Sir David Attenborough: A Natural Celebration

Sir David Attenborough with his RSGS Livingstone Medal, 1989

Despite making daily treks through the mountains of Rwanda to sit quietly with a family of gorillas, David Attenborough had still not found the opportunity he’d been hoping for.  He was making a new television series called Life on Earth, and he wanted to film a sequence about the evolutionary significance of opposable thumbs.   

On his last day, he was in luck.  A female gorilla was sitting in a clearing and pulling up clumps of wild celery, and she was using her thumb and forefinger to separate the stems.  Now was the perfect time.  Slowly and respectfully, David crawled towards her, lay on his side and turned towards the cameraman.   

But the words never came out.  The gorilla heaved herself towards him and placed a huge hand on top of his head.  Then, fixing him with a placid but curious gaze, she pulled down his lower lip and inserted a probing finger inside his mouth.  David felt a weight on his legs:  two youngsters had come with her, and were trying to untie his shoelaces.  He decided that this was not, after all, the right moment to talk about opposable thumbs.  However, the resulting footage preserved one of the most extraordinary moments in wildlife film-making. 

The fascination that Sir David Attenborough feels for the natural world has been inspiring him to create television programmes for as long as most of us can remember.  Beginning as a trainee producer in the BBC’s original studios at Alexandra Palace in London, it didn’t take him long to devise a series that allowed him to travel the world in search of rare and exotic species.  As producer and sound recordist for Zoo Quest, he initially had no camera-facing role but the sudden illness of the presenter forced him to step in at the last minute.   

Zoo Quest had specific goals but absolutely no precedent.  No one could have predicted just how warmly the British public would take to a serialised search for Sierra Leone’s Bald-headed Rock Crow, but when a London bus driver wound down his window in Regent Street and asked David if he was ever going to find it, he felt emboldened to go out and make some more programmes.  In the days when international travel plans consisted largely of booking flight tickets and hoping for the best, he navigated fierce tidal races to film Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and rode on horseback through the sun-baked plains of Paraguay in search of armadillos. 

Back in London, it became evident that David was also very good at his desk job.  Rising to senior management, he was appointed Controller of BBC2 and then the BBC’s Director of Programming.  But he wanted to make programmes, not just commission them, so he resigned from the BBC’s staff and went freelance.  Life on Earth was not the first series he made in this way, but it was unparalleled in its ambition to trace the entire story of evolution, and it took three years to complete.  “Sometimes,” he recalled, “I came back having been filmed speaking the first half of a sentence that fitted neatly on to a second half that we had filmed on another continent two years earlier.” 

Life on Earth was the progenitor of further ground-breaking series, including The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, Life in the Freezer and The Blue Planet.  Capturing rarely-seen natural phenomena required meticulous planning but also the readiness to leap on a plane at a moment’s notice.  Often the subjects themselves were the biggest challenge:  on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, David kept a cool head while a scarlet tide of land crabs surged around his feet and clambered up his legs;  and when his commentary annoyed two bull elephant seals in Antarctica he backed nimbly out of the way and fended off their advances with a stick.  Sitting astride a branch some 200 feet above a rainforest floor, he talked about bromeliads and ecosystems with apparent unconcern at the chasm that dropped away below his dangling legs, but admitted later that his heart was in his mouth.  

Some of David’s documentaries focus on his particular interests:  in Attenborough and the Giant Egg, for example, he investigates the enormous egg of an extinct elephant bird that was brought to him in pieces during his early filming in Madagascar;  and in New Guinea he marvels at the birds of paradise which he’d yearned to see ever since he was a boy.  He also encourages us to use our ears:  for Attenborough’s Wonder of Song, he chooses the spellbinding sounds made by such diverse species as blue whales, nightingales, indris and lyrebirds.   

From a lifetime of travelling, David has witnessed at first hand the impacts caused by climate change and a burgeoning human population.  He has long been an advocate for positive action, and his advice has been sought by world leaders.  He writes: “If the chief measure by which we judge our actions is the revival of the natural world, we will find ourselves making the right decisions, and we will do so not just for the sake of nature, but, since nature keeps the Earth stable, for ourselves.” 

This year, as he celebrates his 100th birthday, David’s latest television series examines the wildlife of Britain’s gardens, from Oxfordshire to the Scottish Highlands.  What strikes you, as ever, is his love of wildlife and his gift as a communicator.  In his book, A Life on Our Planet, he reminisces about his childhood, when he would cycle off into the countryside and hunt for fossils in a local quarry.  “Every child explores,” he writes.  “Just turning over a stone and looking at the animals beneath it is exploring.”   And now, just as then, he knows “of no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it.”  

David Hempleman-Adams and Iain Stewart present the RSGS Scottish Geographical Medal to Sir David Attenborough, 2011

Sir David Attenborough has received a host of awards and honours, and more than 40 species have been named after him.  He first spoke for the Society in 1964 about his then travels on the Zambezi, and has since been awarded the RSGS Livingstone Medal in 1989 and the Scottish Geographical Medal in 2011. For inspiring generations of people with wonder and fascination, we owe him a debt of gratitude that even a thousand birds of paradise couldn’t repay. We congratulate him and wish him joy on his birthday.   

Further reading: 

David Attenborough, Life on Air (2002) 

David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet (2020)