PBS Nature: Running with the Beest

The annual wildebeest migration, in which 1.3 million thirsty animals cross the crocodile-infested waters of the Mara and Grumeti rivers that straddle the Kenya-Tanzania border in East Africa, has been called one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, and small wonder. Tourists from all over the world pay thousands of dollars to be able to see one of nature’s true marvels, and perhaps the truly remarkable thing is that, despite decades of drought, predation, and increasingly erratic rains, the migration carries on much as it has done since the Pleistocene era.

As Running with the Beest, the opening episode of PBS Nature’s 41st season, shows though, all is not well in nature’s showpiece event. This is not Disney. It’s not The Lion King. And the very thing that helps sustain the natural circle of life in one of the most impoverished regions of the world — much-needed foreign exchange from overseas visitors that goes toward funding conservation programs in a developing nation that otherwise might have little incentive to set aside large tracts of grassland for wildlife — is a growing worry for the local Maasai guides who make their living from ecotourism.

Running with the Beest, could have taken the conventional view of countless other wildlife programs, with dramatic images of wildebeest crossing rivers and playing a game of chance against hungry crocodiles that lie in wait, and there are scenes like that. Beest provides important context, though, that other programs might shy away from. Tourist vans descend on the rivers by the dozen, often blocking the routes the wildebeest are most comfortable with, based on previous experience of river crossing. So the wildebeest take chances and cross the rivers in unfamiliar places, where the riverbank may be too high or the swim too treacherous. Some wildebeest end up breaking their legs from an awkward fall down a cliff they might not otherwise have jumped from, or are trampled in mass stampedes driven by panic. These scenes are hard to watch, but it’s important that viewers know. Tourism carries with it its own responsibilities, and not all tour companies are alike when it comes to ethical practices around wildlife.

There are two voices of conscience in the program, Maasai guides Evalyn Sintoya and Derrick Nabaala, and it’s clear from the opening moments that they have a deeply felt attachment to the land and the animals that live there.

“I’m telling you, when you see that migration,” Sintoya says in Beest’s opening moments, “you know it’s just like an overwhelming thing to see, it’s amazing. The movement, the noise … It’s just a spectacular thing. It keeps ringing in your mind when you see it with your naked eye.”

“Wildebeest are beautiful,” Nabaala adds. “When you see them, they're special, they’re unique.”

“I’m very proud to come from Mara as a Maasai,” he adds, moments later. “I feel proud when I look back into this beautiful area, and I see animals.”

It’s all about perspective, however. Tourism is vital — but how much tourism is too much? It’s a question that has echoes all over the world, wherever tourism encounters remote, pristine regions of the planet. It’s a question being asked halfway around the world, on the climbing routes up Mt. Everest or in the tiger reserves in India and Nepal.

Running with the Beest also examines the problem of poaching with wire snares, predominant in the western corridor of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, where fast-growing agricultural communities sprawl up to the park boundary. Beest follows rangers on patrol as they hold the line against thousands of wire snares, possibly an inevitability wherever fast-growing human communities live alongside protected wildlife areas.

In the end, though, it is the tourist issue that is the most nettlesome and the problem many viewers are likely to remember the most.

“A big challenge now in the Mara is too much crowded, and I hope people will realize that, try to give these animals space, try to respect their way, try to give them a distance,” Sintoya says. “Responsibility starts from us. Each one of us in the tourism sector, we should stand and have that responsibility and respect the way of these animals. Take a stand. Be you, and make an example.”

Running with the Beest, is worth a look, if only because it shows a side of wildlife tourism rarely shown in other nature programs, if ever.

It’s also a study in just how resilient so many of these wildebeest are, despite being the butt of ridicule and jokes. For, as Running with the Beest shows, the annual migration is still a going concern. For now.

PBS Nature: Running with the Beest premieres Wednesday, Oct. 19, on PBS at 8E/7C, and on the PBS app.

Derrick Nabaala / Photo by Jo Scofield ©Atlantic Productions

PBS Nature / Photo by Adam Bannister / ©Atlantic Productions

Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride

The key events in Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride, filmmaker Pamela Gordon’s docu-study of the most closely followed, most filmed pride of wild lions in film history, took place in 2015. The story, though, goes back nearly 30 years, and in many ways continues to resonate to this day.

As nature films go, Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is more of a film exposé than family entertainment — more 60 Minutes than The Wonderful World of Disney. It’s warm and quite beautiful in parts, but also gritty and unblinking in its pursuit of the truth.

Nature programs often tell us a comforting lie, that wildlife, left to its own devices, is doing just fine. The truth, of course, is quite different, and what is happening away from the camera, behind the scenes, bares scant resemblance to the pictures of idyllic family scenes featuring playful cubs straight out of The Lion King.

That truth, today more than ever, comes down to human-wildlife conflict in some of the most pristine, untrammeled wilderness areas remaining on the planet.

At the heart of Marsh Pride is the conflict between wild lions and the Maasai cattle herders who live alongside them, and in some cases among them, in a time of ever-expanding human settlements and rapidly advancing climate change.

The two don’t mix easily, if at all, and so, when Marsh Pride opens with the mass poisoning of lions some viewers have been following since BBC’s Big Cat Diary in 1996, no one who follows the environmental scene as it is today can be surprised at how this story ended. It’s all part of a seemingly never-ending cycle: Lions, becoming hungry in their natural home, kill cattle, the lifeblood of Maasai communities, and so the Maasai kill lions, out of revenge and to prevent losing more cattle in future.

The story from the lions’ point of view is dire, though. In just 20 years, more than half Africa’s population of wild lions has been wiped out. Just 20,000 remain. There are fewer wild lions today than there are rhinos. Elephants, also endangered, number some 400,000, 20 times as many. Clearly, lions are in trouble.
Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is no dirge, otherwise most people wouldn’t find a reason to watch. The program shows the Marsh pride during their halcyon years when individual lions with anthropomorphic, too-cute-by-half names like Scruffy, Tatu, Sienna, White Eye and Bibi became staples in British homes tuned to BBC’s weekly Big Cat Diary, a real-time nature program as cinema verité. These scenes go a long way toward explaining why lions matter.

The marsh pride itself is named for an unlikely oasis of swampland and year-round water at the southern edge of the often dry reserve, where the Mara borders Tanzania and the much larger Serengeti National Park to the south. Life, when things are going well, is near bliss, for lions and filmmakers alike. Marsh Pride borrows heavily from Big Cat Diary for these scenes of familial bliss — 26 years later, many viewers will be seeing this footage for the first time, even those living in the UK — but as we know, the world is changing and it is hard to know how, or even if, wild lions will remain, when confronted with an ever-expanding human population and the growing climate crisis.

“We’re at a point in the world where we need to decide if our future includes lions,” filmmaker Gordon said in a recent press interview. “I want a world with big cats in it. Poisoning them not only affects the lions but all the animals around them. I’m hoping viewers will see the importance and move in the direction of change.”

We’ll see.

Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride premieres Wednesday, Sept. 14, on PBS at 9E/8C and on the PBS app.

---