The Oldie

ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG NATURALIST

THE ZOO QUEST EXPEDITION­S

- DAVID ATTENBOROU­GH

Two Roads, 416pp, £25, Oldie price £17.98 inc p&p Combining three long-out-of-print books first published in 1956, 1957 and 1959, and newly illustrate­d with colour photograph­s, Adventures of a

Young Naturalist is what Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph called ‘an invaluable record’ of Sir David Attenborou­gh’s early career.

The descriptio­ns of his trips as a 26-year-old BBC producer in the early 1950s seem to have come from an entirely different world. Keen to use his degree in zoology, Attenborou­gh had hatched the idea of collaborat­ing with London Zoo on joint animal collecting expedition­s to Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay. As Roger Lewis noted in the Daily Mail: ‘The live trophies were shipped back to England by boat, supplied with 3,000lbs of lettuce, 100lbs of cabbages, 400lbs of bananas, and 48 pineapples.’ Lewis marvelled at the long-ago-ness of it: ‘This could be a book about the adventures of a young man at least a hundred years earlier, during the reign of Queen Victoria.’ In the 1950s, the chief obstacle to filming the Komodo dragon was that no one knew where Komodo Island was – and there was no map.

Reynolds found his style, then as now, ‘disarmingl­y self-deprecatin­g, utterly engaging’, as did Damian Whitworth in the Times: ‘Attenborou­gh is an elegant and gently funny writer. “After about an hour and a half,” he writes of a séance in a hut in a Guyanese village, “our initial awe began to wear thin.”’ Whitworth found himself regretting that Attenborou­gh had not turned his attention more recently to a species most definitely not endangered, and been a ‘keen-eyed, dry-witted guide to the humans who have inhabited our planet these past few decades’.

But maybe Sir David just doesn’t want to go there. As Reynolds reflected: ‘there remains something elusive about him, as if he’d rather be in peril up some distant river than anywhere else. He is, in the nicest sense of the word, an adventurer and, like that other great voyager, Odysseus, a man of many wiles.’

‘Attenborou­gh’s style is disarmingl­y self-deprecatin­g, utterly engaging’

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