Emperor Napoleon believed that the length of a man’s nose was an indication of the size of another organ: his brain.
“If I want to do good head work,” Boney said, “I choose a man with a long nose.”
On the Eurasian steppes we discovered in Planet Earth III (BBC1)big noses still play an important role. Female saiga antelopes find them impossibly attractive. And the males have whoppers, like furry shopping bags dangling over their jaws.
Two saigas with horns worthy of small elephants fought for the rights to the herd’s harem. David Attenborough’s voiceover told us that one was an experienced alpha male and the other a young pretender looking to dethrone him – and I knew the outcome straight away.
Executive producer Mike Gunton is notorious for choosing sequences where older animals fend off the challenges of newcomers. He admits it himself. Even in a CGI natural history show like Prehistoric Planet, Apple TV+’s digital dinosaur epic, the old ‘un’ always wins.
Male Saiga antelopes have enormous noses (pictured), which resemble furry shopping bags dangling over their jaws, and the females find them impossibly attractive
A crocodile pounces on unsuspecting deer in Yala Park, Sri Lanka, as seen on Planet Earth III
Two southern right whales surface in the Golfo Nuevo near Argentina’s Valdes Peninsula
Sir David Attenborough (pictured) has provided the voiceover for Planet Earth III on BBC1
This episode’s heartbreaking scene exploring the world’s deserts did not involve a clash of antlers. In the overheated thickets of the Namib in Africa, a pair of ostriches guarded their clutch from the sun.
One by one the chicks emerged, looking more like half-drowned kittens than baby birds. But the parents couldn’t wait for all the eggs to crack open. Before nightfall, they had to get their small flock to safety, out of the reach of predators… and that meant leaving the last few eggs behind.
One chick struggled too late into the light and lay there alone, squeaking and meowing. It seemed too horrible to imagine that these images were being broadcast just to show us a dying hour-old ostrich, but my arms and legs were in knots of fear until finally a parent heard the pitiful squeaking and came to the rescue.
The emotional weight of these nature stories makes Planet Earth III extremely compelling. At the same time we can be amazed by the beauty of the landscape photos. That heat haze over the Namib looked as if it had been painted with watercolor paint.
And there’s always the mystery of how patient camera crews have to be to capture unique moments, like a leopard making a 30-foot dive from a tree and hurling itself like lightning at an unsuspecting antelope.
There was nothing so dramatic about it Liz Bonnin’s Wild Caribbean (BBC2)although the underwater images of American crocodiles were certainly intimidating.
Liz joined scientists to dig in the sand for their eggs, which seems like asking for trouble. More dangerous, however, was the work of ornithologists who climb 20-meter-high palm trees to retrieve hawk chicks from their nests. The endangered baby birds are given a health check, banded and returned to their home… while angry adults bomb the conservationists.
On the ground, Liz was more concerned about the spiders. She spent much of her childhood in Trinidad and knows a tarantula when she sees one. As the scientists stared upward, she looked under the stones and muttered, “Really, where’s that tarantula?”
With a soundtrack of cheerful calypso music, it all had an amusing holiday feel, although the baseball games and carnivals seemed rather irrelevant. The star of the evening was the solenodon, which had a snout that would impress Napoleon.
This shrew-like animal, on the island of Hispaniola (half Haiti, half the Dominican Republic), originated 75 million years ago. It dug in with its trunk and hid underground to survive the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Napoleon was right. It’s smart to have a big nose.