Life in the Snow

Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan narrates this hour long BBC nature doc which spans the globe looking at various animals' strategy in surviving the cold. From wolves and bears to otters and an unusual caterpillar, these are specialized creatures with specialized abilities. I like grouping these together. I wouldn't mind expanding it with more animals. I like the infra-red showing the heat from the blood flow. I also recognize some reusing of footage. It gives this a feeling of a clip show rather than a specific show with Buchanan traveling around the world. It would be better off without the attempt at personalizing the filming. All in all, it's solid BBC nature. The bar is set quite high for these.

The great Gordon Buchanan gads about in various cold climes prodding polar bears and the like. It has a compilation quality but Buchanan is always a charismatic draw and footage of him gamely scrabbling about on snowy hillsides is worth the price of admission alone really. Not a lot of it has stuck into my brain, certainly not enough to fill the required characters count here. I was going to write about the etymology of snow but that is dense and not particularly interesting, so I instead thought I'd puncture the idea that that Eskaluet languages have more words for snow than English but actually that turns out to also be quite a dense topic. Better to just make like Gordon and gad about in it.