Planet Earth: Absolutely and Amazingly Breathtaking

"A hundred years ago, there were one and a half billion people on Earth. Now, over six billion crowd our fragile planet. But even so, there are still places barely touched by humanity. This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before."
– David Attenborough's opening narration, from the BBC series, "Planet Earth"

I would try and add a few more words from my side about this 11-part magnum opus without spoiling any of the magic those few lines from Attenborough must have surely created in your mind.

Have you ever cried watching a documentary which is not about holocaust victims or partition victims or about human beings at all? I did. Watching a male bird of paradise put up a dance show to impress a female bird or watching a polar bear walk&slip on thin ice and then swim for more than 50 miles in icy waters braving certain death in search of a morsel of food and ultimately perishing, I fluctuated from being elated to feeling downright sad.

In a particular telugu movie, set in the wild wild west of Andhra Pradesh (oh yes!), cowboys and sherriff of anakapalli keep fighting for the map of a diamond mine. In the climax, every buffoon in the movie ends up inside the mine where diamonds, mountains of them, grow as stalagmites. I distinctly remember laughing at that scene till my guts threatened to jettison through my food pipe. Imagine my astonishment when in the 4th part of the series, 'caves', they show the insides of Lechuguilla cave which have the exact similar diamond stalagmites, for real! Well, not exactly diamonds, but no less spectacular. Gypsum crystals, to be specific.

Here's a short list of my favourite tales shown in the series -
1. Birds of paradise.
2. A female polar bear leading its two tiny cubs on vast plains of ice in search of food.
3. A humpback whale travelling for more than 1000 miles to give birth to its calf in safe waters, then feeding it for 5 months while starving and finally swimming back the 1000 miles to the feeding grounds. The calf leaves the mother then.
4. A billion Cicadas emerging from the grounds of a forest - one in a 17 year spectacle.
5. A mandarin duck encouraging its seven ducklings to leap from their tree trunk nest high up. All of them leap one by one onto the ground and they safely land. I couldn't help but whistle.
6. Emperor Penguins and their life each year. Each male sings and females choose their mates based on the singing, then the courtship starts resulting in mating. Few weeks later, the female gives an egg and is too tired to incubate and hence the males take the responsibility and how. For the entire duration of winter they brave the chilly winds and hide the eggs underneath their bellies while tightly forming a huge huddle to stay warm. At the end of four months, the females return from the ocean. A frenzy takes over the huddle as they hear their mates returning, the singing starts again and each penguin identifies its mate among the thousands. After a brief romantic moment, the female keeps prodding the male to let her take over the now hatched chick. The male is reluctant to let go off the chick, which he has been guarding with his life. But ultimately, he does yield. I cried at this particular scene(not weepy weepy cry ofcourse, overwhelmed teary-eyed types :P) and saw it a zillion times over and over.
7. A great white shark pouncing on a seal, filmed in super slow motion. Do watch the clip - A 2-ton beast leaping out of water and grasping a seal, all in just one-second!
8. Rarest of rare, a beauuutiful snow leopard chasing long a mountain goat on the steepiest of slopes in the himalayas. The goat jumps into water just at the last second and the leopard returns empty-handed to its hungry cub.
9. Demoiselle cranes making the toughest migration in the world - crossing the himalayas, flying high up above them to reach the Indian subcontinent. Tired from the arduous, they have to duck from the preadatory eagles and fly against turbulents to use rising cloumns of hot air to cross the gigantic mountains and breed in India.
10. A carnivorous pitcher plant and a spider exploiting it.
11. One community of chimps raiding another and cannibalising.
12. This one straight out of a sci-fi movie - Parasitic fungus infecting ants and insects and rising out of their brains.
13. An arctic fox stealing the eggs and chicks of snow geese. Your heart pounds for the two birds chasing frantically the fox hoping to secure the chicks from the fox's mouth. But your sympathies would change sides when the female fox brings all its catch to its young hungry cubs. There are millions of birds but only a handful of foxes and they remain hungry throughout the year, only the breeding season brings them food. This is the case with every predatory animal on this planet.
Many many many more........................................

Life is truly great, evolution has made it so. The ability of a living organism to gradually adapt to its surroundings and find a balance with its eco-system is remarkable. This series made me want to become an environmentalist but I do feel, no matter how bad humans plague this planet, life would survive beyond us. It might take a million/billion/zillion years again but new species would arise out of the ashes we leave. Not for anything else, but for the dead polar bear, I do wish global warming recedes and they have their natural habitat intact. I'm going green.

"Our planet is still full of wonders. As we explore them, so we gain not only understanding, but power. It's not just the future of the whale that today lies in our hands: it's the survival of the natural world in all parts of the living planet. We can now destroy or we can cherish. The choice is ours."

– David Attenborough, in closing