Favourite natural history programmes

One wildlife documentary I have just watched and enjoyed very much is 'A Wind on the Heath', made in 1969 or 1970 by Philip Wayre (of Norfolk Wildlife Park and Otter Trust fame) about the wildlife of Breckland. Some of the more interesting things in this documentary are the now-vanished populations of red squirrel and red-backed shrikes.

Work - East Anglia Film Archive

 

East Anglia Film Archive has some interesting 'zoo' pieces too from Norfolk Wildlife Park and (Ornamental) Pheasant Trust and Thorney.
The two television programmes which influenced my childhood were Anglia TV's 'Survival Game' from the same stable; and 'Zoo Time' with Desmond Morris.

 

I enjoyed both programmes. I'm glad someone else remembers the 'Survival Game'

 

As I've mentioned elsewhere on ZooChat,
"Zoo Time" (Desmond Morris) was one of my very favourite television programmes when I was a child.

Other programmes I used to enjoy enormously include "News from the Zoos" (James Fisher), "Great Zoos of the World" (Anthony Smith), "On Safari" (Armand & Michaela Denis) and "Look" (Peter Scott).

 

Holy ****, I specifically remember the chevrotain, martial eagle, and civet rubbing scenes in a nat geo doc clip on Youtube, glad I found the original doc that included this scene

 

Yesterday evening BBC 4 screened a television programme about David Attenborough's Zoo Quest series.

Well worth watching on the BBC iPlayer. Follow the link below.

BBC iPlayer - David Attenboroughs Zoo Quest in Colour

"Thanks to a remarkable discovery in the BBC's film vaults, the best of David Attenborough's early Zoo Quest adventures can now be seen as never before, in colour, and with it the remarkable story of how this pioneering television series was made."

 

I have just found and watched this brief six-minute excerpt from 'The Edge of Extinction', a 50-minute documentary that aired on the BBC in 1980. It is narrated and stars Gerald Durrell, and the excerpt uploaded online includes footage almost entirely filmed at Jersey Zoo. It is interesting to see the older styles of enclosure that were there, plus a good view of many species in the collection.

Looking at the full episode description on the BBC's 'Genome' page (a full history of BBC TV guides), this episode includes footage of Gerald and Lee Durrell catching a group of volcano rabbits in Mexico.

The excerpt can be viewed in this link:
1980 Edge of Extinction | Earth In Vision

 

Much enjoyed, thank you

 

Just been watching and enjoying this episode of Wildlife on One that is available on Youtube - while the main subjects are Western chimpanzees, there is also quite a bit of footage of other species including sooty mangabeys, African crowned eagles, Western red and pied colobus, Diana monkeys and also some short incidental clips of some more unusual species, including the olive colobus, tree pangolin and giant forest squirrel (I don't think I've ever seen film of the latter species, so that was possibly my favourite surprise).

 

I have recently watched another couple of documentaries that I enjoyed, and figured I would share them here.

The first is Dolphins: The Wild Side, a programme that I believe first aired as an episode of Natural World on the BBC, before coming out a month later on National Geographic - it is the latter version I have found. It is probably the best documentary about cetaceans I have seen so far, even though it is exclusively about dolphins. A big part of why I like it so much is that, especially in the latter half of the episode, there is a big variety of dolphin species shown. As well as the regular suspects such as bottlenose (both common and Indo-Pacific) and Atlantic spotted dolphins and orca, there are also spinner, Pacific white-sided and dusky dolphins, pilot whales and Dall's porpoises. Perhaps the choicest species though are the pygmy killer whale and Northern right whale dolphin, both filmed underwater.


The other is a Wildlife on One episode I have just got around to watching - titled Gremlins of the Night, it first aired in 1994. It is about nocturnal prosimians and tarsiers, and includes footage of some very choice species, including (in order of appearance) the aye-aye, spectral tarsier, Dian's tarsier, Bornean slow loris, grey slender loris and Demidoff's, Thomas's, thick-tailed greater, Moholi and, I think, Rondo dwarf galago (the latter is described as being a brand-new species, and the smallest of all the galagos). There are also some incidental films of interesting diurnal primates, including the sun-tailed guenon. The episode can be watched here.