We’re all familiar with that feeling. As children we would be trapped listening to people for up to 8hrs a day five days a week for weeks on end. It meant that we would have to find any method possible to stay awake. That is not what I have learned from watching these two life on earth documentaries. What I have learned and what I have thought about is the nature of the documentary genre and how it has evolved over the past three decades. When Cousteau and David Attenborough were making their documentaries they were exploring a new world in a new age of discovery. Technological innovation had made the move from exploration of land into the exploration of the sea. Cousteau spent hundreds of hours underwater learning about the marine world and David Attenborough created his documentaries over a decade later. Cousteau spent hours and hours telling us about how his team were working and exploring the new frontier, showing how exciting it was. David Attenborough came along fifteen years later and spoke of a 24 year old Darwin who came to the Galapagos Islands to begin his studies which would lead to his theory of evolution many years later. Documentary production, like all art forms has a natural progression with cross pollination between disciplines and nations. The dissertation I’m working on will explore this much further.

The Planet Earth and Blue Planet documentaries have some amazing footage and some great sights. One of those greats sights is that which starts with birds sitting in the middle of the ocean because the wind is too weak for them to glide. You see the superpod of dolphins and a cluster of those dolphins leave to hunt. The wind picks up and the birds begin to fly. As they fly we see the dolphins get closer to their quarry. A school of fish. The dolphins bring the fish up to the surface, within diving range of the birds. The birds can go as far down as fifteen meters to get their prey. You see the dolphins who help the birds get their lunch. Without the dolphins, the birds would have little food. The dolphins have left and the tuna arrive. They create an artificial seafloor and the birds keep munching and diving for fish. It’s an amazing sight. There are hundreds of fish and hundreds of birds underwater at the same time. It’s amusing to see how they flap their wings to get down and grab their prey, then point upwards and float back to the surface. It’s only within the past two months that I learned that birds can swim underwater. Ducks do it to get to their algae in ice ponds but only whilst the current is not too strong to drown them. The birds described above do it to get their prey. Yet another species of birds dive bombs and leaves trails of bubbles behind them. Ahhh, the things one must watch for dissertation research.