麻豆传媒

David Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952, when television was an experiment. He has never really left. His documentaries have taken him from the mountains of Rwanda to the South Atlantic and just about everywhere in between in search of creatures rare or unfilmed. He also helped set up the World Wide Fund for Nature and has been involved with several other conservation organisations, including Flora and Fauna International and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He still writes all his own scripts.

You have a passion for the natural world and also for telling people about it. Did the two develop alongside each other?

Homo sapiens is a compulsive communicator. Look at the number of people you see walking around talking on mobile phones. We seem to have an infinite capacity for communicating and being communicated with. I鈥檓 not sure how admirable it is, but it certainly demonstrates that we are social organisms. Most science is much more difficult to communicate than the stuff that I do. If I were working in astrophysics I would find it quite hard to explain to people what I was doing. Natural history is a pretty easy thing to explain. It does have its complexities, but nowhere do you speak about things that are outside people鈥檚 experience. You might speak about a species that is outside their experience, but nothing as remote as astrophysics.

As for my love of nature, I remember finding a fossil for the first time when I was a child. I grew up in Leicester, which is right in the middle of Britain. You can鈥檛 get much further from the sea. So when I split a rock and found something that palpably had lived in the sea, I found that a marvel. I thought it was extraordinarily romantic, and to be honest I still do. There is also the childish inclination to look for things and collect things, which is another human characteristic. I had it then and I still have it now.

If you were growing up now, you wouldn鈥檛 legally be able to collect things like birds鈥� eggs in the same way. Does that bother you?

I think it鈥檚 a great pity. I don鈥檛 deny the need to protect flowers or birds or whatever. But as a boy I collected birds鈥� eggs, which was perfectly legal then, and we had a code of ethics. You knew when it was OK to collect an egg as you knew the female would lay another. So I learned a lot about birds, where they build nests, how they lay their eggs and so on. All the great naturalists did the same. Look at Darwin, who had a great passion for beetles and was a mad collector of natural history.

You did a degree in natural sciences after school, and much later you did another degree in anthropology. Have you ever had aspirations to be an academic?

My father was an academic. But in the 1940s when I did my natural sciences degree in zoology it was very much laboratory-based. If you wanted to know about animal locomotion, you got a pigeon and made it fly in front of a graticule of some kind. What you didn鈥檛 do was to go out and see giraffes galloping across the horizon, and that was the sort of thing I preferred to do. I was not keen on the idea of spending the rest of my life in the lab. I also don鈥檛 think I would have been particularly good at it. I don鈥檛 think I have as analytical a mind or the degree of application that one would need to become a first-rate research scientist.

Do you ever feel frustrated by television and feel the need to go deeper into a subject than television allows you to?

Only to a degree. I鈥檓 really a journalist using pictures, and I spend most of my time understanding what other people have already discovered. Keeping up with the literature is quite enough. For example, I鈥檓 not a good ornithologist, and to set about writing a series about birds meant that I had an awful lot of catching up to do. That was extremely enjoyable, and there were things I thought I was beginning to understand about birds of paradise and bowerbirds which I would have yearned to follow up. But to make a film about bowerbirds you have to get in touch with all the guys who have been working on them for 20 years, and you can鈥檛 do much in the way of original observation that is going to compete with them.

Do you ever get accused of 鈥渄umbing down鈥� science in order to popularise it?

It does come up, but happily not so far with me directly. You on 麻豆传媒 are concerned with what is new 鈥� cutting-edge stuff. But I believe the public at large don鈥檛 know a great deal about basic biology, so my programmes are pitched at the fairly low level of a first-year undergraduate. You鈥檝e got to get it right, but if you get it right it鈥檚 sufficiently engaging not to have to dumb it down. A lot of my programmes from 20 years ago are still shown in undergraduate studies.

But you do occasionally show cutting-edge research, and you have identified some new species鈥�

That鈥檚 true. For this latest series about mammals, we put an endoscope into a beaver鈥檚 lodge in the middle of winter to see what goes on, because nobody had looked at that before. Through the endoscope we saw things that looked like small beavers that turned out to be muskrats. Nobody as far as I know has published the fact that muskrat are commensals with beavers in winter, and from some of the shots it even looks as though the muskrats are bringing in bedding for the beavers. That is not a high-grade discovery but it is nonetheless new. I can tell you it is very touching to see it.

Over the years you have become concerned with conservation and environmental degradation. Have you ever been tempted to become more of an activist, in the way perhaps that David Bellamy has?

I tend to think that you have to do these things through the normal democratic process. If you want to achieve conservation, the first thing you have to do is persuade people that the natural world is precious, beautiful, worth saving and complex. If people don鈥檛 understand that and don鈥檛 believe that in their hearts, conservation doesn鈥檛 stand a chance. That鈥檚 the first step, and that is what I do. I don鈥檛 think I鈥檝e done a major series that has not ended up with some sort of declaration about the importance of doing something about the natural world and the dangers that it faces. The current series is no exception. But I don鈥檛 think you can end every programme with a call for conservation, because I think people will just turn off.

Over the time you have been studying the natural world, you must have seen many changes. Is there any change that particularly alarms you or that you think is most significant?

I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population. You see it overrunning everywhere. Places that were very remote when I went there 50 years ago are now overrun. The increase in our numbers is the primary problem. In 1955 I went to a place in Indonesia to film Komodo dragons. Nobody in Indonesia had ever heard of Komodo dragons, and it took us weeks to get to the island of Komodo where they lived. In the end the only way we could get there was to take a small boat and sail it through the coral reefs. I had to go back there a few years ago on another project and there were two or three tourist ships arriving every day. That鈥檚 good for the islanders, who get some income from the tourists, and the dragons themselves aren鈥檛 having a bad time because the island is big enough to accommodate them in a relatively unspoilt and unfussed reserve. Nonetheless human beings are overwhelming the place.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the Earth and about biodiversity?

I don鈥檛 think we are going to become an eco-desert in the next 20 years, though I have no doubt we are going to lose a lot of species, and I deplore that. At the same time, although there are a great number of species that we know very well to be on the verge of extinction, no important large vertebrates have disappeared in my lifetime that I know of. There are more mountain gorillas now than there were 30 years ago, the rhinos are still there, elephants are still there. And thank goodness.

What鈥檚 the strangest or most surprising thing that you have seen in the wild?

Seeing the very big Vogelkop bowerbird build a maypole bower 鈥� to see those bowers and to know they are made by birds simply as a display mechanism, and to sit and watch a male bowerbird bringing in blossoms and arranging them in certain patterns and then changing its mind and taking out a blossom and putting it in a different place to see whether it made a bigger or better effect 鈥� that鈥檚 one of the most extraordinary things to watch, and absolutely riveting. And the more so because very few people have seen it.

What about the famous occasion when you were being befriended by a group of silverback gorillas in the Virunga mountains in Rwanda?

That is one of my most memorable occasions, but only because I keep being shown it about once a month on television. I think the audience must be sick of it.

If you had to point to one thing about your broadcasting, in terms of style or the approach you use, that is key to its success and to getting the message across, what would that be?

One thing is being able to talk to camera without a teleprompter. A teleprompter is a very difficult thing to use well, and it鈥檚 very difficult to write for it. You can write for it in a literate way, but of course we don鈥檛 speak in a literate way. If you believe something and want to make clear what you are talking about, you ought to be able to articulate it without a teleprompter.

Do you have any unfulfilled dreams?

I have never really had dreams to fulfil in that way. You just want to go on looking at these ecosystems and trying to understand them and they are all fascinating. To achieve a dream suggests snatching a prize from the top of a tree and running off with it, and that鈥檚 the end of it. It isn鈥檛 like that. It is not a question of achieving prizes or indeed achieving one particular moment. What you are trying to achieve is understanding and you don鈥檛 do that just by chasing dreams.

One thing that your audience appears to love about your programmes is the enthusiasm with which you deliver the information. Is that something you think about or does it come entirely naturally?

I think it鈥檚 just the way I happen to talk. But I am also happy doing what I do. It鈥檚 a fantastic privilege, and nearly always the creatures that I am with are pretty exciting things. For example, it is very difficult not to be excited by 10,000 king penguins.