Wild Europe

How do porcupines mate? Very carefully. And, no, I didn't learn that tidbit from Henny Youngman, but rather by watching this handsomely filmed public television nature series. Anyone who has ever seen what one critical wag dubbed "nature porn," knows that the two primary interests of animals are, apparently, food and sex. If we are what we watch, then I suppose the same could be said for humans. (In fact, if you wanted to examine a third shared attribute, consider "power/status," as evidenced by the similarity between the lion king's share of the spoils of a kill and a CEO's paycheck.) What separates Nick Upton and Peter Jones's five-part Wild Europe series from other fine nature documentaries is the unusual focus on the more densely populated Europe (people go to Africa to catch a glimpse of lions; they do not go to Europe to watch mice eat snails), where there exists, according to narrator Peter Thomas, a "fragile bond between people, land and nature." In Wild Origins, viewers learn that in Greece's Olympia, the race no longer goes to the swiftest, but to the slow-moving tortoises that traverse the old paths; they watch macaques (Europe's only monkey) on the Rock of Gibraltar; and see that the Oracle at Delphi is inhabited less with the spirit of prophecy than with blue rock thrushes. While the organization is a little haphazard (traditional for nature docs) and the narration is occasionally workmanlike (though also sometimes poetic: I think that the line "at dusk, the ibis gorge on frogs," for instance, could fit very nicely in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), Wild Europe sports outstanding footage (the tortoise mating scene is priceless) of off-the-beaten-continents' (i.e., not North America or Africa) nature sights. The other titles in the series are: Wild Cities, Wild Grasslands, Wild Seas, Wild Mountains and Wild Arctic. Wildly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)