May 2000
Weeks Best Shows UK
Weeks Best Shows USA
Discovery Channel
| TV Nature.com |
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Life
of Birds
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In 70 major filming trips to 45 countries over three long years no one involved in the making of this great series came closer to its subject than the master commentator himself. This is Sir David Attenborough on meeting what may be the world's tamest wild bird. "We were on a tiny South Sea island. I went into the dense forest and called like this," [the inimitable, animated Attenborough demonstration follows, with full sound effects, plus clapping hands] "prrrr....yo yo yo yo yo. Suddenly Providence petrels, huge birds the size of footballs, came thumping down through the canopy and landed at my feet. "I could pick them up. There is a sequence where one sits on my hand then crawls up my kneck. It's a fully wild bird - we see it flying away into the distance. Why does it come so close? We have no idea." Whether this tryst will come to rival the mountain gorilla clinch in Life on Earth in the register of Attenborough close encounters, only time will tell. But it is the sort of sequence children growing up today are likely to remember far into adulthood. That's the power of these films. A new Attenborough series is to documentary film-making what the Olympic Games is to athletics, or the World Cup to football. The same, roughly, four year gap; the same massive preparation and huge anticipation. And, so it seems, the whole world taking part. I'm in David Attenborough's London home for a rapid mind's eye tour to far-off locations from the ten programmes. Soon we are on the beach on Hood Island in the Galapagos as the tropical breakers crash in, and the waved albatrosses lumber out of the surf and take off towards the camera like antique bombers. Then on to the Atlantic rain forest in Brazil as the loudest avian sound of all, the deafening call of the bell bird, echoes through the trees. And, as we listen, humming birds like tiny feathered jewels waltz around our heads. We watch under the permanent drizzle of the Iguacu Falls in Paraguay as dusky swifts zip through the towering curtain of water to their nests. In the Kalahari lanner falcons drop with devastating speed into a flock of Cape pigeons. On the edge of a lake in Upper New York State the returning loons, the great northern divers, call poignantly over water as perfect as platinum. Many of the players in these films are exotic and stupendous and remote, but not all. And this is what sets The Life of Birds apart from every previous Attenborough series. He has amazing stories that are set in his, and your, back garden. "Researchers have only recently discovered how the black bibs on the house sparrow are exactly like insignia on soldiers' uniforms. The size of the bib denotes their rank. So we see the lance corporal sparrows start chatting up a nice female, when the sergeant arrives. He gives a special whistle. `Ok, clear off. She's mine.' And they do. `Sorry, sir'. Suddenly the colonel comes round the corner, and you don't see the sergent for dust. "You say: `Aw, come on, I don't believe it. It's just dusty squabbles. But once you see it demonstrated, you start seeing it all the time." We had travelled from High Andes to Suburbia. It is time for a brief stop over. I ask him if there is any other creature on Earth as accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal[italics] as a bird? And would that not make the bird the most successful creature on Earth? David Attenborough, ever the scientist, is a man so surgically precise with his answers, that he wants to test these assertions to destruction. "Let's see. Is the bird the most widespread kind of creature in the world. Well, hang on. What about insects? But there are no insects at sea. So two thirds of the earth's surface is without insects. Yet there are birds for out on the open sea. "No insects go to the poles, and survive extremely low temperatures. But birds do. And birds are underwater. They have been seen diving to 1000 feet. Birds have colonised the air in a fantastic way. They even fly over the Himalayas. Swifts stay on the wing nearly all their lives, making nests of bits of fluff they catch in the air. They even mate in the air. "Yes, there is no question but that birds are the most widespread and successful kind of organism in the world." If a distant civilisation contacted us to tomorrow and asked what our world was like, Life of Birds would be the series to transmit to them across the ether, along with Sir David's Life trilogy and his recent Private Life of Plants. And the series would be representing Planet Earth, not just Britain. The BBC's Natural History Unit stands alone when it comes to making wildlife documentaries like this. No other filmmaker anywhere commits the money and resources to make programmes of this length and scale. The ten 50 minute films cost #7.25 million and took three years to make. 48 camerapersons used the latest technology - including ultra-slow motion filming, night vision cameras and tiny cameras that film inside nests - allied to plain old-fashioned field craft to bring footage of some of the world's rarest birds, and examples of remarkable avian condust never filmed before. The series is founded on the usual exhaustive year-long, world-wide trawl by researchers to find the best answer to any question presenter and producers could put on birds, to provide the best example to illustrate any avian point they wanted to make. They frequently came up with things Attenborough himself had never heard of. "We wanted to show the best example of a bird living primarily at sea. I thought albatross. I was wrong. It turns out there's a strange little bird called the ancient murrelet. Just 36 hours after hatching the chicks are running down the beach like little clockwork toys, into the breakers and swimming five miles out of land. It spends the least time on land of any bird I've heard about." An intelligent bird? Try the Japanese crow. When they planted decorative walnuts in Japanese cities, the crows found an ingenious way to break into the tough nuts. They drop them in front of cars when they halt at red traffic lights. The advancing cars run over the nuts, cracking them open. When the lights change back to red, the crows walk across with the pedestrians, solemnly picking up bits of nut. The world's best bird mimic? On a fallen trunk in the dense southern beech forest in Australia, Attenborough came face to face with the lyre bird, attracted by a recording of its own voice. The lyre can imitate at at least 12 other birds. It can do the whirring of a camera's motor drive and the click of a shutter. It repeats the engine of a car, and the din of a car alarm. But it can do something more, that perhaps no other creature can - it speaks of its own destruction. It can imitate the screetch of the chainsaw wielded by the loggers coming to cut down its habitat. Some birds, however, can change their tune and survive. On a remote island off New Zealand young saddleback sing, naturally enough, in their parents' language. But when they disperse to different locations where birds sing in a different way, within days they learn these local accents and are able to address females in those accents, so they stand a better chance in courtship. "Think of the research needed to find that out, to study every little twirl and grace note and vibrato, to tell that it's this language and not that language. It provides extraordinary insights to demonstrate that the world of birds is so much more than we thought it was. "After this series I no longer watch, say, a pigeon drop from the sky into my garden in the same way as I used to. I know more about it; I have more empathy with it. I understand its problems and its abilities more than I ever did before. "It's not enough for us to just put a name to a bird and look at because it's pretty. We see only a tiny fraction of a bird's existence. There is a huge amount of its life that we have no knowledge of. I hope this series will enable people to get inside the mind of a bird."