American Buffalo

October 14, 2023

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns looks at the life and times of an American icon and its reemergence from near extinction.

The second part of The American Buffalo, filmmaker Ken Burns’ feature-length paean to the passing — and hesitant recovery — of an American giant, opens with a quotation from Wallace Stegner. “We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.

“But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”

The American Buffalo bows Monday, Oct. 16 and continues the following night on American public broadcaster PBS, and will be available on the PBS app and online after that, for this is one program that, on the face of it, seems destined to stand the test of time.

“In the end, it comes back to us,” Burns said, on a Zoom conference call with writers and arts critics before The American Buffalo’s premiere. “What kind of beings do we wish to be? What kind of planning do we want to commit to, to ensure that we are not so separated and above the rest of the natural world that we can't participate in that kinship that Native Americans over time have taught us is possible? There are [those in the film] who talk about planning seven generations out. We don’t. We plan quarter to quarter, and that has delivered the world in peril we find ourselves in today.”

The story of The American Buffalo tends to be linear, and one-note. It’s a tragedy rooted in the past, about the near-extinction of a keynote species of uncommon dimension and power.

There is a hopeful side of the story, though, if only a glimmer, and it’s that aspect Burns chose to focus on, particularly toward the end, in the film’s second half, on Oct. 17th.

“The first section is, at times, incredibly difficult to watch … when you see a species that numbered perhaps as many as 50 or 60 million dwindle over the course of the 19th century to the mid-1880s to fewer than a thousand, and most of those are in zoos or in private herds, and not running wild and free. So the fact that we have brought the bison back from extinction is itself an accomplishment.

“But we began to see, as we were finishing the film, that the film we were making was really the first two acts of a three-act play. Because at the end of the day, to save a species as a zoo animal or as an exhibit in a corral is not the same as saving them in the wild. And it’s that aspect that's happening now. In some way, the final minutes of the film hint at what that third act will be, which is this wonderful union of private citizens, the federal government — who control upwards of 20,000 head of buffalo right now in national parks and various wildlife refuges — and native people, who have more than 20,000 buffalo distributed among more than 80 tribes all linked and interconnected by the Inter-tribal Buffalo Council. They are repatriating buffalo to tribes that had been disconnected for the last 150 years from this animal that was central to their existence for 10-, 12,000 years. It's very moving to witness.

“To look in the buffalo's eyes and look in the tribal members' eyes and see that recognition across the centuries, the millennium, is an amazing thing.

“There are also NGOs campaigning to set aside land large enough to be considered a complete ecosystem, substantial enough to take these large megafauna. There are many good heroes in this story, enough to make a significant difference. It's a story of what happens when we come together.

“It does not discount the fact that Native peoples who had 600 generations of relationship with this animal had that relationship severed by people who — us — have had fewer than six generations of experience. We cannot tell the positive story that the buffalo is safe from extinction without delineating what brought it to the brink of extinction in the first place, that the slaughter of wildlife on the Great Plains — not just the buffalo but elk and grizzly bears and coyotes and wolves — took place in this period.

“We're headed in the right direction now. We have not yet arrived where we should be, where we can take what is the relatively silent Great Plains, that used to be the American Serengeti, and repopulate it. But we’re getting there.”

Our Planet mise en scène

July 08, 2023

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.

Our Planet II 2.4

June 28, 2023

Our Planet II’s closing note, and David Attenborough’s plea for us to do more to save the natural world

There is a jarring, emotionally wrenching moment toward the end of Our Planet II’s fourth and final hour that is bound to upset most, if not all, viewers.

It is doubly jarring because — spoiler alert — what happens is not, on the face of it, the direct result of human impact on the world’s wildlife migrations, a recurring theme throughout the series. One could be forgiven for thinking it belongs in a different program, one with a less lofty goal than what Our Planet purports to be.

In the end, this final hour of Our Planet II, The Freedom to Move, feels hurried and rushed, and not at the level of the other episodes in the program. It does have its moments, though.

And the important, overriding message remains the same.

Through our actions as a species, we are despoiling the home we live in, and it will take an act of real will and perseverance to put nature back into the natural world. Restoring the natural balance to our increasingly troubled world will not come easily, and it remains to be seen whether we have the collective ambition and ability to do the right thing.

Once again, the hour focuses on three months in the planetary cycle, in this case, the months of January through March, when large groups of animals from the equatorial south begin their arduous, annual trek north. Gentoo penguins in Antarctica are shown feeding their chicks in the brief southern summer, so they can grow strong enough to undergo their first voyage to the sea, where leopard seals, known for their voracious appetites, lie in wait. Human detritus is in evidence even here, in the most remote corner of the Earth. Penguin parents do not have it easy at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

Snow geese from Loess Bluffs, Missouri, take to the skies in large numbers — the first time this mass migration has been filmed from above, using drones — while far away, on the other side of the continent, pronghorn antelope from southern Wyoming make their way through mountain passes and fenced-in ranchlands to the relative comfort and safety of Grand Teton National Park.

Army ants in the Amazon Rainforest enter their migratory phase in which the queen and her supersized larvae swarm over long distances in the dark of night. In another first, Our Planet’s film crew captured the nighttime migration using infrared lighting, and the results are both eerie and eye-filling.

Freedom to Move’s pièce de résistance is the annual grey whale migration from the warm but food-depleted waters off Baja California to the rich feeding grounds of Alaska’s Bering Sea, where king crab, Bristol Bay salmon, and innumerable groundfish coexist in a complex but little understood web of life. The grey whale migration alone was more than a year in the making, and it’s clear there’s enough here to warrant an entire series in its own right.

The whale migrations are tougher than at any time in recorded memory, as the whales, including mothers and their young calves, navigate some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and pods of predatory orcas lie in wait off Monterey Bay. The year of filming witnessed the lowest number of calves born in Baja since 1994, and the overall number of migrating whales was down 40% from previous years.

As always, though, it is David Attenborough’s distinctive, evocative voice that lingers long afterward, and gives Our Planet its sense of purpose.

“For many animals, the instinct to move is overwhelming, despite the dangers,” Attenborough reminds us at the end, as if viewers need another reminder of what’s at stake in the race against extinction. “We have … changed the planet, cutting off ancestral routes, and impacting even the most remote corners of the globe. There is hope. We know more about these journeys than ever before. And with our help, many animals are now overcoming the challenges of our modern world.”

But are they? For a healthy and connected planet, we must preserve, as Attenborough puts it, the freedom to move.

Our Planet II 2.3

June 23, 2023

Our Planet II’s eye-filling, emotionally grueling third hour hints, if only briefly, at a better, more humane future

There are any number of emotionally wrenching moments in The Next Generation, Our Planet II’s third and most profound hour in the series so far. Those moments include a sea of red crabs on remote Christmas Island fleeing their suddenly cannibalistic mothers; a year-old puma in the rugged steppes of Patagonia, the southernmost tip of the Americas, struggling to survive on his own after leaving the safety of his family; and a mass migration of hatchling olive ridley turtles on Escobilia Beach, Mexico making their inaugural pilgrimage to the sea — a pilgrimage which fewer than 50% will survive.

It is two sequences, though, toward the end of the episode, that lend the entire series its perspective, for good and bad. In the first, elevated by some truly astonishing cinematography, a flock of some 400 demoiselle cranes, native to Mongolia and northeast China, embark on one of the most grueling migrations known to science, as they cross the Himalayan mountains to reach their wintering grounds in India — a journey in which many die from exhaustion, hunger and predation from golden eagles.

There are safer, less arduous ways to cross the world’s most imposing mountain range as the cranes, flying with their distinctive heads and necks straight forward and their feet and legs trailing behind, reach altitudes as high as 8,000 meters — Mt. Everest is 8,800 meters — but their traditional migratory route has been hard-wired by 45 million of years of evolutionary biology. When the cranes first started migrating, the Himalayas did not yet exist.

As a species., the demoiselle crane is not endangered — yet — but it is one of the animal species to which the United Nations Environment Programme Agreement on Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds applies, and when one witnesses the sheer effort of their Himalayan ordeal, it’s easy to see why.

Our Planet II is full of cautionary flags about what we’re doing to the

environment, but the demoiselle crane’s story has a unique and uplifting twist.

Villagers in Khichan, in Rajasthan state in northwestern India, feed and protect the cranes on their annual migration, in a ritual that has made these annual bird congregations a renowned, headline-making spectacle. Fifteen thousand cranes now visit Khichan every year. It is a rare example of people working together to make the world a better place for their natural brethren, a signpost to a better, more humane, more sustainable future.

It is the final sequence in the hour, though, in which Our Planet II’s makers follow a family of wild Asian elephants on a two-year journey in Yunnan province, China from their drought-stricken tropical forest home deep into the heart of human habitation — during the 2020 Covid pandemic, no less — that is both harrowing and strangely heartening.

A newborn calf has to move with his herd virtually from birth, and his struggle is near unforgettable. In this changing world, David Attenborough reminds us, animals need our help more than ever. The family’s story made international headlines, and a fundraising campaign raised the financial resources to shepherd the elephants from the city of Kunming — pop. 6.6 million — back to their forest home, now recovered from the drought from two years earlier.

Today’s nature programs tend to be manipulative and somewhat cynical in their headlong rush for viewers. The Next Generation ends with a cliffhanger, which seems unnecessary for a high-minded Attenborough drama, but there is a larger, more meaningful purpose at work here than there is in the usual tooth-’n-claws rollercoaster rides. Our Planet II is worth seeing in its entirety, but at the end of it all, it will be these quiet, uplifting moments that stay in the memory.

Next: a look at the final hour, Freedom to Roam.

Our Planet II 2.2

June 21, 2023

Our Planet II’s second hour looks at the life of bees — and polar bears — and tells us more about a changing climate

Our planet, David Attenborough reminds us in the opening moments of Following the Sun, Our Planet II’s second-of-four hour-long episodes, is solar powered.

It takes eight minutes for the sun’s rays to reach the Earth’s surface. Due to our planet’s tilt, they don’t reach its surface evenly, however. The solar energy arrives unevenly at different times of the year, depending on where it falls. And therein lies the key — if there is a key to be found — to understanding the changing climate, perhaps enough to delay and possibly even reverse the effects of what’s looking more like a climate emergency with each passing day.

Our Planet II’s second act focuses on the summer months, which in the Northern Hemisphere signal a wave of wildlife migrations, from wildebeest searching for grass on the plains of East Africa to snow geese taking to the skies in search of breeding grounds across the far reaches of northern Canada.

This is the time of year when honey bees are at their most active — to make just half a kg of honey, a colony of bees must fly 90,000 km — and pollinate more than a million flowers.

In just one hive, as many as 60,000 bees can work together as one superorganism. A healthy queen can lay an egg every 30 seconds; another 40,000 bees may be developing in this one hive alone.

There isn’t enough room for them all, so the hive inevitably splits. When their numbers reach critical mass, they begin to swarm. They must find a new home.

To a bee, home is a tree hole with the right size, height, and angle to the sun. No sun — no life.

Bees can only move like this when the sun’s energy provides them with enough food to rebuild their colony from its beginnings — and where there are suitable homing grounds, in which to find a suitable home.

The world is changing, and today’s nature programs — at least, those programs with a burning need to impart some valuable, useful message rather than just family entertainment — can be hard to watch at times.

Survival is hard at the best of times, and our mere presence, let alone what we have done to the planet already, has made the challenge of survival that much harder.

There’s a wrenching sequence late in Following the Sun, where a polar bear mother is leading her two cubs up a sheer rock face after a long swim over open ocean where once there would have been floes of ice on which to rest. One of the cubs, the stronger and larger of the two, follows its mother easily enough, but the second, smaller cub, weakened from a long, overextended swim, is falling behind. A wrong turn, a foot slip, could mean a 15-meter fall onto the rocks below. Panicking, he begins to cry out plaintively and heads in the wrong direction. His survival depends on staying close to his mother — if he can’t keep up, she will be forced to abandon him. Spoiler alert: He makes it.

The message is plain, though, for all but the most stone-hearted viewers: With a long journey ahead, and another long swim, he may not make it. With summer sea ice melting earlier than we’ve ever known, polar bears must spend more of their year swimming.

For animals used to traveling across ice, these changes may well prove to be too great.

Life often finds a way — that is the way of the natural world. Animals adapt; the most adaptable survive.

The climate is changing, though. The future, today more than at any point in recorded history, looks increasingly uncertain.

Next: a look at episode 3, The Next Generation