Having had the good fortune to have been brought up in Britain, I was never short of excellent nature documentaries to watch on television. I must have seen thousands of them over the years. I've lost count of how many times I've watched cheetahs chasing gazelles, lions hunting wildebeest, and polar bears padding over the frozen wastes. It's remarkable what you we can observe from the comfort of our own living rooms.
In a perverse way, though, the sheer number and quality of nature documentaries on television inevitably means that some of the Wow! factor has gone. When David Attenborough first sat amongst the gorillas, my whole family, and an entire nation, watched spellbound. But nowadays you can catch up-close-and-personal documentaries about gorillas pretty much any week on one channel or another. We've seen it all before.
But, this week, sitting watching yet another BBC Nature documentary with my dad, I experienced a true Wow! moment. I mean it literally: both my dad and I actually said "Wow!" We saw an animal neither of us had ever seen in action before do something truly amazing. I was, quite frankly, shocked (and a little embarrassed) that I had not known about its remarkable behaviour. And, to top it all, it was a British animal (although, it turns out, there are numerous species which perform this remarkable feat)…
Fortunately, the BBC has made the clip in question available online. [Postscript: The video is not available outside the UK, apparently. This YouTube video covers the same subject matter.]
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be Wowed! I give you the sexton beetle [Nicrophorus vespilloides]:
It is famously said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. I don't know about that. But I do know that the sexton beetle is now officially my favourite member of that inordinately vast order.