Meet the cutest animal in the world — a baby pygmy hippo
THe mouse lemur of Madagascar has a superpower. this little primate, though a distant cousin of the gorilla, is so light and nimble that it can balance on the tips of twigs as it nibbles flowers.
Wildlife presenter Patrick Aryee has a superpower, too. He can make grizzled and cynical tV critics feel eight years old again.
Partly it was Patrick’s excitable delivery on Super Small Animals (BBC1) which shows how miniature species have adapted to survive in the big wide world, drawing heavily on the Beeb’s peerless archive of wildlife footage.
His eyes glistened as he hopped up and down, describing one clever quirk of evolution after another.
‘i’ve never seen anything like this before,’ he gasped, as a cluster of fire ants formed a ball that floated on water.
‘So cute,’ he squeaked at a pygmy hippo baby.
Patrick is an eternal cub scout on a zoo trip.
the soundtrack added to the impression that this prime-time documentary was made for the CBeebies pre-school network — all bouncing tubas and comical xylophones, with a blast of Ravel’s Bolero for the money spiders that could skate on water.
But most of all, it was the way the Bristol University-trained biologist raced from one mini- creature to another, never lingering more than three minutes on anything, and sometimes devoting barely 30 seconds to a subject. it was as if he had a big bag of sweeties and was gobbling them in fistfuls.
Most animals hung around just long enough for Patrick to size them up with a strained comparison. He watched an ant lift a leaf: ‘ that would be like me trying to carry a van on my back,’ he declared.
A dung beetle trundled by, lugging a ball of what dung beetles like best. Patrick was hugely impressed: ‘that is the equivalent of me pulling six fully loaded double-deckers!’
He spoke like this so often that i began to suspect he’s got an app on his phone to generate spurious comparisons automatically. As he compared the world’s smallest and largest chameleons, he told us: ‘the weight difference between them is the same as between me and ten elephants.’
All this bouncing, Peter Pan energy can tire you out, and by the end of an hour, Patrick was starting to remind me of the inexhaustible tony Blackburn at a Seventies Radio 1 Roadshow.
if Super Small Animals had been planned as a whole series, it would quickly become too much. But as a hyperactive jaunt through the BBC natural History Unit’s back catalogue, picking out creatures that are less commonly seen on tV, this was great fun.
the stars of Animal Rescue Live: Supervet Special (C4) are much more ordinary than Patrick’s lemurs and chameleons, and still just as special. All this week, Professor noel Fitzpatrick — on a week’s sabbatical from his veterinary surgery — is working with presenters Kate Quilton and Steve Jones, to find homes for hundreds of rescue pets.
they’ve set themselves the target of rehousing all 120 residents at newcastle Dogs and Cats Shelter, as well as lots of lost friends waiting for adoption at homes around the country.
From slobbery St Bernards to tubby micro-pigs and even a saucy parrot, they’re all lovable. Many viewers, of course, will be yearning to take home noel himself, who is so madly dedicated to his patients that he often sleeps in his office and occasionally even in the dog kennels.
Sorry, ladies, there’s only one noel and you can’t all have him. get a kitten instead.