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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Apr 1, 2007 4:28 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Unforgettable elephants PBS Sunday 4/1/07. Great review in New York Times.

This evening, Sunday April 1 at 8pm, the PBS Nature series will air “The Unforgettable Elephant.” I will paste below information about the program, and a strong review from Saturday’s New York Times.

If you miss it this evening, you should be able to catch an encore. This page will help you find out when it will air again: www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/schedule_airdates.html.

(I share this email with those not in the US as your public stations may air the show at other times, and you can keep an eye out.)

If you catch ‘Unforgettable Elephants’ and enjoy, please don’t forget to express your appreciation. Nature takes feedback at www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/feedback.html.

There is a little promo video, with a scene from the documentary, at www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/unforgettable/video.html.

Here is the Introduction to the show, from the Nature web page www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/unforgettable/index.html:

NATURE chronicles African elephants families through stunning film and still photos in UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS, premiering Sunday, April 1.

We have seen them dressed in costumes and dancing at circuses, living solitary lives at zoos or giving our children a thrill with a ride on their back. But the largest land animals live a life that is completely foreign to us when left to their own in the wild-one complete with battles and births, kidnappings and camaraderie. Fifteen years ago, Martyn Colbeck chose to document in film and photos the life of one family of African elephants. For the better part of two decades, his subject, the elephant matriarch Echo and her close-knit family, have never failed to astonish him, amuse him and inspire him.

The family seems to accept Colbeck into their world, and perhaps even considers him one of their own. The result is that he can record unimpeded the gentle love, and tight bonds that elephants feel for each other. Colbeck’s film gives us a glimpse into the complex world of elephant society. We meet Echo and begin to understand the importance of such a majestic matriarch to her devoted clan. He shows us their language and ways of communication. And he captures remarkable scenes such as the rare birth of a crippled calf that the family desperately and collectively tries to help to its feet. Colbeck’s film causes us to question- could this simply be about survival? Or is there a deeper emotion we have just been privileged enough to witness through Colbecks’ lens.

In scene after moving scene, Colbeck makes us fall in love with Echo, Erin, Enid, Ely, and the rest of this loving family. He conveys through his film and in a special interview with NATURE what complicated, powerful, tender, funny –and, yes, unforgettable– creatures elephants are.

And here is the review from the New York Times:

March 31, 2007
Television Review | ‘Unforgettable Elephants’
African Elephants in All Their Humanity

By NEIL GENZLINGER

The PBS series “Nature” can always be counted on for wonderful images of animals as animals. But tomorrow’s installment, “Unforgettable Elephants,” comes amazingly close to giving us animals as people.

The nature photographer Martyn Colbeck, who has made something of a cottage industry out of his films and photographs of African elephants, here distills some of his best material from the last two decades. The results are breathtaking, and not just for their beauty; Mr. Colbeck makes you feel the joy and pain and, well, humanity of these huge beasts.

He begins by admitting he is skeptical that the experience of living among the animals, as he has for long stretches, can be adequately conveyed with camera. “It’s so much about the heat and the dust and the sound and the context,” he says, “and to put that into two dimensions is difficult.”

He succeeds by devoting most of the film to a single elephant family in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, following its wanderings, births and deaths for 15 years. The elephants have been given names by their human admirers, and the star of this family is Echo, its matriarch.

Mr. Colbeck presents a series of vignettes from the family’s life, making a convincing case that the elephants display love, loyalty, humor and an array of other emotions, often in greater depth than many humans you could name. In one particularly moving segment, the family shows its distress when one member, a grown daughter of Echo named Erin, succumbs to spear wounds. Later, when the elephants’ grazing brings them back to the spot where Erin died, they poke and caress her bleached bones, as if searching for her soul.

Mr. Colbeck sometimes veers toward arrogance, as when he hypothesizes that Echo chose to give birth to one calf out in the open specifically so he could film her. Despite that tendency, this is overall a humbling program, a reminder that there is more to “life” than human activity and achievement.

UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS

PBS, Sunday night at 8; check local listings.

End of New York Times review.

Perhaps the review and the show will inspire a letter to the editor in you! The New York Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com.

Always include your full name, address and telephone number.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare action alerts dawnwatch PBS Nature elephants documentary PBS Nature The Unforgettable Elephant African elephants Martyn Colbeck ethology animal behavior