The Adventures of a Young Naturalist - The Zoo Quest Expeditions is a new book, combining three books first published in 1956, 1957 and 1959, long out of print.
Together, updated and newly illustrated with colour photographs, they make a marvellous book, an invaluable record of David Attenborough's first three journeys to Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay, on quests for strange animals.
The story begins when there was no television other than the BBC's single channel. Attenborough was, in his own words, "a 26-year-old novice television producer with an unused zoology degree". He made friends with Jack Lester, curator of reptiles at London Zoo, and made a plan.
"The BBC and the London Zoo should mount a joint animal-collecting expedition on which we should both go. I would direct film sequences showing Jack searching for and finally capturing a creature of particular interest. The sequence would end with a close-up of the animal in his hands. The picture would then dissolve into a similar shot of the same creature, but this time live in the studio."
Good idea. Separately, neither the BBC nor the zoo was keen on footing the bill. Attenborough saw a way around that, involving a little light deception, each side believing the other had agreed. It worked.
Once the first series was commissioned, he had to work out what film to use, what equipment would work, who would care for the animals they caught before their return to Britain, how they would reach unmapped locations.What makes this elegant book so unputdownable is that Attenborough makes the viewer feel inside the picture, part of his team. We are there when he's woken by the bite of a vampire bat in Guyana. He's not scared, he's glad. It gives him a rare chance to record the nocturnal sounds of faraway howler monkeys.
And in Borneo, when a hunter brings them a week-old baby bear, Attenborough can't work out how to feed it.
His cameraman, Charles Lagus, works out both the method (strong squirts of a feeding bottle to the back of the cub's throat) and the right kind of milk (diluted, canned, condensed).
As the photographs that dot the narrative attest, the great Lagus, the first cameraman engaged by the BBC to shoot natural history footage, was a formidably practical man, navigating volcanoes to get the right shot, working out how to get on with any creature, great, small or human, ready with laconic wisdom whenever things went wrong.
He is in his seventh decade as a broadcaster now and things have changed. "These days zoos don't send out animal collectors on quests to bring 'em back alive. And quite right too."
The emphasis has switched from quest to conservation and, because of Attenborough's work over all the years between, we understand why.
On the page, as on the screen, he shares, shows, explains. His style is disarmingly self-deprecating, utterly engaging.
Yet 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. - The Daily Telegraph..