Happy Birthday, Sir David Attenborough

All hail the great naturalist, who turns 99 today

I was so nervous, I could barely dial the phone number.

That number had extra digits because I was calling internationally from my cubicle in the newsroom at the Tampa Bay Times. It was a phone number in London. A number that caused a phone to ring at the home of David Attenborough.

Back in those days, the mid-1990s, I wrote about gardening and botany and the natural world—much as I do now. And somehow I had wrangled an interview with the twentieth century’s most esteemed naturalist. A man whose craggy face is familiar to millions, thanks to his history of starring in lush, fascinating documentaries about the wonders of Planet Earth.

Was I intimidated? You bet! But my job as a journalist was to be cool and ask smart questions … not giggle and fawn and make a fool of myself.

Turns out, Sir David was warm and kind and oh-so-amenable to talking about his latest project. It was a six-part BBC series called The Private Life of Plants, covering everything from seeds to pollination to how plants compete and survive in harsh environments. It was the usual high-quality nature show viewers had come to expect from Attenborough, as he traveled the world writing, filming, and producing these gems.

I had already received my review copy of the series: six VHS tapes I watched over and over as I prepared to interview this living legend. I had my questions ready, handwritten in a reporter’s spiral notebook.

Back then, we didn’t record phone interviews. While Attenborough talked, I typed madly on the keyboard of my Coyote desktop, one hunched shoulder pressing the phone to my ear. Newsroom noise made it hard to hear him. I was sweating bullets.

In 1999, I scored a second chat with Sir David, this time about his documentary on birds. And this time, I was more relaxed. As he sipped a glass of wine (it was evening in London), we talked like old friends. That famous voice was still warm and kind, humble and boyishly enthusiastic.

In the lede of my story, I called him “the knight of the nature documentary.”

99 and still going strong

Today is Sir David’s birthday. He’s one year shy of a century.

The whole point of this post is to laud the man who has done more than maybe anyone else to introduce a whole generation of viewers to the wonders of the natural world. He awes and entrances us, then he makes us care about the tiniest or most obscure living thing.

Maybe (hopefully!) you’ve seen some of Attenborough’s documentaries. Here in the U.S., they usually air on PBS. Life on Earth, The Living Planet, The Life of Birds, The Blue Planet, Trials of Life. The extent of his filmography—the sheer length of his list of productions—is dazzling. His 70-year career stretches from the very first uses of color film to 3D cameras to time-lapse photography and high-definition video.

Attenborough has filmed elephants in Tanzania, lost tribes in New Guinea, and giant dinosaur bones in South America. His on-camera costars include chimpanzees, orangutans, a blue whale, meerkats, mountain gorillas, bats, and grizzly bears. He’s often shown crouching near one of those animals or sitting on the ground amidst some wild landscape he’s exploring.

In one of the Private Life of Plants episodes, I remember him belaying on a rope through the high canopy of a rainforest, so he could visit a tropical orchid up close and personal. The Attenborough trademarks are his windswept hair, childlike wonder, and sotto voce whisper—delivered in a crisp British accent.

Though he has a degree in natural sciences, Sir David has never worked in a laboratory. Nevertheless, scientists across the globe respect him. Nearly fifty plant and animal species are named after Attenborough. They include a prehistoric marine reptile, a butterfly, a South American orchid, a weevil, a pitcher plant, a dragonfly, a dung beetle and a land snail. Among others.

Here’s Nepenthes attenboroughii, a giant pitcher plant in the Philippines that’s reputedly big enough to swallow a rat. What an honor!

Photo by Dr Alastair Robinson. Used under Creative Commons via Wikimedia.

In recent years, the subjects of Attenborough’s films have turned darker, more prophetic. He warns about plastic pollution in oceans, human population growth, declining biodiversity, deforestation, and climate change. He’s also an advocate for less meat consumption because of industrial agriculture’s huge contribution to methane production.

Birthday tributes

As he turns 99 today, Attenborough seems indefatigable—and as beloved as ever. Earlier this week The Guardian printed a collection of tributes to Sir David, gushing comments and memories by everyone from Barack Obama to Jane Goodall. People lucky enough to work with him on film projects all over the world recalled stories from the field.

His newest documentary, Ocean with David Attenborough, premieres today in cinemas in the UK. A month from now, it will air on National Geographic (June 7th) and then be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu the next day (World Oceans Day, June 8th).

I will close with words from Sir David himself. Here’s the eminent champion of nature narrating the opening moments of The Private Life of Plants, his docuseries that inspired my first interview with him. It’s vintage Attenborough. I bet you can almost hear his voice, intoning these words in his dramatic baritone.

A Laurence Olivier of the wild:

“Midwinter … and the countryside is so still, it seems almost lifeless. But these trees and bushes and grasses around me are living organisms just like animals. And they have to face very much the same sort of problems as animals face throughout their lives if they're to survive. They have to fight one another, they have to compete for mates, they have to invade new territories. But the reason that we're seldom aware of these dramas is that plants of course live on a different time-scale."

And here, in Sir David’s honor, is the 1999 newspaper story I wrote, after interviewing him for the second time.

Happy Birthday, Sir David, and thanks again for speaking with me. It was an honor I’ll never forget. May your lifetime of work continue to inspire us all to love and care for the Earth.