The Delight and Despair of Natural History on TV

A few weeks ago I said that on Mondays I could not be disturbed as I have been watching the BBC programme Life in Cold Blood. It lived up to my expectations and I know that there will be folks around the world that will enjoy it too. So I will not spoil any future enjoyment of my three readers and the cat.

However, the one thing that makes watching this natural history documentary and others like this is just how rare many of the animals in these programmes are.

Today two hundred species will have become extinct. That is two hundred lost today, another two hundred will be lost tomorrow. That is the rate of extinction the fauna and flora on our planet every day. That is the greatest rate of loss since even before the dinosaurs

This is much more important than we realise, not because we loose the beauty of our planet, as important as that is. But its the loss of resources that we have not even discovered yet that is the real loss. Who knows if a species that we have lost could have been a cancer treatment? That's not being emotive as many drugs on the market are derived from plants.

Also by loss of a species we could allow another pest species to become more prevalent. This happened with the Passenger Pigeon in the US. When the Europeans first invaded north America there were five or six billion of them. Their flocks were so large that they would darken the skies for hours as they flew over. But they were easy to shoot and tasted good. So they were shot barrelled and shipped in large numbers. Then in 1915 in Cincinnati Zoo the last member of her species died.

While the loss of a species that once had a global population the same as all the humans now on the planet was lamented it was not until the nineteen twenties that the effect of this loss became clear. As the Passenger Pigeon was a key part of the food chain that once removed lead to the explosion in the insect populations that were in part responsible for the dust bowl in the twenties.

Often in Natural History documentaries there is almost what has become a throw away line that in ten years, in fifteen years, in five years this critter will be extinct. I truly hope that will still be able to see the the beauty of our planet in real life and not just on film.