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

PBS Nature: The World’s Greatest Ocean Feast

“Hunger is good discipline,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, and like so much of Hemingway’s work, what he wrote in the privacy of his study would have a larger, wider reach once it escaped into the world. 

The PBS Nature program The Ocean’s Greatest Feast tells a story about one such moveable feast, but it’s a story that’s rarely told and virtually unknown, at least to popular culture and mass-market natural history programming.

Alone, a single fish may seem insignificant. Together, though, they can shape the fate of an entire coastline, we learn in The Ocean’s Greatest Feast’s opening moments. In the calm, relatively untrammelled waters off South Africa, billions of sardines begin a mass migration each year, lured by the promise of food, shelter and a more comfortable life thousands of miles away. It’s the largest movement of living things on Earth, and yet little is known of this mass migration.

As with so many of nature’s mass migrations, the journey is long, hard and arduous — “nature’s greatest ambush,“ we’re told — where every predator along the African coastline lies in wait, from gannets and sea lions to sharks and dolphins. Even as the planet’s climate systems go through paroxysms of volatility, forcing us to pay more attention to the Earth’s carefully intertwined ecosystems, where the failure of one species can disrupt the entire food chain with far-reaching effects science is only now beginning to understand.

It sounds counterintuitive but where apex predators like sharks and orcas go, so go every other species goes. If the sardine migration fails, the entire food chain will collapse. The sardines sustain the vast congregations of Cape fur seals that gather on the remote African coastline to feed, belch, quarrel and raise their pups, which demand to be fed every four hours. The Cape fur seals in turn provide food for some of the biggest great white sharks on the planet — surfers in wet suits can look startlingly similar to a seal when viewed from below, which is why it’s never a good idea to surf wherever fur seals and great white sharks can be found together.

Cape gannets time their entire breeding cycle on the unpredictable arrival of the sardines, yet another example of how completely unrelated animal species depend on each other for survival. It’s not just birds, either, but bottlenose dolphins, 

The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is disarming in its simplicity of storytelling. It’s understated in tone, gently paced with peaceful, unironic narration, and the visuals are unusual for how rarely underwater scenes of birds swimming after fish ever make it into nature programs. It’s not the kind of flashy program that will draw anxious TV viewers away from the commercial broadcast networks and streaming sites, but there’s something genuinely appealing about sitting back and appreciating nature in its calmer, gentler moments. PBS Nature has always managed to navigate the often blurred line between popular entertainment and fact-based science without pandering to the lowest common denominator or overwhelming the casual viewer with a dizzying parade of facts and figures — the spreadsheet approach to science programming. The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is worth a look. It’s not something you’ll discuss over a latte with friends at the local sidewalk café in the morning, but it will make you feel better for having seen it.

The Ocean’s Greatest Feast premieres Wednesday on PBS Nature at 8/7c.

©Earth Touch

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