Video Catnip

In the first half of the 19th century, the French ornithologist Jean-Jacques Audubon travelled to America to depict birdlife along the Mississippi River. Audubon was also a gifted painter. His life’s work in the form of the classic book ‘Birds of America’ is an invaluable documentation of both extinct species and an entire world of imagination. During the same period, early industrialisation and the expulsion of indigenous peoples was in full swing. The gorgeous film traces Audubon’s path around the South today. The displaced people’s descendants welcome us and retell history, while the deserted vistas of heavy industry stretch across the horizon. The magnificent, broad images in Jacques Loeuille’s atmospheric, modern adventure reminds us at the same time how little - and yet how much - is left of the nature that Audubon travelled around in. His paintings of the colourful birdlife of the South still belong to the most beautiful things you can imagine.

Z ptačího světa

Angry birds are very popular- especially among game-playing kids, but are there real angry birds out there? Birds battle to survive, find food, and shelter, avoid danger, and raise their young. Life's hard, but will they get in a flap?

Jerry, an awkwardly plump hummingbird, desperately tries to fit in with his siblings. But more often than not, he only weighs them down, literally. After accidentally destroying the family nest, Jerry is exiled to an old dead tree, never to be seen or heard from again. Family always sticks together though. So when a hungry house cat attempts to turn his siblings into a three-course meal, Jerry must set his sorrows aside and be the bird he was born to be in order to save his family.

Na ostrove kormoránov

You don't have to travel to faraway countries to observe wildlife, because the fauna of the big city also provides surprises every day. Contrary to expectations, many bird, mammal and insect species have adapted to the concrete jungle. They have become experts of the urban space. “My Wild Neighbors” takes a poetic look at the lives of animals in the city.

Guinea Pig Diaries is an unfiltered look into the lives of guinea pigs and the people who adore them, breed them, show them, and rescue them.

This film documents the yearly cycle of the great blue heron, its migration from Central America and the West Indies to the St. Lawrence River in Québec, and the breeding and rearing of its young. Outstanding footage shot by the filmmaker perched high in a tree affords close-ups of the birds' intricate courtship rituals. A sensitive, beautifully photographed nature film with much to tell us of ecology and wildlife.

Seven-year-old Chloé imitates her big brother Théo doing tai chi on a snowy plain. A group of starlings are watching.

Sihja is a young, charming and a little outrageous fairy who leaves her home in the forest. On arrival in the city, she meets a sensitive new friend, a lonely human boy Alfred. Sihja loves the newly found organized urban shapes and orderly habits that the city people have. One day dead birds appear on the city streets. Alfred and Sihja must find out what is threatening the nature.

Ostrovy milionů ptáků

Výři

David Attenborough tells the remarkable story of how these " birds of paradise " have captivated explorers , naturalists, artists, filmmakers and even royalty.

A baby pufferfish travels through a wondrous microworld full of fantastical creatures as he searches for a home on the Great Barrier Reef.

Jack Peterson, a widowed father of three young children, encounters Ginny Newsom, a wildlife biologist, whose mission is tracking trumpeter swans, a family of which settle in a pond on the Peterson farm. Could that be romance in the air?

After being hunted to near-extinction, the last male Eskimo curlew searches for a mate while making the annual migration from the arctic tundra to the nesting grounds in Argentina.

On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book's publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory--a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy.

Did Cartier dream of making a country from this land of a million birds? In his records of his exploration he certainly marvelled at seeing the great auks that have since disappeared from Isle aux Ouaiseaulx, the razor-bills and gannets that are gone from Blanc-Sablon, and the kittiwakes from Anticosti, all the winged creatures of all the islands which he described as being "as full of birds as a meadow is of grass". And that's not even counting the countless snow geese.

Ornithologist Seán Ronayne from Cobh, Co. Cork is on a mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – that’s nearly 200 birds. Often joined by his partner Alba, he travels to some of the country’s most beautiful and remote locations to capture its most elusive species and soundscapes: the busy seabird colony of Skellig Michael; a native woodland free from road noise in the Burren; the corncrake stronghold of Tory Island; a solitary nest in the Donegal uplands. Along the way we get to know Seán, whose hypersensitivity to sound has proven both a struggle and a strength. At once inspiring and cautionary, Seán’s journey illustrates the beauty and importance of sound, and what listening can tell us about the state of our natural world.

Jim Moir and his wife Nancy continue on their ornithological adventure as they seek out their favourite seasonal birds and learn how they best evoke the festive spirit of Christmas.