Natural History Unit Research Articles

Nature on the airwaves: natural history and the BBC in interwar Britain, 1922–1939 (William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize 2021)

Archival and other historical evidence, including digitized issues of The Radio Times and files from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Written Archives Centre, reveal the pivotal importance that natural history played in the BBC’s programming during the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond merely replicating the forms and styles that could be found across other forms of mass media, natural history broadcasts demonstrated to the British public what radio technology was capable of. At the same time, radio was not isolated from the media landscape of the period, and natural history broadcasts made full use of visual accompaniments such as magazines and pamphlets. Examining a variety of different broadcasts, this paper focuses on how expertise was fashioned behind the microphone, on “stunts” such as broadcasting the live sounds of animals, on audience participation, and on broadcasts aimed at young audiences. Broadcast lessons for schools, which are generally overlooked by historians, offer a rich opportunity for examining how natural history radio developed over the years. Children’s hour characters like the “Zoo Man” modelled an intimate, direct way of engaging with young audiences. Moreover, experiments in field ecology involving listeners in the collection of data showed that radio could act as a two-way medium. These broadcasts helped to shape the modern phenomenon of the nature documentary that would take off after 1945. While the origins of this phenomenon are usually traced either to the establishment of the BBC’s Natural History Unit in 1957, or in some cases to early nature films, there is a strong case for considering the BBC’s interwar broadcasts (1922–1939) as part of this trajectory.

Ways of Seeing Animals

This article looks at contemporary visual material aimed at documenting animal life. Focusing essentially on two television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, Planet Dinosaur (2011) and Spy in the Wild (2017), I explore the stories that such recent visual productions tell about our capacity to apprehend and represent otherness. A connection immediately appears between the documentary ambition that underpins the series and the latest forms of visual technological innovation. From the use of high and ultra-high definition, to the production of animatronic creatures sent out to “spy” on animals in their habitat, the series highlight the new modalities of seeing produced by the digital era, and the opportunities that such modalities open up for the exploration of natural history. By staging the encounter between two figures of the Other—the animal qua “natural” creature on the one hand, and the machine as a product of culture on the other hand—those productions uniquely question the ways in which we apprehend and produce images of alterity. In doing so, they immediately remind us that in imaging and imagining otherness we always run the risk of obfuscating or overlooking it. This is especially the case when the documentary manifests its own anthropocentrism—whether it tends to assimilate the Other and bypass its singularity or chooses to focus on the modalities of human knowledge more than on the animals themselves. In contradiction to this appropriative logic, however, the series do seem to allow for the emergence of visual forms of otherness. They do so precisely when their images contribute to destabilising the sovereign, inquisitive gaze that initially appeared as crucial to their documentary ambition. Alterity then finds its place in our world, in so far as the gaze lets itself be altered—by the uncanny quality of digitally generated images, which our sensory system struggles to process, but also by the reciprocal contamination which those images evidence between documentary and imaginative representation, science and fiction.

Beyond Canned Television

The October of 2018 saw the creation of BBC Earth Tribe, a global online brand representing BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)’s programming on Tencent Video, one of China’s leading online streaming services. Besides providing over 650 hours of BBC documentaries to Chinese online audiences, BBC Earth Tribe delivers unprecedented access to creators from BBC NHU through interactive screen forms and offline events. This article offers a study of BBC Earth’s global strategies in its partnerships with one of the largest Chinese digital platforms, Tencent, in terms of coproduction and online community building beyond traditional canned television distribution. It examines Project Penguin, which has formalised coproduction partnerships between BBC Studios and Tencent Online Media Group (OMG) since October 2018. The distribution partnerships involve not only pre-sales of BBC Earth’s flagship documentaries but also coproduction and online community building on Tencent-run platforms, from streaming services to social media platforms. By examining BBC Earth’s distribution strategies in the Chinese media landscape from the early 2000s, the paper aims to theorise distribution strategies between BBC Studios and Tencent Video and its socio-cultural implications on television distribution in the digital, multiplatform era of convergence.

Ian Calvert

Working for the BBC’s Natural History Unit was a neat stepping stone to a veterinary degree for a man with an interest in exotic species. His enthusiasm and expertise were...

Capitalocene, clichés, and critical re-enchantment. What Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea does through BBC nature

ABSTRACTIn the montage of archival and original material that makes up John Akomfrah's three-channel video work Vertigo Sea (2015), the frequent use of footage shot by BBCs Natural History Unit (producers of series like Planet Earth) stands out as an unusual choice. This article explores aesthetic-political implications of how this material is subtly repurposed, with focus on one of the interconnected issues dealt with in the work: nature and the Capitaloscene. What does Vertigo Sea do to and through these BBC nature images? Which artistic strategies are involved and for which ends? Is the kind of ecological pathos already framing the original material itself critically transformed and if so in which senses? Does Vertigo Sea merely go for a reproduction of the natural beauty often attributed to original material, and as simply juxtaposed with terrible images, or does the repurposing also entail an alteration of the very notion of natural beauty? This article critically explores all these questions mainly through the frameworks of Situationist détournement, Deleuze's ideas about art and clichés, and Adorno's notions of authentic art, re-enchantment, and natural beauty—frameworks that are conversely critically discussed through Vertigo Sea. It aims to reveal Vertigo Sea as on the one hand an experiment in finding vital artistic strategies for re-enchanting (in non-idealizing ways) planetary nature in the Capitalocene, and as on the on the other hand a thematization of the difficulties in doing so. While appearing among a contemporary art scene increasingly concerned with local and/or global relations having to do with ecology in this new era, Vertigo Sea presents us with a highly original case primarily through its unusual choice of main source material and its complex treatment of this material.

Global Nature, Global Brand: Bbc Earth and David Attenborough's Landmark Wildlife Series

Landmark wildlife series like Life on Earth (1979), Planet Earth (2006) and Frozen Planet (2011) are synonymous with the BBC, and are largely seen as unquestioned embodiments of its public service values. Yet the landmark format for wildlife programming was designed from its outset to appeal to international television markets, particularly the US market. This article examines the history and evolution of David Attenborough's landmark series, tracing the development of the landmark format from its roots in the BBC's programming policy of the early 1960s through broader changes in national and international television markets to the development of the global brand BBC Earth. Combining close analysis of landmark wildlife series with ethnographic interviews with BBC Natural History Unit staff and detailed archival research, the article focuses on the role of BBC wildlife documentary in debates about how public service media should be defined and understood. It is concluded that landmark wildlife series have always evinced the tensions between the BBC's public service values and the need for these series to appeal to global television markets.

The BBC Natural History Unit: Instituting Natural History Film-Making in Britain

Cameras have revealed how elephants are able to get a drink of fresh water when faced with a stagnant waterhole.A BBC team discovered that the tusked giants use their trunks to delicately siphon off clean liquid that has settled at the top of the dirty pool.The footage shows how the elephants move incredibly slowly to avoid stirring up any sediment.The Natural History Unit team said this was the first time that they had seen this resourceful behaviour.1INTRODUCTIONThe epigraph above, a 2009 press release from the BBC, draws the attention towards the process through which the British Broadcasting Corporation's Natural History Unit (NHU) came to be able to present its natural history film-makers as discoverers and natural history footage as discoveries, thus implicitly presenting itself as a producer of genuine knowledge of the natural world, without making any mention of the activities and works of scientific practitioners. Referring to the production of knowledge the field, Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler note: [c]ultural appropriation and ambiguous identity go with the territory, so to speak, of the field sciences.2 In the specific case of the relationship between field sciences and natural history film-making, Gregg Mitman for example demonstrates the transformative power of the latter, whose conventions and constraints have been defined outside the sphere of science, on the ways biological knowledge gets produced and consumed. In his study of the work of Iain Douglas-Hamilton on elephants, he suggests that adopting the narrative conventions of natural history film-making, most notably the emphasis on individual animals, lead the field biologist to create new systems of patronage and research3 alien to the culture of the twentieth-century life sciences.The historical study proposed this paper is informed by the constructivist approach to the public understanding of science. This approach underlines the fluidity, porosity and constructedness of the boundaries4 between the scientific endeavour and other modes of the production of knowledge of the natural world, and invites one, specifically, to examine how these boundaries are negotiated, displaced and maintained, according to the needs of social actors engaged fashioning their identity as trustworthy spokespersons for the natural world, with relation to the received source of such knowledge, science.5Two notions enable us to make sense of the way cultures of knowledge production are constituted, and claims to cognitive credibility are made and sustained; the notion of instrument and that of institution. Instruments can be seen as a material nucleus around which bearers of a given material culture can congregate and define a social space based on the expert use of the instrument question, and from which outsiders can be excluded. In this view the notion of instrument points towards the idea that matters of fact are socially constituted on the basis of a consensus in an acceptance of certain 'technologies' of fact creation.6 In the same vein, institutions can be thought about as social constructs and as rhetorical devices providing social groups with resources to assert their moral authority. In particular, they can be conceived of as means to naturalize beliefs, norms and values.7 This focus on two supra-individual categories, which directs the attention to the notion of group, should not, however, obscure the fact that the story told this paper is first and foremost about individuals engaged fashioning their personal identity.Before the First World War and during the interwar period, early natural history film-makers, the person, especially, of Cherry Kearton, successfully took possession of the ground left vacant by a vanishing imperial hunting elite, and established the practice of natural history film-making as a socially and morally legitimate conduct to appropriate, control, and enjoy the Empire's wilderness. …

Nature's great events

This fantastic series from the BBC’s renowned natural history unit combines the epic scale of planet Earth with the intimate, emotional stories of charismatic animals as they struggle to survive. Using state of the art HD technology, these amazing programmes capture the earth most dramatic and epic wildlife sepectacles and the intimate stories of the animals caught up in them. Every year around the world, seasonal changes transform entire landscape and draw in millions of creature. For some animals, this is time of great opportunity but for others it’s the most dangerous time of their live. With stunning photography, this series follows the dramatic stories og key animal characters as these great events unfold.

Companion interview

Abstract Julian Hector is editor of the BBC Radio Natural History Unit in Bristol having previously worked for the British Antarctic Survey, Bristol Zoo and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.

Visions of nature, spaces of empire: Framing natural history programming within geometries of power

This paper investigates the multiple spaces of construction of media representations of nature, focusing on television and the natural history genre. It does so through an examination of two of the world’s largest non-US producers of such programming, the BBC’s Natural History Unit and Natural History New Zealand. It argues, first, that the televised natures generated by these entities need to be understood and interpreted in the context of the three connected, material geographies in and through which they are created: sites of capture, spaces of production, and networks of distribution. Second, it demonstrates that these geographies are in many respects geographies of empire, variously constituted and constrained by the residual inscriptions of the formal British Empire, and by the power relations of the contemporary global empire of the US media.

BBC NATURAL HISTORY VERSUS SCIENCE PARADIGMS

In 1979 the finale of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth featured Attenborough’s iconic forest floor romp with mountain gorillas. Two decades later and Sir David was still being asked to re-enact this memorable piece of television on the Parkinson chat show. Life on Earth had become the BBC’s first David Attenborough blockbuster to be followed by The Trials of Life, The Living Planet, The Life of Plants, up to the most recent, The Life of Mammals, in 2002. The outcome of this success has been to invest BBC natural history television with scientific authority. The BBC Natural History Unit and BBC Wildlife Magazine have become dominant conduits for popular natural science in the UK. Natural history television often relied implicitly upon science for advice and subject material. Recently the links have been made explicit with wildlife filmmakers and scientists’ research depicted working hand in hand, e.g. The Blue Planet and Walking with Dinosaurs.However the very success of the BBC’s wildlife output has produced a schism between the presentation of natural history and of the other sciences, e.g. cosmology, geology, non-wildlife biology. These sciences, explored in other generic programmes, e.g. Horizon or specific series e.g. Space, are promoted separately from natural history programmes. This schism extends to the BBC’s website, www.bbc.co.uk, which separates the genres between ‘/science’ and ‘/nature’, respectively. The science of natural history not only occupies its own broadcasting niche; it works to a different paradigm.

Birds, weather and climate

WeatherVolume 57, Issue 11 p. 399-410 Research Article Birds, weather and climate Tim Sparks, Corresponding Author Tim Sparks ths@ceh.ac.uk Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks WoodNERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks Wood, Abbots Ripton, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE28 2LS.Search for more papers by this authorHumphrey Crick, Humphrey Crick British Trust for Ornithology, ThetfordSearch for more papers by this authorNorman Elkins, Norman Elkins Cupar, FifeSearch for more papers by this authorRobert Moss, Robert Moss Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, BanchorySearch for more papers by this authorStephen Moss, Stephen Moss BBC Natural History Unit, BristolSearch for more papers by this authorKen Mylne, Ken Mylne Met Office, BracknellSearch for more papers by this author Tim Sparks, Corresponding Author Tim Sparks ths@ceh.ac.uk Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks WoodNERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks Wood, Abbots Ripton, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE28 2LS.Search for more papers by this authorHumphrey Crick, Humphrey Crick British Trust for Ornithology, ThetfordSearch for more papers by this authorNorman Elkins, Norman Elkins Cupar, FifeSearch for more papers by this authorRobert Moss, Robert Moss Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, BanchorySearch for more papers by this authorStephen Moss, Stephen Moss BBC Natural History Unit, BristolSearch for more papers by this authorKen Mylne, Ken Mylne Met Office, BracknellSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 December 2006 https://doi.org/10.1256/wea.142.02Citations: 21AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume57, Issue11November 2002Pages 399-410 RelatedInformation

Science, Observation and Entertainment: Competing Visions of Postwar British Natural History Television, 1946-1967

Popular culture is not the endpoint for the communication of fully developed scientific discourses; rather it constitutes a set of narratives, values and practices with which scientists have to engage in the heterogeneous processes of scientific work. In this paper I explore how one group of actors, involved in the development of both postwar natural history television and the professionalization of animal behaviour studies, manage this process. I draw inspiration from sociologists and historians of science, examining the boundary work involved in the definition and legitimation of scientific fields. Specifically, I chart the institution of animal ethology and natural history film-making in Britain through developing a relational account of the co-construction of this new science and its public form within the media. Substantively, the paper discusses the relationship between three genres of early natural history television, tracing their different associations with forms of public science, the spaces of the scientific field and the role of the camera as a tool of scientific observation. Through this analysis I account for the patterns of cooperation and divergence in the broadcasting and scientific visions of nature embedded in the first formations of the Natural History Unit of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Narrating the Natural History Unit: institutional orderings and spatial strategies

This paper develops a conceptualisation of institutional geographies through participation observation and interviews in the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU), and the approach of actor network theory. The methodological and theoretical tenets of actor network theory are examined for the insights they offer for understanding the achievements of this pre-eminent centre for the production of natural history films. The scope, scale and longevity of the NHU are analysed through the means by which localised institutional modes of ordering extend through space and over time. Drawing on empirical material, the paper outlines three different modes of ordering, which organise relations between actors in the film-making processes in different ways: prioritising different kinds of institutional arrangements, material resources and spatial strategies in the production of natural history films. Through these three modes of ordering, and through the topological insights of actor network theory, a series of overlapping and interlinked institutional geographies are revealed, through which the identity of the Unit as a centre of excellence for wildlife film-making is performed.

Tool Use by the New Caledonian Crow Corvus moneduloides to Obtain Cerambycidae from Dead Wood

SummaryFrom a successful effort in late 1997 to film crow tool-use with the BBC Natural History Unit, I present the first detailed description of New Caledonian Crows Corvus moneduloides using tools to extract larvae of an endemic Cerambycidae:Prioninae from dead wood. I observed birds over a six-week period at Sarraméa where fallen Aleurites moluccana logs were ‘salted’ with the larvae. Crows habitually used mostly A. moluccana leaf-stems to extract larvae from holes and manufacture was also common when birds removed leaves from leaf-stems before using tools. The techniques of adult crows varied but were more proficient than those of a juvenile crow that frequented the site. Tool-use to extract Cerambycidae from dead wood was probably an important part of the foraging behaviour of the crows year-round. My observations here and elsewhere show that crows in different localities can have distinctly different traditions in their tool behaviour.

Exploiting the archive: and the animals came in two by two, 16mm, CD‐ROM and BetaSp

SummaryUsing an account of the construction and subsequent exploitation of the film archive at the BBC's Natural History Unit, this paper explores the ways in which animals are embedded in the different cultures of care, control and commodification in the zoo and the wildlife film‐making unit. Network analysis is used to account for the similarities and tensions between these forms of animal exhibition, as revealed in the electronic zoo at Wildscreen World.

Animal, vegetable or mineral? Cataloguing and indexing in the Natural History Unit Film Library

Contenu et fonction de la filmotheque du departement, histoire naturelle de la BBC, catalogage des documents, methodes d'indexation, identification du contenu de chaque film