Tom Lamont / Sat 12 Dec 2020 08.00 GMT
At 94, what has the world’s most-travelled naturalist learned? He talks garden birds in lockdown, the eerie silence of Chernobyl – and tackling the climate crisis
Before the stay-at-home orders of 2020 kept him in one place for months on end, David Attenborough had never sat in his garden and listened to the birds. Not properly, he says, not determinedly “swotting up with a notebook and keeping a bird list”. The foremost figure in natural-world broadcasting (so admired by naturalists around the planet, he has three types of plant as well as a spider, snail, grasshopper, frog, lizard, marsupial lion and shark-like fish named after him) hardly paid attention to the wildlife on his doorstep until lockdown forced his hand. From spring through to autumn, he says, he sat outside with a pencil and made a determined effort to identify every species he could hear. Blackbirds. Thrushes. Jays. Blue tits and great tits. Swifts.
“Actually, I couldn’t really hear the swifts,” the 94-year-old admits. Something to do with their pitch, and his failing ears. “My hearing,” Attenborough growls, using the breathy, mournful voice that often accompanies footage of an ageing alpha getting supplanted by a younger fitter animal, “is not what it was.”
Back in his 30s and 40s, when Attenborough was regularly out in the field on five continents, shooting endless one-off nature programmes for the BBC, he wore a lot of khaki. In his 50s, presenting the genre-defining 13-episode series Life On Earth, he wore a shirt patterned in pink, the better to show off the lushness of a novel 1979 colour broadcast. Into his 89th year, he was prepared to wear rolled-up summer chinos and blue Crocs for a show about coral reefs. Today, sitting in his study at home in London, Attenborough’s outfit is more muted. Two curly pale shirt lapels escape from the collar of a brown sweater. Your eyes are drawn to the rightward sweep of flossy bright-white hair.
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While he talks, Attenborough clutches spectacles, using these for emphasis – jabbing them in the direction of his garden, for instance, when discussing the elusive swifts, and later arcing them above his head to suggest a larger world and its troubles with global heating. We’re still on garden wildlife when he stops what he’s saying, suddenly, and points the specs in my direction.
“Have you got a garden?” he asks.
