Adventures of a young naturalist The zoo quest expeditions

THE SOOTHING, AUTHORITATIVE Voice of David Attenborough has become such a widely recognized feature of nature documentaries that there are now all sorts of spinoffs. Funny animations show gorillas munching on leaves while gossiping about their encounter with the pith-helmeted explorer. Spoof documentaries of our species' mating rituals show young men drinking beer in a Canadian bar while Attenborough's voice-over notes that "the air is heavy with the scent of females." In my classes at Emory University, I show so many snippets of BBC documentaries that I need to warn students that not all of our knowledge about animal behavior comes from this omnipresent talking gentleman. He is just the narrator. But "just" doesn't do justice to his role, because Attenborough co-wrote the programs and the insertion of his persona into almost every scene is deliberate. It is the key to the success of "Life on Earth," "The Blue Planet," "Planet Earth" and all those other BBC nature series we love. It all started with a 1950s television program featuring animals from the London Zoo. The animals were brought into a studio, where the famous biologist Julian Huxley handled them while explaining their anatomy, habits and special skills. The occasional escapes and other mishaps on this live program greatly contributed to its entertainment value. People wanted more - and they particularly wanted information about animals in their natural habitat. But how to give them this without losing the human-animal interaction they liked so much? The BBC simply moved the hands-on approach out of the studio, a formula followed by nature programs ever since. Attenborough became their star presenter, filmed in distant locations while capturing or holding wild animals. Even the zoo connection was maintained, because all of those animals, once captured, were then to be shipped to London. It is not the kind of mission we approve of nowadays, but without it the West might never have gotten interested in wildlife to begin with. We started by shooting exotic species for their skins and bones and trapping them for our zoos, and only recently moved to worrying about their survival in the wild and the health of the planet in general. This history is symbolized by the transformation of Attenborough himself from a talking and writing crocodile hunter to the greatest living advocate of the global ecosystem. The "Zoo Quest" television series as well as Attenborough's book about it, "Adventures of a Young Naturalist," report on the action-packed expeditions of a small team of Englishmen to faraway places with names like Wailamepu, Arakaka, Borobudur, Asunción, Komodo and Ita Caabo. The team's main goal was to bring back live specimens that no other zoo in the world possessed. They captured a 10foot caiman (by luring him to stick his snout through a lasso), a manatee, a peccary named Houdini (because of its frequent escapes), a baby orangutan, a 12-foot python, a giant anteater, a bear cub and tons of other animals. Many captures seemed extremely dangerous, not only for the humans involved but also for the animals. They even tricked a wild Komodo dragon into a trap baited with goat carcasses. After first having stayed completely silent around these giant lizards so as not to disturb them - to the surprise of the locals, who knew how hard of hearing they are - the camera crew noticed the dragons were unafraid and they walked right up to them to take pictures. It all ended well, but this was before we knew about the dragon's venomous bite capable of bringing down pigs and deer. The captured dragon was one of the very few animals that regulations forced them to leave behind. Attenborough relates his adventures of 60 years ago with typical British wit, as when he felt obliged to sample cassiri, a drink made from cassava bread assiduously pre-chewed by women in a Guyanan village. He had to overcome the smell of vomit that rose from the drink: "I felt it would be extremely impolite to refuse it," he writes, "but at the same time I could not dismiss from my mind the method of its manufacture." Animal captures are described in the same understated style. Here, for instance, Attenborough catches up with a sloth in a tree in Guyana, precariously balancing 40 feet above the ground: "The sloth, about the size of a large sheepdog, hung upside down and stared at me with an expression of ineffable sadness on its furry face. Slowly it opened its mouth, exposing its black enamel-less teeth, and did its best to frighten me by making the loudest noise of which it is capable - a faint bronchial wheeze. I stretched out my hand and, in reply, the creature made a slow, ponderous swing at me with its foreleg. I drew back and it blinked mildly, as if surprised that it had failed to hook me." After its capture, the sloth, too, had to be released because Attenborough realized that the zoo back home would be unable to obtain the cecropia plants it needed. The book contains many other indications of the sort of concern for animals that today would make us refrain from capturing them altogether. For example, there is anger at a Dayak in Borneo who lifted his rifle to shoot an orangutan in the forest ("Why? Why? I said in fury, for to shoot such a human creature seemed to amount almost to murder"), the release of birds for which there was no suitable food, the patient feeding of parrot chicks by pushing cassava with his tongue into their beaks, and the refusal to mount a bony horse that seemed too weak to carry him. When the team landed once at an airport in Amsterdam, Attenborough even raided some of the surrounding tulip fields to find live worms for the coatimundi kitten he had tucked inside his shirt during the flight. In all of these situations, we recognize the love of animals that decades later would translate into his consciousness-raising natural history programs. Perhaps the scene that reminded me most of this future approach took place in Argentina, when Attenborough decided to find out how the rhea cock urges hens to lay eggs in his nest. Rheas are gray flightless birds distantly related to ostriches and emus. The cock's nest may contain 50 or more eggs, which he incubates and guards all alone, but which obviously come from a great many hens. Since the nest is so well hidden, Attenborough and his team set out to document the comings and goings. Watching for several days, they finally caught a male in the act of leading a single female to the nest to add her giant egg to the clutch. The team was jubilant! This is a great book for anyone who wants to vicariously travel like an old-fashioned adventurer and seeks to understand how far we have come in developing a protective attitude toward wildlife. It all started with the building of collections for museums and zoos and culminated in attempts to protect native habitats. The BBC nature series have made immense contributions to this endeavor by showing the exceptional splendor of the natural world, which for as long as we can remember has been explained to us by the same caring voice belonging to a man who, as this book shows, has earned the trust we put in his expertise.