Happy Birthday Sir David

“What do you think this is?” asks Sir David Attenborough, handing me a heavy rock. We are sitting in his Richmond home and I have been drawn into playing a game of ‘guess the fossil’. The specimen turns out to be vertebrae from an ichthyosaur, which Attenborough found in his neighbour’s garden while looking for rocks for his aquarium. “I went over and there was this, just lying about!”

His fossil collection sits behind his sofa, which itself faces a large collection of wildlife paintings, tribal artefacts and one unexpectedly massive state-of-the-art television. From outside, the house is immediately identifiable for it lacks the patios and SUVs of its neighbours and instead has a winding path surrounded by lush greenery.

Attenborough is very much as you would expect from his on-screen appearances—knowledgeable, eloquent, a consummate storyteller and extremely excited about wildlife. He is as happy enthusing about a turtle mating frenzy as he is about the grisly habits of the caecilian, a burrowing worm-like amphibian whose young feed by tearing strips of fatty skin from their mothers. And what about the most interesting thing he’s eaten himself? “Big moth caterpillars in New Guinea. You put them on a fire and they come out like Twiglets.”

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