Original air dates: 21 October – 23 December 1998
Introduction
Birds are probably the most popular animal group of all. As Attenborough points out, there is a royal society to protect birds but merely a national one for children. Bird books dominate the natural history bookshelves in stores. Also birds are the only truly wild animals most people see. It was therefore logical after the success of the plant series that Alistair Fothergill head of NHU decided that the next series should be about birds (himself being an expert on them). The only real drawback was that Attenborough felt that as a non-expert in bird classification he was not the right man for the job. But he was fascinated by their behaviour, the way they fly and why some have become
flightless. He found it exciting to make a series about such things. His seemingly impeccable approach may have appealed to more people than the expert ornithological one might have.
Almost everyone at the NHU sought to participate in the series. NHU has a vast collection of bird songs. Pete Basset, who took on the programme with bird song,
decided that he would not be satisfied with filming a bird singing and then adding a song from the NHU’s archives. As he said, correctly, you can tell. The movements of the throat don’t match the sound. There would be no such shortcuts in The Life of Birds.
While recording the songs there should be no sound interfering with the song at dawn, that includes cars, aeroplanes or farmers rising early. There should also be no twigs interfering with the pictures.*
This does sound like the demands for every modern natural history programme. This was obviously going to be a very demanding series since the audience was bound to be full of experts on various species they were going to record. Strangely the series lived up to its expectations.
There is no information about the technology used for this series but the first series (the Zoo Quest era) demanded that sound should be recorded separately so what was heard was usually only an imitation of what was expected in real life. In many books, like his memoirs, there is a chapter dedicated to how these matters were dealt with in the early years, but little information about more recent solutions.
Being very fussy about such unimportant matters as Attenborough’s dress-code it is somewhat odd to spot that after a special dress-code seemed to be set after the Trials this is the only series where Attenborough has not been dressed in a blue shirt. Here he always wears a white one, except for the photo sporting the back cover of the book. There he wears the usual blue one.
References:
*Summarised from: David Attenborough: Life on Air. p. 359-60.