Tv Animal Programs

I love the "Echo" trilogy. Great camerawork (Martyn Colbeck), great field science (Cynthia Moss) and great narration (David Attenborough). "Elephant Nomads of the Namib Desert" is a more recent film, again shot by Martyn Colbeck. The other 4 programmes are notably less glossy but Saba Douglas-Hamilton is easy on the eye

I believe there's a similar DVD available in Australia. It has the 3 Echo films and a fourth Cynthia Moss programme, "Africa's Forgotten Elephants". Can never have too many eles!

 

Incidentally we in the UK have recently been enjoying the rather marvellous "Tiger: Spy in the Jungle", a highly recommended watch! The producers used elephants trained to carry cameras on their trunks and cameras disguised as logs or boulders to capture the most remarkable and close-up tiger footage I've ever seen. They filmed a litter of 4 tiger cubs from 6 weeks old (youngest tigers ever filmed) until they were 3 y.o.

Not just tigers either, lots of Indian wildlife: jackals, sloth bears, chital, sambar, langurs, dhole, gaur, leopards, jungle cats....

The whole thing was filmed in Pench National Park.

 

Re: Flight of the Condor; thanks for that Chris79; I stand corrected. It was an excellent program.

 

A heads-up for those in the UK: new series called "Britain's Lost World" starts Thursday night at 9pm on BBC1. It is about the island of St Kilda.

 

@Writhedhornbill: Nigel Marven might know something off-screen, but Pleistocene Park was quite awful, having plot holes, bad special effects and flaws big enough to drive more than one titanosaurus herd through...

Fo those interested in Nature/Animal TV documentaries: don't forget the older/ non-"Discovery Channel"-/BBC-documentaries. Among others, the still running Austrian Universum series (often in cooperation with the BBC) and the German "Tiere vor der Kamera" by Ernst Arendt and Hans Schweiger as well as Jacques-Yves Cousteau's old docus should be mentioned.
Especially Arendt & Schweiger are worth watching: the video footage of keas destroying an unimog or tasmanian devils accidently biting through the electric cables during filming are some of the funniest & most memorable things I've ever seen on TV.

And one should not forget "Sterns Stunde", Heinz Sielmann or Bernhard Grzimek's "Ein Platz für Tiere", "Wild America" and many more "TV oldies"...

 

Has anyone seen a programme or documentary featuring okapi in the wild?

 

I remember seeing one in "Herrscher des Urwaldes" by Sielmann.

 

I have two copies of flight of the condor on tape. Ara, I could copy one for you?

It was this documentary that made my parents go to southern south america!

 

I doubt if any truly wild okapi was ever filmed.

There is, however, an excellent documentary by late Alan Root. I seen it only once. There is okapi, water chevrotain, otter genet and lots of other shyest African rainforest species. Animals are "staged", that is shut in fenced bits of rainforest. There is even a sequence of leopard feeding on dead okapi and chased off by a troop of chimpanzees.

 

There's about 2mins of okapi footage in the BBC "Congo" series from 2001, including licking behaviour during courtship. Whether these are truly wild okapi or not I don't know, but the programme does credit the Wildlife Conservation Society who were instrumental in setting up the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in eastern DRC. You can buy this series on Region 1 DVD but not Region 2. There are of course other means of getting hold of it

Okapi Conservation

 

One of my favourite shows is Hunter Hunted aka Wild crime it is like animal CSI.
The show is very interesting it describes a lot about animal behaviour.

 

(Writhedhornbill - thank you; I have managed to obtain a copy of Flight of the Condor now; nevertheless I appreciate your kind offer. It was very decent of you.)

The first animal documentary I ever saw (back in the days of black and white television) was a program about Africa filmed and presented by Armand and Michaela Denis who were, I think, Belgian.

There was also a program from San Diego zoo called Zoorama. The presenter was an irritating bloke in a bow tie who seemed totally ignorant about animals and asked the various curators the dumbest questions!

Some of the earliest movies which could be called animal documentaries were made by the Disney studio, with titles like The Living Desert and The African Lion. (Quite ground-breaking for their time.) As a kid I also found a movie called Where No Vultures Fly interesting. Not strictly a documentary, it was a fictionalised account of a game warden on an African reserve trying to protect animals from poachers.

 

This website WildFilmHistory has a lot of clips and information on old nature documentaries. It's very UK-centric but well worth a look.

 

@Chris79: Nice link-thanks!

 

I saw a wild-life doco. on South America the other day (no, not Flight of the Condor,) and the narrator referred to a coati as an agouti! (Hope it was just a slip of the tongue.)

 

Anyone fond of Dangerous encounters? Brady Barr hosts it, quite an interesting TV show, but the title of the episode usually gets sidetracked.

 

The video was probably taken at the Okapi station in Epulu

 

As has already been stated, David Attenborough's documentaries cannot be beaten. He's been an idol of mine since I was foetal (well, maybe not that young) and it'll be a sad, sad day when he retires.

I used to watch quite a bit of Animal Planet but that seems to have gone to 90% 'reality' series such as Animal Cops and I've got no interest in watching these shows. National Geographic Wild sometimes has decent one-off shows... I appreciate that reality TV is unbelievably popular and isn't going away but can somone please convince these channels to give us back the documentaries we used to have? Wildlife channels at the moment are nowhere near as fun or educational as they should be.

 

David Attenborough I find too makes extremly breath-taking documentries,

I like about him most is that he says and captures things in a such unqiue way with different tones and pauses that I just find a lot more through,

 

Can the moderators move this thread to the new documentaries forum please?

Thanks