Nature

In a lifetime of natural history filmmaking,

I have seen many odd animals

but few odder than these proboscis monkeys in Borneo.

I first saw them some 50 years ago.

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: Late one evening we had a great stroke of luck,

for a troop of the extraordinary long-nosed proboscis monkey

had come down to the riverbank to feed.

When I started filming such creatures,

it was quite easy to show viewers

animals that hitherto had only been seen in the wild by intrepid explorers.

As the years passed, one way and another

we got better and better shots

and in the process, I had some memorable encounters.

Boo!

This is a very intelligent animal.

And top of the menu right now is...

Salmon.

I think that was pretty clear.

I've been lucky enough to live through

what well might be considered the golden age

of natural history filmmaking.

Almost every year, it seemed, we found some new way

of revealing new things about the natural world.

In the 1950s,

much of the wildlife of the planet was still unfilmed, even unknown.

And in the following 60 years,

a succession of technical innovations enabled us to reveal more and more

of the natural world in increasing detail.

This is the first natural history film I ever saw,

back in 1934, when I was eight.

And I thought it was wonderful.

Ladies and gentlemen,

let me put you out of your misery at once.

You are not going to see me for long.

Although I'm inviting you to come on this trip with me,

you will only see me occasionally.

The man in the pith helmet is Cherry Kearton,

one of the first people

to try and capture the lives of wild animals on film.

There are 5 million penguins on this island,

which are called the jackass penguin.

I am always polite to animals.

And as I intend to stay with the penguins for several months,

I am naturally adopting my most friendly manner.

Kearton traveled round the world filming wild animals

that of course had never been filmed before.

His approach was hardly scientific

but nonetheless, he was very entertaining.

His sister, a typical flapper,

not content with being one of the fair sex,

wants to join the air sex,

but resigns herself to just a flip here,

a flap there and a flap in between.

For all its obvious flaws,

Kearton's films captured my childish imagination

and made me dream of traveling to far-off places to film wild animals.

My first natural history series, Zoo Quest,

recorded the progress of animal-collecting expeditions

arranged for the London Zoo,

and brought to the screen places and animals

that had never before been seen on television,

or in the cinema, come to that.

One targeted the largest lizard in the world,

which lived on the small indonesian island of Komodo.

Few people had heard of it

and in Indonesia, no one seemed very sure where the island was.

Eventually, we set off with a fisherman who said that he did

but after a couple of days at sea, I had my doubts.

I said to the captain,

"You have been to Komodo before, haven't you?"

And he said, "Belum," and I didn't know what belum meant,

so I had to go down into the hold and find my Indonesian dictionary.

I looked up belum and it said "not yet".

So it was clear that he didn't know the way.

After a week at sea,

and having survived encounters with coral reefs and Whirlpools,

we arrived at what I thought must be Komodo.

And I remember wading ashore across the coral lagoon

and finding a tiny little village and saying,

"Excuse me, but, um, is this Komodo?"

And they said, "Yeah, this is Komodo." That was okay.

The locals recommended that we should use a dead goat as bait.

Once in the bush, we began to build a trap

using materials gathered from nearby.

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: And now, all we had to do was to wait.

There was a rustle in the bush and there was the dragon.

Our first sight of this magnificent monster.

To my surprise, we were looking out at the trap

and I heard a noise behind me and I turned round

and there was the dragon,

that was taken at that particular moment,

looking at me straight in the eye, from only about a couple of yards away.

And I looked at it and it looked at me and I thought,

"Well, at least I might take your photograph."

So that was the photograph I took of him.

And then eventually he rather wearily

heaved himself up and strolled round us

and went down into the dry riverbed where we'd made the trap.

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: And down came the door.

Hastily, we piled boulders on the door so that he couldn't lift it up.

We'd got him.

During the days of Zoo Quest,

traveling to far-flung locations took weeks.

But 20 years later, when I embarked upon the

biggest natural history series ever attempted

international air travel made things much easier.

I was able to film in 30 countries,

appearing to move from one continent to another in the space of a single sequence

as I traced the history of life on the planet.

The South American rainforest,

the richest and most varied assemblage of life in the world.

These lime stones here in Morocco...

Macaques live in many parts of Japan.

Life on Earth was shown in a hundred different countries

and seen by perhaps as many as 500 million people.

Natural history television was now a global phenomenon

revealing our wonderful world, in color, to all.

During the series, we made full use of both color and scuba gear

to help show the underwater world as never before.

One of the problems with underwater films, of course,

was that you can't talk underwater.

Most of the time, if you've got a breathing apparatus on your back,

you've got something in your mouth,

but Alastair, one of my producer colleagues,

was very keen that we should try and introduce the presenter

talking to camera underwater.

There was a wonderful new invention called the bubble helmet.

This is it.

And you could put a microphone in one side of it.

So we went down to the swimming pool in the hotel where we were staying,

and this was screwed on my head.

It took a long time to screw it down tight,

to make it watertight,

I put it on like this and I waded into the water

and I hadn't gone more than about a foot underwater when suddenly,

water started bubbling in.

Very alarming, water rising... ...around you.

And I was going to drown,

and how long would it take me to get this off?

So I came out in a hurry. "There was a fault," I said.

"Nonsense," said Alastair. "Give it to me."

And so he changed this, put it on his shoulders, put it on his head...

I, with some pleasure, screwed it down quite tight,

and he waded into the pool.

And he came out even quicker with me, then... (GURGLING)

He was gesticulating to get it off and I finally took it off.

And he said, "There's a fault."

I said, "Yes. There is."

So, I happily left the helmet behind

and reverted to my old mask and scuba gear

when it came to my next underwater assignment,

to reveal the extraordinary social behavior

and intelligence of dolphins.

1990 ATTENBOROUGH: They're full of curiosity.

They play with odd things they find, such as twigs.

And swimming among them leaves you in no doubt

that they are highly intelligent.

They will even mimic you as you spin or hang in the water.

Until the 1980s, you could only shoot 10 minutes' worth of film underwater

before you had to come back to the surface,

open the underwater housing,

take out the camera and put in a new roll of film.

But then video cameras solved that problem.

Videotapes ran for 30 minutes.

And now, at last, we had the chance

of properly recording animal behavior underwater.

In addition, video cameras were far more sensitive,

so we could record at much lower light levels,

making artificial lights unnecessary.

It was a huge breakthrough for underwater filming,

and crucial to the success of The Blue Planet series.

Now it was possible to record, for the first time, marlin hunting.

The seas and oceans were full of animals

whose extraordinary behavior, up till now, no one had ever seen.

And the shots just got better and better.

Cameramen could now stay underwater long enough

to capture every moment of the action.

And be in the right place at the right time

for the most dramatic events.

So now we can capture previously unseen animal behavior

throughout the seas of the world.

On land it had, until now,

been impossible to film animals behaving naturally at night,

when most mammals are active.

All we could do was shine a spotlight on them and film them as they ran away.

And it was the same problem wherever animals lived in darkness.

Caves are fascinating places, but difficult places to work in.

When I first came here to this one in Gomantong in Borneo back in 1972,

we had to bring a lot of lights with us

in order to film the many millions of birds and bats that live in here.

And the droppings of all those creatures make the cave reek of ammonia.

Ah. (INHALES) Ah! The smell brings it all back to me.

When I was here 40 years ago, the director said,

"There's a pile of droppings at the far end of the cave

which goes right up to the roof."

"Why don't you climb up to the top?"

And as I got to the top, he shouted, "Say something!"

So I tried.

And... And what it is is

these bats, packed tight on the roof here,