We have extreme cuteness, too, in the form of an ancient murrelet chick on Canada’s Haida Gwaii who has to trek alone towards the shore, so small it keeps smacking face-first into twigs lying on the ground. The locusts’ trip from Sudan to Tibet is illustrated by figures moving on a 3D relief map, a clever visual aid to underline the vastness of the distances that migrating creatures cover. A megaherd of cape buffalo in the Kalahari, filmed from the air and looking like swarming ants actual swarming army ants, carrying “supersized larvae” to their new forest home locusts turning the ground yellow as they walk, then undergoing a bristling metamorphosis that makes them even more disquietingly alien, whereupon they turn the sky pink. The show’s recurring motif is an unbelievable shot of animals on the move together in staggering numbers.
We have plenty of wonders still to enjoy. It is not all doom – in fact, the environmental warnings are slightly less strident than they were in the first run of Our Planet. The theme is migration, as prompted by the changing seasons – but humans have changed how extreme those seasonal shifts are. A polar bear, knackered by the need to swim much more and walk much less, fails to hunt a bearded seal that’s better at sliding on and off the melting, fractured ice. The four new hour-long episodes have plenty more sequences to make you think: heck, what have we done? In the Arctic, a walrus perches on the only floating glacier shard within view, unsure where to go next.
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