Am I alone or do you too associate certain birds with people on TV? Puffins always remind me of Johnny Morris (remember him?), Harpy Eagles always remind me of the cross-dressing Corporal Klinger from M.A.S.H. (must be something about noses and beaks) and Mallards, always remind me of David Attenborough. Now I’m not for a moment suggesting the great man has an Anseriforme ‘schnoz’, not at all! The reason for this particular association is quite different. It’s all because of one very special film sequence that appears in the ‘The Life of Birds’. Perhaps you’ll remember it. It begins with a close up of a Mallard in flight. As we follow the bird Sir David begins to narrate in his own inimitable way and then, as the camera pans out we watch as the Mallard splashes down in the middle of a lake, where, sitting in a small boat a few metres away, is the man himself. The editing is flawless, the impact instantaneous. Once again, his seemingly effortless ability to blend science with theatre is brought home and the result is, in my view, the best wildlife series that is ever likely to appear on our TV screens. Forget ‘Walking with Dinosaurs ’and ‘The Blue Planet’ – ‘The Life of Birds’ is quite simply as good as it’s possible to get!
Now, I have not always had such a high opinion of the wildlife documentary makers art. The ‘precision’ of it all really used to get my goat. For example, in another series, Sir David is walking through a desert and talking about some furry creature that lives underground (have a feeling it was a Golden Mole now I come to think about it...). He stoops and begins to dig into the sand with his hands. Cut to shot from inside a burrow as his hands break through and what should he find there but the aforementioned crittur. P-lease! And what about all those generalisations? Picture this typically ‘Attenborough-esque’ scene. The master is sitting on a rock on a beach. It’s night. The camera pans to his feet and we see hundreds of crabs. The narration goes something like this. ‘Here on this one beach on 20th May every year 10,000 female crabs come ashore to lay their eggs in the moist sand, as they have done for centuries. Each female excavates a 30cm pit into which she lays 500 eggs etc…’. Great. Well, NO – actually! The truth is that in some years the females go to a different beach. They may turn up as early as the 10th or as late as the 30th May. Some years 8,000 turn up and other years 12,000. The pits can vary from 20 to 40 cm deep and as many crabs probably 300 eggs as they do 500. OK, maybe I’m being overly pedantic – but talk about generalising! Surely somebody must research this stuff?! They do, of course, and thankfully (!) such unbecoming cynicism is now long behind me. At least it WAS…until I turned on The One Show the other night and it all came flooding back. You see, sitting on the sofa with the other presenters was somebody I'd encountered before... OMG... the world is both small AND mad.
A few years ago I’d taken a friend of mine to a one of my then regular haunts, Woolston Eyes to have a look at the resident birds when whom should we meet in the hide but the producer of a new wildlife series for Channel 5 (now sitting alongside Adrian Chiles and Chrsitine Bleakely). He was there to film the Black-necked Grebes. Have you ever noticed the little signs on some reserves (I think there’s one in the Swanlink hide at Martin Mere) that warn the public to ‘Be quiet because birds have ears too’? Well, this bloke hadn’t! He was excruciatingly LOUD!!! I’m sure he was from the same school of etiquette as a bank teller I once encountered in Stirling who’d tried to make herself understood to a foreign gentleman by simply repeating what she’d already said, but twice as loudly; ‘DO YOU HAVE YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER?!’ As the Channel 5 bloke cranked up the volume another notch (presumably interpreting our bemused looks as simple misunderstanding), I rather foolishly assumed that perhaps the birds wouldn’t notice…
And perhaps they wouldn’t have, had it not been for the fact that his cameraman was crammed into the tiniest hide you can imagine, right on the edge of the pool 20 feet from us but literally two feet away from the nearest birds. As a Black-necked Grebe popped up right by him our One Show chum practically stuck his head out of the shutters and yelled to the cameraman ‘THERE’S ONE JUST POPPED UP TO YOUR LEFT!’. Suffice to say the bird didn’t hang around long - so much for field craft FFS! Come to think of it, perhaps THAT’S how David Attenborough gets such memorable shots? Remember that amazing sequence of a Kagu on New Caledonia comically zig-zagging off through the forest with its crest raised? I can almost picture the cameraman trying to follow his instructions, ‘KAGU AT TWO O’CLOCK!…TEN O’CLOCK!!…TWO O’CLOCK!!!…TEN O’CLOCK!!!!’ Well, it makes you wonder…
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