By Steve Pond

For the last couple of decades, Werner Herzog has kept returning to a peculiar specialty: the wonders of nature, often as seen through the eyes of a specific scientist or adventurer.  He’s tackled bears in “Grizzly Man,” Antarctica in “Encounters at the End of the World,” 30,000-year-old paintings in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” volcanoes in “Into the Inferno,” meteorites in “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds” and now African elephants in “Ghost Elephants,” which premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.

This trend isn’t necessarily new for Herzog – you can trace its roots back to one of his first nonfiction movies, 1971’s “Fata Morgana,” about mirages in the desert. But it brings out a continuing desire on his part to find the poetry in nature and in those who explore it. He doesn’t approach these topics as a strict documentarian would, though; the most memorable sequence in his doc filmmaking over the last couple of decades may well be his reverie at the end of “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” where he conjures up entirely fictional (though he doesn’t tell you that) radioactive albino crocodiles in the river that flows near where some of mankind’s oldest artworks reside.