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Endemic to the forests that give it its name, the Philippine eagle is the largest known eagle species by length and wing-surface area. After a century of human-fuelled habitat destruction, it also happens to be the world’s rarest, with only 400 nesting pairs now thought to be living in the wild. But this population is up from just 50 nesting pairs in the early 1980s, so that there are any Philippine eagles at all outside captivity is a credit to a small group of conservationists, scientists and researchers dedicated to protecting this ‘masterpiece of nature’.
One such conservationist is the celebrated US wildlife cinematographer Neil Rettig. Aged 27, Rettig trekked deep into the forest of the Philippines to capture the first-ever footage of the eagle in its nest as part of a 1980s public relations effort to save the bird from extinction. Rettig is now 64, and the feature-length documentary Bird of Prey (2018) follows as he and a small filmmaking team seek, once again, to photograph a Philippine eagle’s nest and, in doing so, bring renewed focus to the threats it faces. Along the way, the director Eric Liner of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology unravels the unlikely story of how local and international activism saved the world from losing the Philippine eagle forever – an activism that continues to this day.
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
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Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
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History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes