Werner Herzog
2007
99 minutes
This is the Herzog documentary with the notorious suicidal penguin, who goes berserk and just starts charging away from the herd inland to his certain doom. Apparently they do that sometimes, which other nature documentaries usually aren't able to capture or willing to show. It's sort of the opposite of the infamous lemmings documentary, in which Disney gave the poor rodents a helping hand and herded them over a cliff to illustrate an urban legend about them that is generally contrary to their nature.
The closest to such a marvel you've experienced was only second-hand. When you lived in Milwaukee, your now-deceased wife and your upstairs neighbor witnessed an act of squirrel infanticide which, deliberate or not, they found very haunting. One of the squirrels that inhabited your attic apparently decided that downtown Milwaukee was no place to raise a baby squirrel and proceeded to put her progeny out of their misery before they even got a start. When it was time to give birth, she situated herself with her rump and bushy tail sticking out of the hole in the attic through which she had infiltrated. Before long it was raining infant squirrels onto the pavement leading to your front steps. They did not survive the fall. Mercifully, it seemed that they were dead on impact, but your wife was forced to clean up the mess while your upstairs neighbor cried.
You did however make another unpleasant zoological discovery firsthand when your uncle kept pet hamsters at your grandmother's house. The two male hamsters he had purchased turned out to be gay, as you discovered when one of the hamsters would pose himself before the other hamster submissively with his tail up and the other hamster would mount him from behind. Your uncle would pound on the hard plastic of the hamster container to discourage this behavior, as if trying to fix the signal on an old television. It was not in their nature to be discouraged. Not long after, one of the male hamsters gave birth to a litter of little hamsters, which seemed to be a minor miracle. This cycle happened a few times, and the hamsterrarium was soon filled with blind and naked little beasts meandering their ways around the maze of tunnels and tubes and burrowing under the sweet-smelling wood shavings.
You tried to get a population count of the hamster colony, but could never get the numbers to agree. The population leveled off but then began decreasing, to your grandmother's dismay. Clearly hamsters were escaping the enclosure and raiding her pantry, as the rodent droppings she was finding interspersed amongst her canned goods proved. At least that was the prevalent theory until you made the gruesome discovery of half a baby hamster nestled under a pile of wood shavings. The other half had clearly escaped inside the stomach of one of the larger hamsters. You tearfully explained this discovery to the adults, but no one wanted to listen. And years later your grandmother still blamed any gnawed bags of flour and rodent droppings in her pantry on the hamster escapees of yore, grumbling about your uncle's carelessness in keeping the hamster tank secure.
Time to choose something different: