media I can say positive things about television too

If you aren’t watching “Planet Earth” on the Discovery Channel, please do so.

The episode called “Forests” that I watched tonight was the best so far, for my money.

Day-old ducklings jumping out of a tree. Shot after shot after shot that made me ask “how’d they do that?” out loud. An answer to that question at the end, featuring a cameraman saying “I don’t have a fear of heights. I have a fear of falling through them onto the ground.” His producer following that up with, “As long as the wind stays good and they don’t land in Mozambique, we should be absolutely fine.” Tiny lemurs the size of your hand that eat giant hawk moths. The Siberian leopard, the rarest cat in the world, with fewer than 40 animals still living in the wild. Wonderful, wonderful time-lapse photography of flowers, ferns, and trees awakening in the spring, thriving through the summer, and firing red in the fall.

Seriously, the film of the trees turning red is worth the whole hour itself. That and the ducklings jumping out of the tree in slow motion, which I watched four times.

This is an amazing program, and it’s, like, your duty as an Earthling to watch it.

Best of all: Except when there’s a Mike Rowe show on, Discovery shows “Planet Earth” pretty much all the time. It’s on every day.