Nature
22 public collections on Loreline.
Documentaries
- AldabraAldabra is the world's second-largest raised coral atoll, a 34 km ring of razor-sharp fossil limestone and mangrove lagoon 1,150 km southwest of Mahé, so hostile to landing that it survived the age of sail nearly intact. It is the last refuge of the Indian Ocean's giant tortoises, some 100,000 of them, alongside the region's last flightless bird and the largest frigatebird colony in the Indian Ocean. Twice it has been saved by people who spoke up, by Darwin's petition in 1874 and by the scientists who stopped a military airfield in 1967, and this archive follows that story to the third fight, the one @friendsofaldabra is running right now against a luxury resort on the island next door.
- Wild HorsesHorses evolved in North America, crossed into Asia, and then vanished from the continent that made them for about ten thousand years, until Spanish ships brought them back. Everywhere they got loose they became something nobody had a word for: not wildlife, not livestock, not quite wild. Twelve countries have since answered that question twelve different ways. Australia calls them an invasive pest and shoots them from helicopters. Japan protects one herd as a Natural Monument. Canada invented the word "naturalized" and lets a North Atlantic sandbar population live and die untouched. Britain calls them private property with owners and ancient commons rights. The United States protected them in 1971 as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit", a statute that answers a cultural question and carefully avoids the biological one, and now keeps 58,000 of them in corrals and leased pastures at two thirds of the programme budget. The classification was never settled by science. It was chosen, and then the science was recruited. This archive follows the horses and the argument: the Pleistocene bones, the Plains nations who built a civilisation on them in a century, the mustangers and the pet-food trade, Wild Horse Annie and the schoolchildren, the helicopters over Kosciuszko and Nevada, and the people on every side who think they are the ones protecting them.
- Steve IrwinHe grew up in a reptile park his parents opened at Beerwah in 1970, took it over in 1991, and renamed it Australia Zoo in 1998. Before any of the television, he spent years volunteering to catch problem crocodiles in north Queensland and move them somewhere they would not be shot, more than a hundred of them, often alone and often at night. He met an American naturalist called Terri Raines in 1991 when she came to watch him do a demonstration, and the footage from their honeymoon became the first episode of The Crocodile Hunter. He died on 4 September 2006 at Batt Reef, aged forty-four. A state funeral was offered and his family declined it, because his father said Steve would have wanted to be remembered as an ordinary bloke. What he left is a zoo his family still runs, a wildlife hospital named for his mother that treats thousands of animals a year, more than four hundred and fifty thousand acres of protected land, a turtle he and his father discovered on the Burdekin, and two children who grew up on camera and are still doing the work.