The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: PICK

(2005)

The White Diamond: PICK

(2005)

Winged Migration: PICK 

(2005)

Content advisory:

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and Winged Migration each contain a few images of injured, distressed or dying/dead birds, and are fine family viewing. The White Diamond contains an instance of profanity, a sickeningly vivid account of an accidental death and brief disaster footage of the Hindenberg, and might be troubling to sensitive children.

It isn’t March of the Penguins and it isn’t Grizzly Man, though it has a little in common with both. Yet another intriguing 2005 nature documentary, Judy Irving’s charming sleeper hit The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (recently released on DVD) focuses on exotic birds in peril, and an eccentric California man’s intimate involvement in their lives. The difference here is that the dangers faced by the film’s subjects, a small flock of cherry-headed conures, aren’t those of their native environment — and Mark Bittner, a middle-aged, unemployed San Francisco man with a waist-length ponytail, hasn’t gone off to some exotic location to insert himself into the lives of wild creatures.

These tropical birds live in San Francisco. Like many of the city’s residents, they’re immigrants — in this case escapees from captivity, though no one knows exactly from where or when. In many ways they still behave like pet birds, flocking to Bittner as he brings them free meals. Yet Bittner assures a skeptical bystander that these are wild birds, many of whom were born (or hatched) in the wild and are now raising families of their own in freedom.

Like Grizzly Man’s Tim Treadwell, Bittner assigns his wild friends names and becomes intimate with their personalities.

Yet where Treadwell saw himself in quasi-messianic terms as the champion and defender of his beloved bears, Bittner, who actually seems to be helping the birds, self-deprecatingly minimizes his role: These birds, he says, would fare just fine without him. And, of course, it helps that the birds can’t eat him.

The White Diamond is the title of Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog’s other documentary of 2005, referring to the brainchild of lighter-than-air researcher Graham Dorrington, a small airship shaped like a puffer fish and designed for maneuverability. Such a craft, Dorrington says, would be able to negotiate close encounters with the otherwise inaccessible rain forest canopy and provide hitherto unprecedented access to its biodiversity, with all the potential research and discovery implications that would entail. Why Dorrington decides to actually test the airship deep in virgin Guyanese jungle isn’t entirely clear, though an argument between the inventor and the director about Herzog accompanying the ship’s maiden voyage may provide a clue. Apparently, Herzog isn’t just documenting the expedition; he’s funding it.

Nor is that the extent of Herzog’s tampering with his subject matter. In interviews Herzog candidly acknowledges that dialogue in some scenes was scripted and rehearsed, and that much of the apparent scene-stealing by a local man employed by the expedition was actually Herzog’s own invention.

Finally, the outstanding 2003 nature documentary Winged Migration, out of print for awhile, recently got a “special-edition” DVD release featuring basically the same features as the original release — but at a remarkably low price. In the tradition of the also nearly wordless Atlantis and Microcosmos, Winged Migration is another invaluable French nature documentary that “documents” with such extraordinary wonder and power that educational voiceover narration is superfluous: It’s enough simply to see.

Shooting from hot-air balloons and ultralight aircraft, the filmmakers insinuate the camera’s eye so intimately into the midst of airborne flights of birds that one can almost count the hairlike barbs on the feathers. It’s a remarkable achievement that never goes very long without showing something you’ve never seen before.

Steven D. Greydanus is editor

and chief critic of DecentFilms.com.