The Reign of David Attenborough

David Attenborough, 2019.Photograph by Sam Barker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Already known as a naturalist, a broadcaster, a writer, a campaigner, and such a flat-out, all-encompassing gentleman that he hobnobs with gorillas, David Attenborough has added one more string to his bow: he is now a centenarian. Attenborough was born on May 8, 1926—that is to say, three and a half weeks before Marilyn Monroe. She has passed into legend, so much so that she barely seems real, and her movies are treasured as historical artifacts, whereas Attenborough, as real and as eager as a meerkat, has a new show on the BBC.

“Secret Garden” is a five-part delve into the domestic wildlife of the United Kingdom. The first episode aired on April 5th. There was Attenborough at the start of the program, hale and kindly, addressing us head on; and there was his voice, mellowed but un-degraded by the years, still telling us things as if he were confiding a secret and egging us on to share it. Mayflies, we learned, “are the only winged insects to undergo a second adult moult.” As for a grass snake, “its forked tongue can smell in stereo.” At the climax of the episode, two kingfishers sported over a stream, a dazzling dogfight of orange and blue.

To say that we have lived through the era of Attenborough would be tempting but incorrect, because an era—as he himself, a fervent fossil hunter from childhood, would be the first to point out—is a hefty unit of geochronological time. The Mesozoic era lasted some hundred and eighty-six million years. The Carboniferous period dragged on for sixty million. Even the Middle Jurassic epoch, which was happy hour if you were an ammonite, lingered for more than thirteen million years. What is so special, then, about the Attenborovian age, given that it’s measured in mere decades? In the grand scheme of things, that is the blink of a marmoset’s eye.