Thursday, November 7, 2024
Nature: "San Diego: America's Wildest City" (Terra Madre Studios, 13 Productions, PBS, 2024)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (Wednesday, November 6) I took a break from all the dire political news by watching two of the three science shows on KPBS, Nature and NOVA. The Nature episode particularly interested me because it was local: it was called “San Diego, America’s Wildest City.” That’s a pun not only on San Diego’s bizarre tagline, “America’s Finest City” (which it isn’t), but on the apparent fact that San Diego has over 100 species of animal and plant life, more than any other city in the continental United States. This was a standard-issue science documentary, bereft of the usual talking heads but with plenty of glorious footage of animals. I noted all the species the show depicted and came up with this list: grebes, ground squirrels (and the dogs who prey on them), snakes, tarantulas, frogs, coyotes, Orca whales, dolphins, sharks, Pacific Harbor seals, butterflies (and goldenrod in a “super bloom”), Allen’s hummingbirds, California grunions, predatory birds (including roadrunners), nematode worms, bobcats, and skunks. If nothing else, this documentary showed how often the predator/prey chains don’t line up the way we think they would from the popular depictions in cartoons: the roadrunners in this film are shown eating hummingbirds and the Orcas are shown eating dolphins. The grebes, a duck-like sort of bird, are not native to San Diego but have migrated here due to the human encroachments on their original habitats. They’re shown here with a boy grebe and a girl grebe trying to get together and make little grebes – which takes place as part of an elaborate courtship ritual involving him bringing her a live fish for dinner. (I immediately joked to myself that the girl grebe would say, “What – fish again?”) There were also spectacular shots of the grunion runs along Pacific Beach (something my late partner John Gabrish and I would drive out to watch during the late 1980’s), as well as scenes showing a beach-cleaning machine run by humans along the San Diego beaches pretty much destroying the grunions’ carefully laid eggs. Grunions lay their eggs in beach sand to protect them from predators, but they weren’t ingenious enough for humans. Indeed, the effects of people on San Diego’s abundant animal life are well documented in this film and one of its principal points. Last Saturday Charles and I went to 13th and Broadway downtown and both of us were startled at the visible physical changes in the area, particularly the sheer number of new buildings. (Are the rents coming down with all the new buildings going up? Hell, no!) It was an O.K. hour of television and helped by all those spectacular shots of San Diego’s fauna in action, but handicapped (as so many science shows are) by the golly-gee-willikers tone of the narration.