PBS series gives viewers catbird seat of winged wildlife
Ever see an ornithologist moonwalk?
Kimberly Bostwick, curator of birds and mammals at Cornell University’s Museum of Vertebrates, glides backward, Michael Jackson style, to illustrate the courting moves of the manakin, a small golden-headed bird.
Her stage is the leaf-covered floor of a Central American jungle, where in the branches above, the manakins are getting it on with their dance of love.
Although the birds are common, the exact nature of their mating ritual wasn’t known until Bostwick captured it on her high-speed video camera – 500 frames a second, to be exact. Played back in slow motion, the birds’ choreography of courtship was visible for the very first time.
Also discovered on tape: The sound the birds generate comes from the slapping of their wings, not from their throats, as was previously believed.
Bostwick’s racy brand of bird-watching is included in “Deep Jungle,” a three-part PBS “Nature” miniseries – “New Frontiers,” “Monsters in the Forest” and “The Beast Within” – airing tonight, next Sunday and May 1.
Be-bopping birds aside, what makes this nature series unusual is that the animals share the billing with the people who study them.
“Traditionally, wildlife films didn’t often have people in them, but the genre has moved a bit, it’s become more flexible, more intimate,” says co-executive producer Brian Leith. “It’s moved to a style where you can tap in to all these talented, engaging, knowledgeable people like Kim.”
Bostwick grew up in rural New York state, where “my form of entertainment was a lot of walking around in the fields and forests.”
She became interested in biology in high school, and by the time she was an undergraduate studying animal behavior at Cornell she realized bird-watching was something she could explore even in her own back yard.
Eventually a combined interest in “birds, the tropics, and evolution” led to her current area of expertise – and extensive travel.
She describes the excitement of first seeing a pompadour cotinga in the wilds of Guyana, a bird “the color of wine,” which she had actually dreamed about.
“It’s an exploration and discovery thing,” Bostwick says. “Other people had seen it, but to find it for myself, not go to a zoo to see it, to find it where it lives, is just wonderful.”
Leith believes “good storytellers” like Bostwick mean you don’t have to “go down the rather boring route” of many nature programs that focus almost exclusively on how dangerous wild creatures can be.
He also hopes that the series will allow audiences to recognize nature is not something separate from them.
“But at the same time we are there to entertain, not there to preach,” Leith says. “If we start wagging a finger, people will say, ‘Hey, what’s on the other channels?’ “