The Life of Birds is David Attenborough at his characteristic best: presenting the drama, beauty, and eccentricities of the natural world with unusual flair and intelligence. The renowned writer and filmmaker treks through rain forests and deserts, through city streets and isolated wilderness, to bring us an illuminating panorama of every aspect of birds' lives -- from their songs to their search for food, from their eggs and nests to their mastery of the air. Beautifully illustrated with more than two hundred color photographs, the book will delight and inform bird lovers and any general reader with an interest in nature.
Open Letter from the Author
June 1999, New York
Dear Friends,
I'm in New York for a few days, preparing for the PBS showing of The Life of Birds and I just wanted to get in touch with you about this project.
When I was a boy, I was fascinated—as I guess nearly all kids are—with animals. If I discovered a fossil or found some strange creature in a pond, I would take it to show my father and he would say, "Good—now tell me all about it". So, I had to become an expert on what I had found just to answer him.
Birds, of course, were a particular fascination and have remained so. After all, they are the only truly wild creatures that most of us city dwellers can be sure of seeing every day. My particular interest, however, was not so much in spotting wild species and making lists of them, as in watching them closely, whether they are common or uncommon, to see what they do and why they do it. How, exactly, do they make their nests? How do they learn to fly? And what exactly are they saying to one another with their varied calls?
So I was overjoyed when PBS and the BBC agreed to let me film and write The Life of Birds. The work took me and the production teams into forty-two different countries. We worked in the tropical rainforests of Brazil, as well as the icefields of Antarctica. We spent time in the deserts of Africa and the high mountains of New Zealand. We were able to use the latest in video technology—cameras that can see in the dark, computer animation, high speed photography to slow down swift actions—often to record what no one had succeeded in filming before.
It was a marvelous three years for me. At the end of it all, I feel I have found a new understanding of birds. I guess I now look at them in a new way and with a new understanding. I hope that you could manage to take a look at the book The Life of Birds and can catch the ten weekly episodes that start on July 20th - and that you will feel the same way as I.
Sincerely yours,
—David Attenborough
