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Intro (some rant content)
Up so far:
IntroAfter fifty or so tapes it starts to pale a little. But before that milestone was reached, if there was a nature programme on either the Beeb or the German channels, I'd tape it. I must say that most material is best watched with the sound off, as biologists have not moved very far beyond the stage of "Science proves that Negroes are more closely related to Apes and therefore may be kept as Slaves" (this was the view held by the Victorian English, at least those who could accept the notion of humans and apes being related at all) and it is grimly funny how they twist every quirk and peculiarity of Nature into a well-thought-out Darwinian survival policy - did you know, boys and girls, that kangaroos determine the sex of their offspring to ensure maximum input into the gene pool? - while dismissing as peculiarities anything quite commonplace in the animal kingdom that doesn't fit in with the world perception of Modern Western Man. Whenever something needs to be justified, "Nature" is the big excuse: a pride of lions, the male basking while the females hunt for food and take care of the cubs, becomes "proof" that every man should have his own harem, but not that women can work efficiently in a team or sustain themselves without the aid of a husband; nor is the fact that lions sleep some fourteen hours a day ever used as an argument against eight-hour workdays or the human fitness craze. And that's the serious stuff; I won't even start about programmes with names like "White sharks: Natural Born Killers" in which any predator sufficiently scary to the human eye becomes a monster in a man-made horror movie, never mind that these fearsome predators, like any living being, are simply trying to live their own life and probably feel more harassed and threatened by the camera team than vice versa. That said, camera teams produce some breathtakingly beautiful footage, which I can watch without fear of being eaten, stung to death or drowned in a swamp, and without my having to travel long distances to harass these animals personally. And this material, I think, is worth capturing and putting up. Of the vidcap galleries of this page, this one will be the slowest to fill and probably the first to have its subject matter exhausted - how many times can one vidcap cheetahs in the Serengeti? - but it is intended as an appreciation of Nature in all its non-human forms and a tribute to those collaborators in nature documentaries who do the filming rather than the talking.
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