One hundred years of wildlife filmmaking

Via AB Apana's very engaging blog, I came across WildFilmHistory, a riveting website that chronicles one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking. The website hosts profiles of nearly a hundred wildlife filmmakers from the familiar to the obscure - Jacques Cousteau, Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough, George Schaller, Doug Allen, Jen and Des Bartlett, Lyndon Bird, Desmond Morris and Steve Irwin among many others. There are pages dedicated to over 185 films, along with short clips from each. Preview Jen and Des Bartlett's The Flight of the Snow Geese (1972), Joan and Alan Root's Two in the Bush (1978) and Gerald Durrell's Catch me a Colobus: The Beef Mine (1966). Excellent way to pass the time, and to learn so much about the history that fascinated enthusiasts like us during our growing-up years (truth is, the growing up never ends). Also, I couldn't help ruminating on the fact that a great many of these wildlife films were shot at a time when photographic and recording technologies were in their infancy but when wildlife was more plentiful. Today, when access to equipment is ubiquitous, we have to travel a long way to locate the wildlife. How ironic!

Remembering Steve Irwin, ironically

With the death, by Sting Ray stinging, of Steve Irwin in 2006, couch potatoes lost a beloved star prankster. The natural world, to its immense relief, lost a bothersome pest. And naturalists, most of them wallflowers who shied away from television cameras, must have smiled smugly at the warming absence of the celebrated television personality known as the Crocodile Hunter, who was associated with all kinds of derring-do involving lizards, snakes, crocodiles and a variety of other wildlife that begged to be left alone. September 4 marked two years of the death of Steve Irwin. While tributes poured for this dubious wildlifer, the voice of reason amid all the reactionary mourning was that of Germaine Greer. Hers was a bloodthirsty, controversial little obit, but one full of razor-sharp observation and incisive commentary that was unwilling to let a dead man off the hook. And rightly so. For what we must really remember Irwin for are the things we cannot dare forget. Lest history go photocopy itself. Here's an excerpt:

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress. Every snake badgered by Irwin was at a huge disadvantage, with only a single possible reaction to its terrifying situation, which was to strike. Easy enough to avoid, if you know what's coming. Even my cat knew that much.

Read the whole piece here. It's worth bookmarking for life. So that we don't offer unwitting or involuntary patronage to Irwin and his teeming tribe of clones.