Star follows his animal instincts
by David Attenborough Two Roads, £25
WHETHER slowly chasing a sloth up a tree in Guyana, talking pidgin to an Amerindian guide called King George, pleading with officials in Indonesia for permission to find a Komodo dragon or being bemused by the confusion between armadillos and prostitutes in Paraguay (apparently there is a local word that can mean either), David Attenborough is a delight to read.
Adventures Of A Young Naturalist combines three books written in the 1950s to accompany the BBC TV series Zoo Quest, now reissued after almost 60 years.
These were Attenborough’s first programmes filmed on location and represented the start of a glorious era in animal documentaries which has gone from strength to strength up to the present day.
The books give a wonderful sense of the problems that accompanied filming in territories almost unexplored at that time and the wonderful passion shown by the young Attenborough in overcoming them. Since then the challenges and difficulties may have lessened as both filming and travel have become so much easier but Attenborough’s passion remains undiminished. Filming among a tribe in Guyana, he relates the problems caused by him dropping a pebble which rolled through a crack in the floorboards. The trouble was that according to a local mystic, the pebble contained a powerful spirit which would be most upset if it wasn’t found among countless similar pebbles and restored to its owner.
Fortunately, after several false attempts, they found a pebble that satisfied the mystic and Attenborough was relieved to be allowed to return to his hunt for vicious animals, deadly spiders and exotic fauna.
He tells us how to feed a baby parrot: you chew some cassava bread, let the bird peck it from between your lips then force the bread down its throat with your tongue.
And he explains the difficulty of sleeping when there’s a vampire bat in your tent. They have a way of biting off a patch of skin then lapping up the blood that seeps out and they can do it all so gently that you only realise what has happened when you wake up, see the sheets covered in blood and later die of rabies.
These problems and countless others, such as how to pick up a bad-tempered porcupine named Percy or how to find worms at 4am in Amsterdam to feed a coatimundi, Attenborough takes in his intrepid stride. One of the last of the pith-helmeted, noble British adventurers, he tells a host of wondrous tales set in the last years of the crumbling British Empire and he tells them beautifully.
HE HAS a wonderfully easy style, whether making light of his own discomfort and danger, trying to make himself understood and accepted by locals or capturing animals to take back to the BBC or to London Zoo. His writing is as impressive and enjoyable as his TV programmes and there can be no higher praise.
My one slight disappointment is the quality of the photographs which are a bit fuzzy and in black and white. Admittedly they are around 60 years old and I suppose that adds to the period charm of it all. Even if you read these books more than half a century ago, the young Attenborough’s world is well worth dipping into once more. To order any of the books featured, post free (UK only), please phone The Express Bookshop on You may also send a cheque made payable to or you can order online at www.expressbookshop.com