Nature is full of David and Goliath stories. The huge number of animals that reside in the forest makes it a survival of the fittest. A clip from the Disney+ documentary series American the Beautiful captured a unique moment of big versus small in nature.
An angry squirrel is filmed doing its best to scare away a full-size bear from its stash of food. Even though the bear is at least 1,000 times the size of the little rodent. The clip was captured by hidden cameras in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
The new series captures special moments rarely seen in nature through fly-on-the-wall observations in a hidden camera. The lack of human crews nearby allows the team to capture moments in nature that could normally go unnoticed.
Squirrels hide nuts as the weather gets colder to build a food supply during Winter. The squirrel in the videos gets his stash raided by a hungry bear. The little rodent does his best to scare the big bad bear away, but the bear isn’t phased as it eats through the squirrel’s supply. However, the squirrel is as smart as it is brave and it gets the last laugh in the end.
“You then see this incredible standoff between the squirrel and the bear,” Vanessa Berlowitz, also an executive producer and co-founder for Wildstar Films, told Newsweek. “No one’s ever seen that in the world, because normally the bear would be aware [of the camera team], and the squirrel would be aware, you wouldn’t get that sort of natural behavior.”
A Unique Look at Nature in ‘America the Beautiful’
American the Beautiful promises to be a unique look at nature full of special moments rarely seen on camera. Mark Linfield, an executive producer on the show told Newsweek, “[The camera traps] allow you to film really shy animals that you couldn’t get any other way.”
The squirrel gets the last laugh over the thriving black bear. It ascends up a nearby tree to reveal another well-supplied stash of food out of reach from the hungry bear.
“A lot of our animals we portray as sort of heroic, and that’s not necessarily always just the big, shiny, mountain lions and grizzlies. We’ve got a whole sprinkling of fantastic sort of underdogs as well,” Berlowitz said. “Effectively, the animals are filming themselves.”
“[We had a resource of] naturalists, and guides, and enthusiasts and park rangers, who are all kind of really into their local wildlife,” Berlowitz continued. “It was tapping into those sorts of people that would help you get into those really unusual stories that you don’t see every day. As well as the small things, we worked really hard to show iconic animals. Each of the regions has an iconic animal that is emblematic of that region.”
The six-part series is available to stream on Disney+ now.