"Planet Earth," or, How I Stopped Fearing Teeny-Tiny Cave Birds and Learned to Love Sir David Attenborough

So do any of you watch Planet Earth?





I do. A lot. Do you watch it when you’re not exactly "down to Planet Earth"? Yeah, I know that’s probably totally passé by now, but whatever. I totally love to do that. Because it’s so stupefying and mystical to me just how machine-like our world is. The bat-shit-eating beetles in a cave in the jungle affect the tides. Anyway, that’s fairly sophomoric thinking. Sorry. But I’m watching this portion right now about these millions of tiny, tiny birds called swifts that live in these deep, dark caves and that build itsy-bitsy nests on the cave walls. Each nest can hold one fat little birdie (they look just like those cartoony-traditional-sailor-jerry sparrow tattoos) and a teeny-tiny, microscopic (okay, not that small) egg. The kicker is this: The nests are made entirely of the hardened saliva of the owner. They look like porcelain. The concentric circles of the nest make it look like something Demi Moore and the ghost of Patrick Swayze (shiver) spun on a wheel just before he revealed his murderer’s identity and that poor son of a bitch got pulled down to hell by a shitload of really scary demons. Or something like that.

Human workers scale the walls on rugged ladders made of vines, a million feet above the floor, collecting the nests to sell as the main ingredient in bird’s nest soup, a commodity which keeps the nests competing with silver in value. The narrator tells us that as soon as a nest is removed, the bird builds a new one, keeping the colony perpetually alive. It all seems so symbiotic and organic and pure.

But what if those birds are pissed? What if they are pissed off as shit? I can only imagine just how goddamned frustrating it would be to have your home stolen every effing day so some businessman can eat some fancy soup that probably just tastes like chicken broth. I just looked this crap up (even I won’t pretend I knew shit about bird’s nest soup until just now), and apparently it’s a delicacy in China because of the gelatinous texture the nest provides once dissolved in hot water. Hot bird-loogie stew. Dude, gross. Who thinks this shit up?

Maybe world peace will never be achieved as long as we think it only has to occur between humans. I’m just saying, what if the birds were allowed to live a life that didn’t include a regular big-bad-wolfing of their homes? Would they spend more time chillin’ in their nests and less time deranged with anger and tortured by desires for revenge that could never be realized by such small and delicate creatures? Would that reduction in wing-flapping alter the course of global warming? Perhaps we’ll never know, because Mr. Businessman needs his gross Tweety-spit Campbell’s.

By the way, what's up with the American version of this? Yes, I was highly skeptical of the American version of my beloved The Office, but it proved to be its own entity with its own characters and stories. But Planet Earth? It's the same friggin' script! Who are these Americans who can't handle listening to a voice unlike their own for more than fifteen seconds? Boo.