Views from the Reading Room

I've been watching Operation Snow Tiger (it finished a week ago, but I built up a bit of a backlog during Springwatch).

The researchers are trying to find a particular tiger in the reserve, and Liz Bonnin says they're splitting up to improve their chances, and I hear "Let's split up, that way it's bound to get one of us." and sure enough ... they were checking a camera trap and found that it had been triggered by one of their colleagues, on foot on his own, and the very next shot was a tiger (not the one they're looking for). And then they were going to pick up their colleague before sunset, which is when tigers like to hunt apparently, but they had trouble with the vehicle.

*sigh* Didn't any of you people ever play D&D? Don't you watch movies, for crying out loud?

*needs a headdesk icon*

Serengeti, the first programme in BBC Four's new series Unnatural Histories, told me a lot of things I never learnt in decades of wildlife documentaries and environmental activism.

I knew that colonial governments set up parks to protect game animals from "poachers" or subsistence hunters (who had co-existed with the wildlife for centuries, if not longer) whereas the actual threats to animal populations were from "white" hunters who were just killing for fun and macho cred. I didn't know that the low human population in eastern Africa, when those colonial governments started paying attention, was a result of a major natural and humanitarian disaster caused by invaders from Europe: Rinderpest. "Explorers" saw starving environmental refugees whose herds or plough animals had died; they didn't look for the civilisation that had been there a generation earlier, in dynamic balance with the ecosystem.

So the colonial governments came along, saw this romantic pseudo-pristine landscape without all those pesky people, and tried to preserve it in amber. But the ecosystem itself, before and after the arrival of humans, had changed many times with the natural variations of climate. The current path of the wildebeest migration has not been the same for time immemorial, and it will need to change again if it's to survive.

The programme is available for another 17 days (region-locked to the UK, probably). The next episode is about Yellowstone.

the episode on the (natural and cultural) life of The Himalayas:

David Attenborough talks about the legend of the Axis Mundi; here is Mount Kailash, source of three of the greatest rivers of Asia; here are Buddhist, Hindu and Jain pilgrims; here are prayer flags, and paper prayers being wafted up to the summit where the gods live ...

The summit, David Attenborough tells us, is so sacred that it has never been climbed.

... I'm thinking, Don't tell everyone! Some People will insist on climbing it!

(I guess it's harder to reach than Uluru.)

PS: If you've seen it (or if you haven't), can you guess what annoyed me about "Plant Pioneers of the Himalayas", the ten-minute bit at the end? (apart from the fact that they can't seem to schedule a 50-minute programme nowadays without rounding it up to an hour with DVD extras.)