Which nature documentary focus is most interesting?

Learning about the natural world attracts many hobbyists: outdoorspeople, scientists and college students in search of some much-needed fresh air. Now, we don’t have to go outside to learn about worlds thousands of kilometers away from our favorite recliner.

For this reason, nature documentaries attract many people. A few are found on almost all major streaming services, making it even easier to access knowledge about the rock we call home and those with whom we share it; however, personal preference draws viewers to love certain biomes.

Nature documentaries open a world for viewers that is largely inaccessible to the vast majority of people. As biomes fracture and climates change, now more than ever, being educated about our dear planet Earth is absolutely necessary.

Deserts: Hotspots for storytelling by Jack Erickson

In middle school science class, whenever we’d watch nature documentaries, I always looked forward to the episode about desert dwellers. Although learning about the behaviors of many temperate and tropical rainforest dwellers is interesting, flora and fauna beyond the jungle have not had the luxury of a nearly unchanging climate for millions of years. 

Where conditions are unfavorable – where mother nature has reared her ugly head for millennia – inhabitants fight against the inevitable: time. In the dry and hot, where a lack of water could mean dehydration, the sandy desert becomes one of the harshest environments on Earth. Organisms that have adapted to call this place home are some of the most resilient living beings on the planet. 

Aside from the sheer impressiveness of these organisms, desert documentarians are forced to tell better stories because they work with a smaller cast of characters with the same airtime.

In episodes where biodiversity is high, like rainforests and coral reefs, I’m often left with more questions than answers. 

In a National Geographic documentary, the Greater Iophorina performs a unique ritual dance for his potential mate, often with little luck and an unimpressive dance. Comedic? Absolutely. But as a viewer, I want to know more about the former bird-of-paradise species and what other parts of their lives make them special. 

Because the jungle contains an unfathomable number of different species, researching all of them is nearly impossible. In desert episodes of nature documentaries like “Our Planet” and “World of the Wild,” the few animals are well-researched, so their stories can be told from beginning to end with more airtime for each. 

In jungle documentaries, following the same fauna for a lifetime is difficult and often can’t capture the full capabilities and uniqueness of jungle dwellers. 

In desert episodes, viewers are given time to fall in love with desert dwellers. Whereas rainforest docs can pick and choose the best adaptations from various organisms, documentarians are left with few options for deserts to tell the same length story. 

Desert episodes require a different kind of storytelling: one that focuses less on showcasing flashy traits and more on highlighting the necessary adaptations to survive in such harsh, unpredictable environments. I want to be able to fall in love with an adorable fennec fox for an entire episode, not just for a segment.

Nature documentaries featuring desert-adapted organisms are my favorite because they showcase how organisms have adapted to their environment rather than to other organisms. Sure, there is a food chain where predators like the sidewinder rattlesnake camouflage in sandy soil to hide from prey, but the coolest adaptations are to the heat, aridity and resource scarcity. 

Camels, for instance, have humps of fat that can be easily converted to water. The thorny devil lizard can absorb water quickly through any part of its body, including its feet.

I also enjoy desert documentaries because of the aesthetics – particularly the sand and dunes that dry desert wind creates. The soil of deserts, or aridisols, is easily blown by wind, causing dramatic sandstorms that can’t be found in any other biome.

Deserts are one of many unique biomes on planet Earth, and nature documentaries showcasing this slice of the biosphere tell stories steeped in millennia of adaptations to extremely arid conditions. Desert documentaries reign supreme because they require documentarians to analyze their well-adapted inhabitants closely and use better storytelling techniques to show viewers why deserts deserve viewers’ love and appreciation.

Rainforests: Rooted in abundance by Jocelyn Baas

When I was a toddler, we had a set of magnets on our fridge that were shaped like rainforest animals: jaguars, howler monkeys, quetzals and more. If asked, my mom will fondly recount that I was obsessed with the hummingbird and poison dart frog. I can still remember holding my favorites in my tiny hands.

My love for the rainforest and its animals has not faded as I have grown up. Though – to my chagrin – I no longer have the magnets, I feed my interest now by rewatching my favorite nature documentaries more often than I am willing to disclose.

The “Jungles” episode of “Our Planet” tells its viewers that these environments contain millions of living species. As if that was not shocking enough, we discover new species every week.

For instance, the World Wildlife Fund writes that a single tree in the forests of Borneo has the potential to contain over a thousand different species of insect. Rainforests are simply so packed with life that we have yet to determine the true number of species present with any specificity, which I think is a wonderful problem to have.

Jungle environments surpass any other when it comes to biodiversity. Imagine stepping into a world where black spider monkeys clamber through the canopy, jaguars stalk through the underbrush and leafcutter ants march on tree trunks. This is the reality in the Amazon, as revealed by the aforementioned “Our Planet” episode. 

Rainforests only cover around 7% of Earth’s surface, but nowhere else is there so much variation within such limited space.

I must admit, part of why I enjoy the jungle episodes of nature documentaries so much is simply their visuals. The trees are a deep, lush green, thanks to their more-than-adequate sources of water. Birds sport brightly colored plumage in every color under the sun. High humidity means that dramatic fog hovers perpetually around the tops of the towering trees.

Such vivid worlds easily capture a viewer’s imagination, which lends itself to another reason that I appreciate the rainforest episodes. In every environment on the planet, the effects of climate change and human interference are becoming clear, but the disappearance of the jungle’s sheer abundance of life is both obvious and heartbreaking, which makes for particularly poignant climate advocacy.

To this point, “Our Planet” shows footage of row upon endless row of oil palm trees. Narrator Sir David Attenborough warns that we have destroyed over 27 million hectares of lively, vibrant rainforest and replaced it with this single-species monolith, all but eliminating natural diversity and habitat in those areas. 

Today, human irresponsibility can be made clear through any environmental lens, but rainforest documentary episodes pack a particular punch when they advocate for change because of the prospect of such large-scale loss of life.

Rainforests boast uniqueness and abundance in nearly every conceivable way: the number and diversity of species, density of life and striking colors. The biome is rich in every sense of the word, which allows it to come alive on screen more vividly than any other.