Sir David Attenborough, in his own words

One wonders when it’s going to stop. For the last 50 years I’ve thought ‘I’ll do something next year and then that’s going to be it’, but there is always something out there that I haven’t thought of!

Now we can almost do anything you could think of; we can film at night, we can film at the bottom of the sea, we can slow things down, speed things up, we have remote cameras and we have the highest quality.

In the 1950s, people thought filming a lion catching an impala was impossible. Well, within 10-15 years of course we had. After that, we knew how to do it: we knew what the lion tactics were and where to put the camera, and so the quality of our footage has just gone up and up and up. Now, people can make their own movies – so it’s up to us to keep ahead of them!

We’ve seen cheetahs hunt before of course, but this particular clip had an extraordinary intimacy and immediacy about it. Unusually, the camera wasn’t on a long lens, so you feel as though you’re right in there as it happens – and that’s because the cameraman actually was.

He had habituated these fully wild cheetah cubs since they were small to watch them grow up in this program. They knew him and took no notice of him so he was able to be alongside just as soon as they caught that impala. It is a key moment in their lives: this is the first time they hunted for themselves. Had they failed, as they had done for the last few hunts, they would be doomed to death. This is the time where they became adults and when you knew they would go and live, and make their lives.

I’ve already made one programme about them, but the NHU encouraged me to make one more, which is not only about the birds but the way in which human beings discovered the birds and the legends that were around them. I remember reading when I was about 12 or 14 a book by Alfred Russell Wallace, the first [western] man to see birds of paradise display in the wild. There were wonderful illustrations: I thought that must be the most wonderful thing in the world.

The scientific name for one of the species I love means ‘without legs’. In the 16th century, the very first birds that were bought over [to Europe] didn’t have any legs, because they had been cut off by the traders in New Guinea because the plumes were used as currency. But for another hundred years, scientists in the west thought that the birds didn’t have legs because they hadn’t seen them, and that they lived in paradise, floating in the skies drinking dew. They thought they lived among the gods.