If there has been anything good to come out of this pandemic, it would be the newfound appreciation for our outdoor spaces. 

As many of us sit trapped within our concrete jungles, wellness and the determination to reconnect ourselves with nature have been at the forefront of our minds. Although we may still be slaves to Zoom, Netflix’s menagerie of nature documentaries have given BBC Earth a run for their money with their jaw dropping cinematography and majestic scoring. Here are just a few of my top picks:

My Octopus Teacher (2020)

One man, one octopus and a friendship that may or may not border on romance has brought this cinematic masterpiece to our screens. My Octopus Teacher took 10 years to film and unlike other nature documentaries equipped with an entire film crew, this documentary was primarily filmed by one man who just decided to free dive in the icy ocean waters off the South African coast every morning for a decade. The filmmaker, Craig Foster, formed an unlikely friendship with an octopus during his dives in the dense and turbulent kelp forest near his Cape Town home. The documentary not only reveals astonishing discoveries of octopus intelligence, but takes an incredibly intimate and introspective look into what it means to be human. This film will probably make you cry, you have been warned. 

“Night on Earth” (2020)

New technology has allowed this film crew to capture animals quite literally in a new light. “Night on Earth” features breathtaking cinematography courtesy of moonlight cameras to film animals at night and reveals new discoveries of their nighttime behavior. 

 BONUS: Night on Earth: Shot in the Dark

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “A documentary ABOUT a documentary? You’ve gone too far.” Fair point, but just hear me out. The work that went into filming “Night on Earth” will blow your mind and leave you with a newfound respect for what nature doc crews do. The camera crew had to travel to the most remote parts of the world, persevere in the most extreme climates and get bitten. That’s right, I said bitten. Bitten by a pack of urban monkeys in Thailand, swarms of mosquitoes in a dense jungle and fanged vampire bats. This film took a lot of creative problem solving and required the crew to shoot in 30 different countries.

Dancing With The Birds (2019)

Those TikTok dances you’ve been practicing in your bedroom have got nothing on these birds. Accompanied by some groovy tunes and rather risqué narration, these colorful birds shimmy, sing and even pole dance to win the eye of a female. The documentary follows the stories of affectionately named male birds in their attempts to, as the narrator puts it, charm a female onto their poles. We see birds intricately building towers, choreographing group dances, dilating their pupils at alarming speeds and creepily enough, mimicking the sounds of human children’s voices in their elaborate courting rituals.

“It may be a cliche, but size matters to female bowerbirds.”

– Stephen Fry, Narrator of “Dancing With The Birds”

“Our Planet” (2019)

Narrated by the nature documentary icon himself, Sir David Attenborough, “Our Planet” is a six episode series covering ecosystems ranging from arctic tundras to the deep oceans. The series boasts breathtaking cinematography of landscapes and animals, but is primarily centered around how human activity is damaging these ecosystems. One particularly horrific scene of walruses plummeting to their deaths while fighting for space almost broke the internet. It is a prime example of the devastating impacts of global warming.

BONUS: Our Planet: Behind the Scenes

This behind-the-scenes film reads a little like a twisted reality TV show at times – you’ve got videographers trapped inside a cold, tiny hut for six days at a time to film Siberian tigers, lights failing during a nighttime shark feeding frenzy with the diver right in the center of the action and then crew mates struggling to fit their gear into a tiny hydroplane. It’s nonstop action. “Our Planet” took four years to film in over 60 countries, with over 6,600 drone flights and 400,000 hours of trap camera footage for the crew to scour through. 

“Alien Worlds” (2020)

If life developed on discovered exoplanets…what would it look like? If Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Attenborough got together to make a docuseries, this would be it. “Alien Worlds” is not exactly a nature documentary, but it took incredible imagination and technical work to animate these fantastical alien dreamscapes. This documentary is a must-watch for sci-fi and nature documentary lovers alike.

Ghost of the Mountains (2017)

This international crew of filmmakers was the first to ever capture a snow leopard family on camera in the wild. The crew had to brave altitude sickness, freezing cold temperatures and live in a crowded shack with no electricity or running water for months on end. To get to their final destination in the remote wilderness of the Tibetan mountains, they had to drive for an entire week to an elevation of over 16,000 feet above sea level. With every 1,600 feet gained in altitude, the crew had to stop and rest for 24 hours to avoid altitude sickness. Before they could even think of filming, they first needed to track down a snow leopard family in the mountains, which is no easy task, but it was all worth it in the end. This Disneynature documentary is now an important part of history.

Featured Image designed by Kara Fields