ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG NATURALIST
THE ZOO QUEST EXPEDITIONS
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’