Friday, September 8, 2017

Glacier Bird on BBC


The final episode of BBC TWO's new documentary series about mountains will air at 9 pm on 13 September, featuring a variety of sequences filmed in the Andes.

Among the Andes sequences will be a segment filmed at Quelccaya, as described above. Several wonderful "behind the scenes" clips have been produced for the Glacier Bird film, one of which is here (hopefully available soon in North America). A link to the page above, with an embedded clip, is here.

Since the time of filming - just last year - science has moved forward:  we have discovered a second species of bird which also nests on the glacier (Hardy et al., submitted to Wilson Journal of Ornithology), and Glacier Bird's taxonomic classification has changed from Diuca speculifera to Idiopsar speculifer. The common name in English remains White-winged Diuca-Finch, but this too may change because the bird is not a Diuca-Finch!

For those not in the UK, the series will be broadcast in North America by PBS at a later date.