Once upon a time there was a hidden kingdom. A while ago, during one of my last year's frequent clean-up showers, the ideal way to deal with frustrations, I encounter two promo DVDs of nature films. Nature movies are a genre I'm just beginning to discover. The way in which nature is filming, I would like to call them here, is absolutely amazing nowadays. Partly because of the high specialist quality of modern technology and its inexhaustible shining possibilities, everything is clearly possible in this field. There are images and nature loving nerds, who desingn en construct very ingenious devices with small cameras with beautiful image quality, which are used with great enthusiasm, for example by Sir Richard Attenborough, who himself was allowed to see his 99th birthday a month ago. I am referring to the effort they put in it. Some cameramen spend hours or days in a tent on the ground in the cold waiting for that one moment.
Last night I pulled out the television with DVD player, I'm not really a fan of the medium, and I started with the disc on which part one of HIDDEN KINGDOMS, a BBC EARTH production is on. On the cover you see a scared little mouse with behind it a big mean-looking snake. It won't be boring! The film is entirely dedicated to two mice, one, a senghi on the savannahs of Africa and the other in a desert far away from there, a grasshopper mouse, also called scorpion mouse. She is so filmed, with specially developed camera performances that both stories play on the physical level of those tiny mice. This also means that the dung beetle that the senghie regularly encounters on his path is a real, and therefore very detailed appearance. Really very special to look at and there really is a story in it, the whole is not presented as some single impact-oriented images. And here it gets even more interesting. The knowledge that these nature filmmakers seem to have on their subject makes it even more worthwhile.
We follow the two mice during their survival journey. One, the grasshopper mouse, enters this barren journey, only four weeks unwittingly as a voluntary adventure, the other, the senghie after his mother was eaten in her quest for food for her young, by a dragon. It appears to be a law in wild nature that the smaller the animal, the more energy, in proportion, and therefore food it needs to develop into an adult animal. In this case, both animals must learn to survive themselves without being initiated by their mother. You don't actually hear anything about fathers. The senghie have their own path between the grasses, through which they can hunt at a speed four times that of a cheetah, given the large of their body and fortunately just in time can escape their also hungry attackers, partly because of their instinct, if they are lucky. Eating or being eaten in the animal kingdom, however beautiful it often looks from the sofa on television. The scorpion mouse, which is called that because it can kill and eat a scorpion, eventually takes on three true desert buzzards, chasing the creature. Remarkable is that buzzards hunt in groups and have a plan. So there's one who hunts the prey, one who sets the trap, and the third one... Yeah, he goes with it. Eventually, this mouse also survives and the rest of the also really tough trip just like the other mouse on the other side of the Pacific.
What matters in the end is that I saw that no matter how small you are and how many incessant setbacks you have to endure, there is always a chance that you will survive, when you do not give up and use your qualities well. That's the hidden kingdom.
