During particularly stressful times I fall into a nightly rhythm of watching nature docs in order to lull myself to sleep. Growing up, mom called such shows “nature trash,” but I love them. They’re beautiful night lights, screen savers with narratives, easy metaphor factories that make me feel like everything’s connected. But when I tucked into the first season of BBC Earth’s AFRICA, narrated by David Attenborough and currently available on Netflix, I was too shaken by the images to sleep. The stories were so sad, the animals so evil, and the environments so hostile. I was worried. Was David Attenborough okay? Was I okay? Did we, animals forged in the chaotic grass fires of the Savannah, even evolve to be okay?
Nearly every story in the documentary said no.
1. Armored ground cricket tries to eat a baby bird with its horrible mouth parts.
AFRICA splits the continent into ecological regions. The Kalahari is the first ground Attenborough & Co. covers, and it’s here where we meet the armored ground cricket.
A mama bird leaves her nest with two lil fleshy chicks inside it for like ONE MINUTE and then this villain arrives. Before it can start munching the baby birds, the mama bird swoops in and pecks the pest out of her nest. When the cricket falls to the ground, his cricket friends tear him to pieces. He becomes the meat he was seeking. Horrible.
2. Mama elephant unable to watch her baby starve to death.
In the Savannah, a herd of elephants has been traveling for days without anything to eat except for burned up branches. Lack of food for mama means lack of food for her calf. At one point, the baby elephant begins to fail. Its limbs stop working and it crumples into the dust. The mama elephant then has to decide whether or not to stay with her dying child or risk losing the herd, which must keep pressing on to find food. Mama stays, but she can’t bring herself to watch her child die, so she turns her back to it and kinda lightly kicks it to make sure it’s alive. When the baby draws its final breath—through its little trunk nose!—the camera jump cuts to the mama elephant crying, and then finally abandoning her baby’s corpse to join the herd.
3. The cold-blooded negligence of the shoebill.
Not too much horror here, except for the fact that this avian zombie, which is the size of a teenager, lays two eggs but only raises one chick. The bird lays the second egg as a kind of “insurance,” Attenborough claims. I submit this bird and it’s opaque, white eyelids as the official mascot of 2016.
4. African penguins letting their own eggs fry in the sun.
Watching a waddle of penguins gasping for breath on the hot rocks of the Cape is sad enough. Watching one make the choice to abandon its brooding duties to beat the heat is soul crushing.
5. A cricket walking over a folding leaf frog like it’s not even there.
The Congo episode is all about how the jungle is a capitalist patriarchy nightmare. Even the plants spend their entire lives ripping each other apart for a few little dollops of golden sun. Due to overcrowding and high competition for resources, being literally walked over by a larger animal is an indignity the folding leaf frog suffers regularly.
6. The slow, sure demise of a sea turtle named Shella.
In the Future episode, which covers stories about the impacts of global warming and extinction, a sea turtle named Shella is in rehab because she “had an accident with a boat.” Despite a few years of healing, she never recovers and dies.
