Achi news desk-
Tthe Etruscan whistle is a furry little time machine. The smallest mammal on Earth weighs less than a ping-pong ball and finds food by feeling for it at night, mimicking the very first mammals 200m years ago. They lived in darkness for one simple reason: during the day, dinosaurs roamed.
Two-thirds of mammals are still nocturnal, so Mammals – David Attenborough’s latest nature extravaganza – begins with a chapter dedicated to lives lived in the dark. The Etruscan mice are joined by mole rats, coyotes and a host of others, all hunting under black skies, most of which require the latest filmmaking technology to be seen.
The night vision aesthetic of the first installment helps dispel, or at least delay, the obvious criticisms you might make of the series. Natural history programs always try to present themselves as having a specific goal or theme, but after starting out as smart little dogs, mammals dominate the Earth today. This study of them feels like a rather vague premise. It could lead to a show that is cool stuff about animals in general.
However, a thrilling, crazy battle between predator and prey is always enough to draw us in, and Mammals kicks off with a corker in Zambia. (The sound of Attenborough introducing a new segment by intoning the name of a place, incidentally, one of the enduring joys of wildlife television. “Zambia.” Say that to yourself now in your best Sir David whisper. “Zambia.” Lovely. ) A leopard, armed with its tapetum lucidum – reflective tissue behind its retinas so it can see brilliantly in the dim light of a crescent moon – tries to chase down some impala, before entering instead on baboons sleeping in a tree.
The baboons can’t see, but they can hear, so as soon as the leopard grabs a twig, the screaming primates are on the run. We hold our breath as mother and baby get stuck at the end of a branch. Will it take the leopard’s weight? When the big cat gets its teeth into an unlucky baboon, we see blood gushing out and dripping from a branch, something that is included here in inverted monochrome when it might be left out of a conventional color sequence. But blood is, if anything, more eerie in the sight of the night, as is seeing paw prints on one of the hind quarters of the impalas.
Equally harrowing is the tragic story of a lone cape buffalo in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro crater. He can fight against a spotted hyena. He can fight against a 10 spotted hyena. But then 20, 30 and 40 of them turn up, shining an eerie light gray through the lens of the night. The buffalo is slowly being torn apart.
For at least half the time, however, Mammals find ways to film in color, in low light. The greatest technical achievement of the hour is taking place in the Sahara, where the fenugreek fox – seldom seen, because if humans come close, it disappears into the dunes – is captured crisply on adventures at night which, thanks to oversensitive cameras, look as if they have been flooded. His super cute ears enable him to listen for the bugs and lizards he likes to snack on – and to spot a distant call from a potential mate.
Learning that it is still possible to make new friends, even when one is the size of a guinea pig and is wandering across endless sand in the early hours, is comforting. Meanwhile in Argentina, a big furry armadillo also has a night to remember, chasing and then fornicating with a woman in an abandoned farm building. The shot of him up on her stubborn hind legs, sniffing appreciatively after picking up the thick scent of a big hairy female armadillo, is the single best image of the episode, ahead of some strong contenders.
Bats make up one fifth of mammal species, so it takes time for the show to find bat wonders like Trinidad’s largest coastal bulldog bats. Again, the night vision filming lends an unsettling, alien quality to the section set inside their cave, as if the creatures’ damp wing membranes and floppy jowls weren’t haunting enough. But out at sea, we’re back to conventional moonlight filming for the highly impressive sight of the bats catching fish they can’t see: fins above the water are enough for them to use echolocation to guess where is he going A swoop, and a scratch across the face with hooked claws does the rest. Mammals may be wide-ranging but so far he is relentlessly hunting wonders.
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