Crunching the numbers in nature TV programming: Where science meets hyperbole.

Given that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and humans have inhabited it for little more than 200,000 of those years, give or take, it may be hard to believe anything in nature programs, where numbers are concerned.

Hype springs eternal, especially on TV. The bigger the number, the higher the potential ratings. Breathless is the order of the day.

So when we’re told in Our Planet II’s first scene that the herd of cape buffalo onscreen, filmed in Botswana, is “the biggest buffalo herd ever recorded” (in an assistant producer’s words, as related in Netflix’s press material, and repeated, more-or-less verbatim, in David Attenborough’s narration), we can be forgiven for wondering what’s true and what has been made up for the audience.

The herd is 5,000 strong, Attenborough tells us.

Think about that. Is that even possible?

We are often told that the world-famous wildebeest migration in Kenya and Tanzania’s Mara-Serengeti ecosystem numbers some 1.3 million wildebeest in all, but anyone who has witnessed the migration in person knows that wildebeest move in small groups within the larger congregation. Grazing animals, like wildebeest — and cape buffalo — are not like locusts. If they were, they would destroy every patch of grassland they cross, with no point of return.The assistant producer again:

“Normally, cape buffalo tend to hang out in smaller groups — a couple hundred, max — so they’re not putting as much pressure on resources. In the wet season, you don’t usually find them more than 20 kilometers from a water source.

“But the last rains fall around April, and then everything starts to dry up. The buffalo scatter and gather around small water pans until

there’s no more rain, and the last remaining water source in the area is in the Mababe Depression.

“There’s a marsh there that maintains water year-round, so all of the scattered buffalo from this huge radius travel into the area, and the herds converge, eventually forming what’s called a mega-herd.

“No one had ever seen a mega-herd as big as this — sometimes, they’ve seen herds up to 2,000, but this one, we painstakingly hand-counted every single buffalo in the shots we took.

“There are upwards of 4,000 buffalo in these images.”

Hand-counted? Is that even possible? Field biologists often say that counting animals in the wild — for population counts and scientific studies — can be misleading because it’s all too easy to count the same animal twice.

Counting feels effortless to most of us; we’re unlikely even to remember when and how we picked up this apparently automatic skill, University of York associate professor in psychology Silke Goebel noted in a 2021 article for The Conversation.

Humans and animals alike routinely extract numerical information from their environment, but it’s language that ultimately sets us apart.

That’s important to know because understanding language, and how it’s used in nature programs, helps better interpret and understand the world around us.

What you see onscreen doesn’t necessarily add up to the reality.

But does that matter?

It’s worth thinking about, either way.