As a veteran watcher - and regular critic - of what we used to call "nature programmes", I'm always afraid I've become too jaded to expect to see or learn anything new. But in this company I need have no fear!
Watched on a big-screen TV (essential equipment here), this episode resembles the others in the series in being a colourful treat for the eye. But it is of course far more than that, having been crafted with a very great deal of thought.
To be gained here is a perfect balance of the emotional and the cerebral, of the scientific and the artistic. And even within the domain of its closer subject-matter, somebody clearly spent a great deal of time wondering about - and then achieving - a correct (nay perfect) blend of the environmental and the ecological. If the episode were all doom and gloom it would be too much of a switch-off. If it was all pretty pictures that would be wrong too. But here the message is that there is still such majesty out there that there is something left to play for - even as the threats grow greater with each passing day. The protection within the Torres del Paine NP in Chile has allowed the puma to rebound, but deforestation in Colombia leaves tamarins in isolated pockets of forests surrounded by vast herds of cows, while the "turning of the tap" at the multitude of giant dams along South America's rivers has impacts on baby swifts kilometres downstream.
Here again, we score marvellously, as grand-scale ecology about tectonics, volcanoes and so on interweave with stories on the scale of whole forests or landscapes, and then again with mciroscale ecological interactions at microcosm level.
Of course, for any story told here, there are 10,000 more. So this vignette of South America could have been a random choice - e.g. based on what could actually be filmed; or it could have been a supreme effort to find things both supremely engaging and properly representative of so much more.
It was the latter that was achieved, and congratulations to all for that!
Watched on a big-screen TV (essential equipment here), this episode resembles the others in the series in being a colourful treat for the eye. But it is of course far more than that, having been crafted with a very great deal of thought.
To be gained here is a perfect balance of the emotional and the cerebral, of the scientific and the artistic. And even within the domain of its closer subject-matter, somebody clearly spent a great deal of time wondering about - and then achieving - a correct (nay perfect) blend of the environmental and the ecological. If the episode were all doom and gloom it would be too much of a switch-off. If it was all pretty pictures that would be wrong too. But here the message is that there is still such majesty out there that there is something left to play for - even as the threats grow greater with each passing day. The protection within the Torres del Paine NP in Chile has allowed the puma to rebound, but deforestation in Colombia leaves tamarins in isolated pockets of forests surrounded by vast herds of cows, while the "turning of the tap" at the multitude of giant dams along South America's rivers has impacts on baby swifts kilometres downstream.
Here again, we score marvellously, as grand-scale ecology about tectonics, volcanoes and so on interweave with stories on the scale of whole forests or landscapes, and then again with mciroscale ecological interactions at microcosm level.
Of course, for any story told here, there are 10,000 more. So this vignette of South America could have been a random choice - e.g. based on what could actually be filmed; or it could have been a supreme effort to find things both supremely engaging and properly representative of so much more.
It was the latter that was achieved, and congratulations to all for that!
