Donna
I'm Falcon Crazy
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« on: 26-Mar-10, 10:53:43 PM » |
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Remember Top Trumps? That card game where you compared numerical data – about cars, aeroplanes, dinosaurs etc – in order to win other players' cards? The Lamborghini Countach was the card you wanted in my Top Trumps pack, for its unbeatable speed. Actually Top Trumps are still very much around, as I discovered last Christmas when one of my nephews produced a pack. Steam trains. I'd forgotten how fantastically boring and unimaginative it is. We read out our figures – speed, weight, length, date of manufacture (there was some disagreement about whether earlier or later should win) – and exchanged cards. I won: I had the Mallard, the Lamborghini of steam trains.
Inside the Perfect Predator (BBC1) was basically Top Trumps, turned into wildlife TV; or, rather, wildlife TV turned into Top Trumps. There were just four cards: the peregrine falcon, the Nile crocodile, the great white shark, and the cheetah. And we looked at various data for each creature – strike rate success, force of blow, eyesight, speed etc – to see which one is the Top Trump of the animal kingdom.
Well, the cheetah's going to be the fastest, obviously, everyone knows that. Oh, it's the peregrine falcon, which can dive at 200mph apparently. Yeah, but that's just falling, under gravity. Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, could probably achieve similar speeds by leaping from a great height, if he plummeted headfirst and tucked in his extremities to be more aerodynamic. Clearly, Perry W would be less successful at pulling out of the dive than Perry F, and this would be a once-only experiment.
The bird scores well on the eye test, too; it has two sets of sensors at the base of its retina that give it incredible powers of triangulation. But it only has a 20% strike rate – that's a lot of diving for not very much dinner. The great white, meanwhile, has a 50% strike rate (bad news for South African cape seals and Australian surfers), and scores well dentally, as does the Nile crocodile. The croc is also the stand-out winner when it comes to number of aortas – two, compared with everything else's one. A cheetah can out-accelerate a Porsche (0-60 in under three seconds – see, it really is Top Trumps), and can spot a moving gazelle a mile away. But is that really so impressive? I reckon I could spot a moving gazelle a mile away, although obviously I couldn't catch it, unless I was in my Porsche . . .
Oh, this show's not really as boring as Top Trumps. John Simm off Life On Mars does an amusing narration: a cross between an action movie preview and Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link. "All four predators are poised for the attack, their insides a powder keg just waiting to explode. But who will make the kill? And who will go hungry?" There's some cool computer graphic stuff of the insides of these creatures as they do their thing: the cheetah's leg muscles, those two aortas pumping away inside the crocodile. And I know we've all seen it a million times, but the shark exploding out of the water with a seal in its teeth, and the croc doing pretty much the same to a wildebeest, is still thrilling. I'm sure it's very wrong to be excited by it, but it's better than the stats. Wildlife snuff-porn Top Trumps natural history, then.
And the peregrine is the surprise winner, on account of its success at living in buildings in an urban environment. The falcon, that is, not the Worsthorne, who, being a Tory of the old school, is less likely to be successful at adapting to the modern world.
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