Green turtles can live up to 90 years. And no matter where they swim in the world, when a turtle meets an old friend, one says to the other, “Blimey! That David Attenborough has been around for a long time.”
Arguably the greatest presenter in television history and perhaps the most influential teacher who ever lived, Sir David first showed us green turtles during his Zoo Quest adventures on Raine Island in 1957.
More than 65 years later, his magnificent Planet Earth III (BBC1) took us back to this remote outpost, about 75 miles off the Australian coast, to revisit the turtles.
Tens of thousands of them strand here every year to lay eggs. The sight of the young struggling from their nests and staggering to the water’s edge continues to move us, a vivid symbol of how vulnerable wild animals are. It was extraordinary to hear Sir David talk when the cameras came back. No one else alive has such a perspective on this phenomenon.
Sir David Attenborough is undisputedly the greatest presenter in television history and perhaps the most influential teacher who ever lived, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
In Planet Earth III, Sir David returns to Raine Island, where he first showed us green turtles during his Zoo Quest adventures in 1957.
But Zoo Quest didn’t tell the whole story – and neither did Planet Earth III. Sir David didn’t do any personal interviews before this eight-part series aired, but I sent him a note asking about Raine Island.
He replied that the first visit was coincidental, when ‘a bloke in the pub who had a boat’ in Oz offered to take him and the film crew. The journey took ten days and a shocking spectacle awaited them.
‘There were dead turtles everywhere. Convicts in the 19th century had built a watchtower and dug stone from the center of the island, making the island saucer-shaped.
Turtles came up and after laying their eggs they headed downhill back to what they thought was the sea, except this was actually the center of the island. So the place was absolutely littered with turtle corpses. It was the most depressing thing I had ever seen.”
Without a doubt too disturbing for the general TV audience in the 1950s. Fortunately, conservation workers have reshaped the island by moving thousands of tons of sand, and the turtles are thriving – although rising sea levels pose a real threat.
For Sir David, now 97, bringing back the cameras was one of the highlights of the show. “I was fascinated to see it all again,” he said.
Every moment of this opening episode was fascinating. High-definition photography is explosively more beautiful than ever, and drones are giving us views we could never have imagined, like the spectacle of Cape fur seals harassing a great white shark.
They rushed at it, like crows chasing a buzzard. Underwater photography alone could not demonstrate this, although a few divers did enter the water.
Sir David revealed that his first trip to Raine Island was depressing as it was littered with the corpses of dead turtles who were confused into thinking the center of the saucer-shaped island was the sea.
High-definition photography is explosively more beautiful than ever, and drones are giving us views we could never have imagined, like the spectacle of Cape fur seals harassing a great white shark.
A family of ostriches leave their nest in the heart of the Namib Desert after waiting more than 40 days for their eggs to hatch
They stayed close to the seabed and filmed back to back – the fur seals may get away with being stubborn, but it’s not wise to try your luck with a great white.
It is impossible to single out any Attenborough series from the past seventy years as ‘the best’.
But Planet Earth III can certainly claim to be the most visually stunning. The flamingos on the Yucatan salt flats, the Namibian desert lions, the archer fish and the pregnant whale: it was all amazing to see.
Photos of a whale nursing a newborn calf were particularly impressive, as it was only a few decades ago that the extinction of these creatures seemed inevitable.
When Sir David made his Life On Earth series in the 1970s, whale killing was rampant. Before the 1986 whaling moratorium, fleets slaughtered them as quickly as they could find them. The Soviet Union’s aim, as revealed in a BBC4 documentary earlier this year, was to wipe out whales so that the ‘capitalist West’ could not benefit from them. It was ecological madness.
Sei whales got their name because, slow-moving and heavy, they were the ‘right whales’ to hunt. It was a reprieve from disaster to see the mother nuzzling her 20-foot-long calf, which requires 10 gallons of milk a day.
It is remarkable to hear that the whales have chosen this spot as a nursery, partly because the sound of the waves crashing on the shore will muffle their murmurs and deter the orcas from discovering them.
Sir David never explained in his series why sea angels glow in the dark when they are hungry and cannot see
An arctic wolf on Ellesmere Island in Canada. Although he would find the idea ridiculous, Sir David’s touch has become almost supernatural
At the other end of the scale, the blind sea butterflies and their equally blind predators, the sea angels, which hunted them in the White Sea off the northwest coast of Russia, were eerily beautiful.
Sir David did not explain why the angels, if they cannot see, glow in the dark when they are hungry.
The sight of them digesting their prey in their translucent stomach pouches was gruesome yet mesmerizing. They looked like refugees from a Harry Potter book.
I’ve been lucky enough to see previews and, as Mail’s Weekend magazine revealed in a stunning spread earlier this month, there are some incomparable stories in the pipeline. My favorites include the two-ton rhino strolling through a Nepalese town to a grazing area as tuk tuks circle around him. Then there are long-tailed macaques in a Balinese temple, robbing tourists and holding their phones for ransom.
All this is told in the reassuring Attenborough style, always erudite but never pompous, and with a touch of mischievous humour. Although he would find the idea ridiculous, his touch has become almost supernatural.
Mike Gunton, executive producer of the series, told me that Sir David had chosen to film his introduction in the grounds of Down House in Kent, once the home of Charles Darwin.
‘The weather had been terrible for weeks and it was raining, which wouldn’t look good. But of course, David being David, the sun came out on the one day we booked for filming, and it was beautiful.” Nature is so indebted to Attenborough that even the weather obeys it.