TV REVIEW : ‘Great Moments From Nature’ Features Best of This PBS Series

The title of Sunday night’s “Great Moments From Nature” pretty much speaks for itself (Channel 28 at 9:10 p.m., and Channel 15 at 8 p.m.).

Put together by host George Page specifically to help PBS in its spring fund-raising efforts, the program is a nearly two-hour highlight reel of six years and 100 episodes of “Nature.” Page’s spare and often poetic narration accompanies a tour featuring earth’s creatures and their environments--from lush rain forest to beneath the polar ice cap, from the Kalahari Desert to Yellowstone National Park in the winter.

It’s the usual great stuff. Nature’s beauty and cruelty and complexity--up close and personal.

We see elephants rolling in red mud. Osprey snatching fish from lakes. Coyotes stalking gophers. Orchids tricking sex-starved wasps for pollination purposes. Balletic cranes and goofy gooney birds dancing for prospective mates. Vampire bats drinking the blood of sleeping sea lions. A tiny klepto-parasitic spider stealing a meal from a big spider’s web.

We may have come to take for granted the unique educational value--especially to children--of being able to observe a polar bear mom playing with her cubs somewhere inside the Arctic Circle or of being able to watch octopus eggs hatching somewhere in the Gulf of California. And the extraordinary photographic feats of such consistently excellent shows as “Nature” may no longer elicit as many living-room gasps of amazement as they once did.

But as “Great Moments” makes redundantly and beautifully clear, “Nature” is a priceless program whose continued existence alone probably justifies making a regular contribution to PBS stations--and even makes pledge drives worth enduring.