The Friday Fillip: Nature on the Beeb

One of the reasons I’m no great fan of winter is that it moves you away from nature, at least the quick and the colourful; embrace winter how you will, the smells, sounds, and hues of flora and fauna are all seriously muted. In summer nature is very much in your face, flashing, cheeping, biting, croaking and generally redolent. This is when you take the car trips on which you count the cows, when you fish (and release), when the garden’s profusion nearly overwhelms.

So it seemed a good idea to offer you and the family something straightforward about this “great blooming, buzzing confusion” — and that would be the BBC’s website Nature. Here a little learning goes down as easily as though it were sugar-coated. For example, there’s:

• a slideshow on Animal colour through animal eyes, so now you know how your dog sees you.
• an illustrated short article on the Secrets of sticky feet, which reveals how it is that some beetles can walk on water (and you can’t)
• a creepy cool TV show on nature’s nightime world (only a week’s viewing time left)
• and stuff on bats, cuckoos, arctic foxes, savannah grasslands, damselflies, the bunchberry dogwood . . . .

There are two dozen video collections, each of which comprises multiple programs — just right for that rainy afternoon at the cottage. There’s even a whole portion of the site dedicated to prehistoric life in case what’s around you just isn’t enough.

And as an extra treat for those interested in information technology — as pretty much everyone should be — I can tell you that the Nature site is to a significant degree built using “linked data.” This video from OCLC explains quite well what linked data is and why it’s increasingly important.