Sunday, January 18, 2009

The Great Cantaloupe Chase

My dad, two of my four brothers, Chris and Derek, and Chris' girlfriend,  Rachel, came into town Friday night for a visit. Since I'm new to the Blu-ray world, and Dad is a veteran, I asked him to bring a bunch of Blu-ray discs.

Late Saturday morning we needed a video that would appeal to both the kiddos and the adults in the room. Planet Earth – a visually stunning nature documentary series – fit the bill. A few of us started watching, but one by one the others left the room leaving Ava and me. It wasn't enough for me to just let her watch, though. I gave her a running commentary throughout. The best part is that she was actually listening to me.

One of the first sequences we watched together showed African hunting dogs chasing what I thought were antelope (moments later I learned that the antelope were actually Impalas, but that's beside the point). Great stuff for a father to show his two-year old daughter, huh?

The most intense sequence was filmed in northern Canada. It showed a portion of the longest overland migration of any animal: a 2,000-mile trek by three million caribou. 

The caribou encounter hungry wolves along the way. One of these wolf-caribou encounters is actually caught on film. As we watched the gut-wrenching sequence, which shows a young caribou getting separated from its mother and caught by a wolf, little Ava looked up at me and said something along the lines of, "Look at the doggy chasing the cantaloupe, Daddy."

Brian Signature copy

1 comment:

  1. Brian, your a good daddy and Ava Kathryn is something else!!! Love Mom

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