When a British citizen turns 100, they get a message from the monarch. It’s a tradition dating back to 1917 when King George V started sending telegrams to congratulate citizens on landmark birthdays.
But Sir David Attenborough is no ordinary citizen. And he didn’t get just a letter or a telegram.
In a video produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit, a relay race of animal couriers helped deliver the 100th birthday message from King Charles in Balmoral Castle in Scotland to Attenborough at Royal Albert Hall in London.
A border collie handed the letter to an eagle who dropped it on a hedgehog who carried it wedged between its spines till a red squirrel picked it up. A flock of geese, an otter, a swan, a duck, a fox and a deer all played their mail-carrier roles until a barn owl finally delivered it through the letterbox of Attenborough’s home.
It’s utterly magical but especially because it features not show-species like lions, polar bears or orangutans, but the most humdrum of British animals, the kind we read about in old Enid Blyton books where the children of Cherry Tree farm discover the wildlife in their own backyard thanks to Tammylan, the “wild man” who chooses to live in the woods.
I loved reading (and re-reading) that book as a boy even though the Kolkata I lived in had almost none of the creatures Tammylan found in his woods—water voles, dormouse, stoats and red deer that shed their antlers. All I saw around me were crows, sparrows and the occasional common mynas.
One day we discovered to our great excitement an owl perched on our terrace. It seemed white. My father bought a lottery ticket in case it was a good omen from Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. We didn’t win anything. Perhaps it was grey, not white, my mother said. But I felt I had already won the jackpot—a real, live owl on our terrace just like the barn owls Tammylan showed the children of Cherry Tree farm. Somehow I dimly understood then that my backyard and their backwoods were connected.
The great gift of David Attenborough has been, as King Charles said in his message, how over the decades he “has revealed the beauty and wonders of Nature to audiences around the world in new and marvellous ways.” Whether it’s sitting with a family of mountain gorillas or lying on a beach at the dead of night watching a leatherback turtle lay eggs or chatting with a sightless black rhinoceros, Attenborough has taken us to places we could barely imagine. And he got to experience it all in real life. “The rest of us got to live it vicariously through Sir David,” writes Sam Philip on BBC Earth. “Who, if you’re choosing someone through whom to live vicariously, is pretty much top of the list.”
Nature documentaries are all about the vicarious experience. As a boy I loved animals. I would save up money to buy glossy photobooks about animals and wildlife encyclopaedias. I would devour the National Geographic magazines our neighbours got. My sister and I placed red-black-and-white caterpillars we found on our lily plants in a shoe box. We were breathlessly excited when they turned into chrysalises but sadly no butterflies emerged. But my love for nature was unfazed. I would watch every wildlife-related film that came to local theatres—Born Free, Living Free, Day of the Dolphin, Hatari, Safed Haathi. My family’s patience gave out when I insisted on going to see documentaries with names like King Elephant and Elephant Calls Slowly.
My poor uncle was the only one who would suffer through them stoically while I wept next to him because the baby antelope or giraffe had failed to outrun a pride of hungry lions. Then he would buy me ice cream to cheer me up. What I realise in retrospect is how little there was from my own country. I learned about the English countryside and African savannah and Arctic tundra long before I learned anything about India’s own staggeringly rich wildlife diversity. Safed Haathi just didn’t cut it.
In time I grew out of the nature documentaries but Attenborough’s Blue Planet and Life on Earth remained a gold standard. It was during the covid lockdown that I, like many of us, rediscovered nature series online. At a time when we were sequestered at home, they were a way to remind us that there was a world outside and it was actually doing just fine with us out of the way.
Nests of leatherback turtles were at their highest levels on the beaches of Phuket, Thailand. Thousands of Olive Ridley turtles hatched along Odisha’s coast. The populations of horseshoe crabs, once hunted relentlessly for their blue blood which is used in the pharmaceutical industry, rebounded along Delaware Bay in the US. Endangered otters returned to the normally crowded Putrajaya lake in Malaysia. A pod of 2,000 dolphins surfaced off the coast of UAE while 350 sperm whales appeared near Sri Lanka. Deer roamed the streets of Haridwar, while elephant herds were spotted in Coimbatore.
It was a humanitarian crisis and a terrible economic slowdown but it was a small respite for nature. It almost felt like Arundhati Roy’s prophecy for another time in another context was coming true—“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
Attenborough even made a documentary called The Year Earth Changed, where he too said the earth was breathing again. My uncle was long gone but I was suddenly back in a creaky seat in a near empty theatre in Globe cinema in Kolkata watching with bated breath a baby elephant take its first wobbly steps.
Slowly just like the flocks of flamingos returning to the wetlands, animal reels started creeping into my social media as well. It was the opposite of doomscrolling as I watched bears relaxing in some clueless homeowner’s backyard hot tub or teared up when a blind baboon died in South Africa. I followed unlikely friendships between a cat, a dog and a Canadian goose and learned about the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey which sneezes when it rains. Some of the reels now are probably AI but at least I wasn’t going down the toxic wormhole of terrible things being said by world leaders. Nor was I enviously looking at ripped people enjoying fabulous vacations in gorgeous resorts I could never afford. I was just looking at quokkas, the “world’s happiest animal.” I don’t know if it really is happy. But it works.
A 2020 study from the University of Leeds showed that watching videos and images of cute animals could reduce stress levels by up to 50%. Heart rates dropped, blood pressure moved to a more ideal range. Apparently we were all releasing oxytocin, the love hormone associated with bonding and trust as we watched animal videos.
I watched them to be wowed and entertained and I was wowed and entertained. But they taught me something I didn’t expect. They made me slow down, pause and really look at the world around me.
David Attenborough knew this all along. At 100, he seems the epitome of the man who never stops to rest but when he was asked what animal he would want to be for a day, he didn’t hesitate.
“Oh undoubtedly a sloth. Hanging upside down a tree with nothing to do.”
Except perhaps, in my case, watch some more animal videos.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.