Customer Reviews

National Geographic Video: Africa's Animal Oasis [VHS]

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This is one of the best documentaries on Ngorongoro Crater's wildlife. The footage is spectacular, the place is magnificent, and the wildlife drama is exciting. We experience the trials of predators and prey in this magnificent and unique corner of Africa. The filmmaker also addresses the impact we make on this African paradise. We see multitudes of safari vehicles that surround the wildlife, birds stealing food from travelers, life-stock grazing in the crater. I strongly recommend this video to anyone interested in African wildlife.

If, like me, you're going there, you'll want to see this documentary; but it's nothing out of the ordinary.
Try "Eternal Enemies: Lions & Hyenas" for something special.

This is a to predictable image of Africa. Why must Americans always treat AFrica like a giant zoo?

This one hour video provides a good overview of the inhabitants of the African plains ecology by focusing on a relatively small region with a fairly dense wildlife population, the Ngorongoro crater. As explained in the video, this crater, ten miles across, supports permanent populations of many species by virtue of its year round water supply.

The video covers a wide range of species, with at least a few minutes spent on each of wildebeest, zebras, flamingos, acacia trees, jackals, hippos, and visiting storks and elephants. Lions and hyenas, as the dominant predators, get somewhat more time; vultures get less because, unlike most of Africa, they aren't common here, since the Ngorongo predator populations are high enough here that little is left over for scavengers.

The video also shows various interactions between the species: several hunts by lions for wildebeest, for example, as well as one by hyenas and one hostile encounter between two hyena clans. The last is slightly gruesome when an unfortunate hyena is caught by the enemy clan and ends up trailing some of its entrails. In the hunting scenes, one may end up rooting for the mother wildebeest and rhino that defend their young against the hyenas; the baby rhino is also pretty cute when it tries to charge the hyenas itself. Subtler conflicts, such as flies which in earlier years decimated the lion population, are covered as well.

The video generally keeps the focus on the animals, avoiding the occasionally boring scientist interviews found in some other nature videos by putting the information into the voiceover instead. However, the video does spend five minutes apiece on two other populations of humans that do interact with the wildlife - the Masai, who use the crater for parts of the year and set an unauthorized fire to some of the grasslands to improve the pasture for their cattle, and the tourists, who end up inadvertently feeding some rather aggressive hawks.

This video is now unfortunately out of production. However, Amazon does offer unused left over copies from third party vendors at very attractive prices.