id="u7b1ffdde-6ff7-5296-a838-290e1c9a977f">
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. and BBC Books:
a division of BBC Enterprises Ltd. in 1979
This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2018
Text © David Attenborough Productions Ltd. 1979, 2018
Photographs © individual copyright holders
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover Design: Heike Schüssler
Front Cover Photograph © Visuals Unlimited, Inc / Joe McDonald / Getty Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source ISBN: 9780008294281
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008294298
Version: 2018-08-09
CONTENTS
13 The Compulsive Communicators
Pygmy sunbird (Hedydipna platura) adult male on flower, The Gambia, West Africa.
I still recall, with great clarity, the very first time I went to the tropics. Stepping out of the plane and into the muggy, perfumed air of West Africa was like walking into a steam laundry. Moisture hung in the atmosphere so heavily that my skin and shirt were soaked within minutes. A hedge of hibiscus bordered the airport buildings. Sunbirds, glittering with green and blue iridescence, played around it, darting from one scarlet blossom to another, hanging on beating wings as they probed for nectar. Only after I had watched them for some time did I notice, clasping a branch within the hedge, a chameleon, motionless except for its goggling eyes, which swivelled to follow every passing insect. Beside the hedge, I trod on what appeared to be grass. To my astonishment, the leaflets immediately folded themselves flat against the stem, transforming green fronds into apparently bare twigs. It was sensitive mimosa. Beyond lay a ditch covered with floating plants. In the spaces between them, the black water rippled with fish, and over the leaves walked a chestnut-coloured bird, lifting its long-toed feet with the exaggerated care of a man in snowshoes. Wherever I looked, I found a prodigality of pattern and colour for which I was quite unprepared. It was a revelation of the splendour and fecundity of the natural world from which I have never recovered.
Since then, I have managed, one way or another, to get back to the tropics many times. Usually my purpose has been to make a film about some corner of that infinitely varied world. So I have had the luck to find and film rare creatures that few outsiders have seen in the wild, and to gaze on some of the most marvellous spectacles that the wild places of the world have to offer – a tree full of displaying birds of paradise in New Guinea, giant lemurs leaping through the forest of Madagascar, the biggest lizards in the world prowling, like dragons, through the jungle of a tiny island in Indonesia.
Initially, the films we made tried to document the
