Animals

The subjects. Deliberately held to under a tenth of this archive, because a career this long generates effectively unlimited wildlife footage and the archive is about the work rather than a nature reel. What is here is chosen for the sequences that mattered to the programmes: the gorillas, the birds of paradise, the lyrebird, the reef.

Part of David Attenborough

71 moments in this segment.

1. 1995 - The Biggest Flower in the World | Titan Arum | David Attenborough | BBC Studios. The titan arum, the largest unbranched flower, from The Private Life of Plants. Attenborough presents plants as active organisms, which the series made possible through time lapse.
2. 1995 - Exploring the Venus Flytrap with Attenborough | BBC Earth. A Venus flytrap examined by Attenborough in The Private Life of Plants. The 1995 series established that plant behaviour could carry a landmark strand.
3. 1995 - Plant Growth of Tropical Flowers in the Desert | David Attenborough | BBC Studios. Desert flowers blooming in time lapse from The Private Life of Plants. Time lapse rigs must hold position for weeks, which is why the technique arrived late to location work.
4. 1998 - Amazing! Bird Sounds From The Lyre Bird - David Attenborough - BBC Wildlife. The superb lyrebird imitating camera shutters, car alarms and chainsaws, from The Life of Birds in 1998. Attenborough presents the sequence and it remains among the most circulated pieces of natural history film.
5. 2002 - David Attenborough Says Boo To A Sloth | Life Of Mammals | BBC Earth. Attenborough with a three toed sloth in The Life of Mammals, broadcast in 2002. The Life sequence began with Life on Earth in 1979 and ran to Life in Cold Blood in 2008.
6. 2005 - The Incredible Lives of Ants | Attenborough: Life in the Undergrowth | BBC Earth. Ants from Life in the Undergrowth, the 2005 series on invertebrates. The series depended on macro sliders and probe lenses to film animals a few millimetres long.
7. 2005 - Life of Insects | Attenborough: Life in the Undergrowth | BBC Earth. Insects from Life in the Undergrowth, the 2005 series. Filming invertebrates at this scale required macro sliders, probe lenses and lighting that does not cook the subject.
8. 2005 - Red Back Spider | Attenborough: Life in the Undergrowth | BBC Earth. A redback spider in Life in the Undergrowth. The series is the invertebrate panel of the Life sequence, which ran from Life on Earth in 1979 to Life in Cold Blood in 2008.
9. 2005 - Amazing Cicada Life Cycle | Sir David Attenborough's Life In the Undergrowth | BBC. The cicada life cycle from Life in the Undergrowth. Periodical cicadas spend years underground, so filming the emergence means committing a crew to a predicted date.
10. 2005 - Clever Queen Bumble Bees | Sir David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth | BBC Studios. Queen bumblebees in Life in the Undergrowth. Attenborough narrates and presents these sequences; the filming is done by specialist macro camera operators over months.
11. 2005 - Amazing miniature world - Sir David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth - BBC wildlife. The miniature world of Life in the Undergrowth. Attenborough was 79 when the series broadcast and continued presenting landmark series for a further two decades.
12. 2005 - Life of Insects | Attenborough: Life in the Undergrowth | BBC Earth. More insects from Life in the Undergrowth. The series completed the invertebrate gap in the Life sequence, twenty six years after Life on Earth began it.
13. 2006 - Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi - Planet Earth Attenborough BBC wildlife. Cordyceps fungus taking over an insect, from Planet Earth in 2006. The sequence introduced a wide audience to parasitic fungi and is among the series' most reused clips.
14. 2006 - Bird Of Paradise Courtship Spectacle | Planet Earth | BBC Earth. A bird of paradise courtship display from Planet Earth. Attenborough first sought birds of paradise on the New Guinea Zoo Quest expedition in the collecting era.
15. 2006 - Snow Leopard Hunting | Planet Earth | BBC Earth. A snow leopard hunt from Planet Earth in 2006. Snow leopards had barely been filmed in the wild before this series and the sequence required months of remote camera work.
16. 2013 - Penguin leaving the water, Antarctica. Life in the Freezer in 1993 was the first of his series built entirely around the Antarctic, and Frozen Planet followed in 2011. Both depended on camera operators living on the ice for whole seasons.
17. 2015 - Black Sicklebill Bird of Paradise - Attenborough's Paradise Birds - BBC. A black sicklebill from Attenborough's Paradise Birds. The family Paradisaeidae runs through his work from the 1950s expeditions to dedicated series six decades later.
18. 2015 - Emaciated polar bear. Images of starving bears became the standard shorthand for Arctic warming and were also the point where the sanitised nature critique bit hardest. George Monbiot argued the blue chip films had taught audiences a great deal about nature and very little about what is happening to it.
19. 2016 - Iguana vs Snakes (Full Clip) | Planet Earth II | BBC Earth. The marine iguana hatchling pursued by racer snakes on Fernandina, from Planet Earth II. The sequence became the most discussed of the 2016 series and won the BAFTA Must-See Moment award.
20. 2016 - Iguana chased by killer snakes | Planet Earth II: Islands - BBC. A shorter cut of the Planet Earth II iguana and racer snakes chase. Filming it required long lens work timed to the hatching season on a single Galapagos island.
21. 2016 - The day the lyrebird met David Attenborough - Attenborough at 90 - BBC. The BBC revisits the lyrebird sequence for Attenborough's 90th birthday. Anniversary packaging of famous sequences is promotional in function and clusters around his birthday years.
22. 2016 - King penguins, Fortuna Bay, South Georgia. South Georgia holds some of the largest king penguin colonies on Earth and is a standing location for Antarctic filming. Life in the Freezer in 1993 was the first Attenborough series built entirely around the far south.
23. 2016 - King penguin colony, Salisbury Plain. A colony of tens of thousands on the South Georgia coast. Working here means living aboard a ship, which is the role the RRS Sir David Attenborough was built to fill for the British Antarctic Survey.
24. 2017 - Creatures Of The Midnight Zone | Blue Planet II Narration By David Attenborough | BBC Earth Relax. Creatures of the midnight zone from Blue Planet II, narrated by Attenborough. Deep sea sequences depend on crewed submersibles and remote vehicles that reach depths no diver can.
25. 2018 - Emperor Penguin Mourns the Death of Chick | BBC Earth. An emperor penguin with a dead chick, from a BBC Earth sequence. Critics including George Monbiot argue the films long showed nature without showing what is happening to it, a critique the later work responds to directly.
26. 2018 - Penguin chicks rescued by unlikely hero | Spy in the Snow - BBC. Penguin chicks in Spy in the Snow, filmed with disguised robotic cameras. The crew's decision to intervene in a related Dynasties sequence prompted public debate about whether film crews should assist animals.
27. 2019 - The Dancing Bird of Paradise Scene from Our Planet | Netflix. The dancing bird of paradise sequence from Our Planet. Our Planet is a Silverback Films production for Netflix with WWF, released in full on 5 April 2019, and was explicitly built to show environmental threats.
28. 2019 - Netflix, Attenborough and cliff-falling walruses: the making of a false climate icon. A climate sceptic account of the Our Planet walrus sequence. Susan Crockford argues the animals may have been driven off cliffs by polar bears rather than by ice loss; director Sophie Lanfear of Silverback Films rejects that directly, Crockford is herself a contested figure amplified by sceptic outlets, and the LSE Grantham Research Institute published a rebuttal.
29. 2019 - Mountain gorilla, face and eyes. Attenborough filmed mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda on 9 January 1978, at Dian Fossey's Karisoke Research Center, with one of her habituated study groups. The whispered piece to camera that followed is the best known sequence of his career.
30. 2019 - Mountain gorilla yawning. The crew went into the Virungas with a written sequence about the gorilla's opposable thumb and how apes grip. A roughly three year old male called Pablo climbed onto him and an infant called Poppy pulled at his shoelaces, and he abandoned the script on camera. The improvisation is real; it displaced a planned sequence rather than arriving from nothing.
31. 2019 - Female mountain gorilla feeding. Dian Fossey was wary of film crews and granting access at Karisoke was not routine. She was murdered at the research centre in December 1985, seven years after the filming. The mountain gorilla population has since recovered, but attributing that recovery to one television sequence is not supported.
32. 2019 - Komodo dragon. The Komodo dragon was the target animal of Zoo Quest for a Dragon in 1956, the Indonesian expedition of the Zoo Quest run. The format was animal collecting: expeditions travelled with London Zoo staff to capture named animals for the collection, which was standard practice at the time and is not defended now.
33. 2019 - Komodo dragons fighting. Two males wrestling upright. Zoo Quest ran from its first broadcast on 21 December 1954 to 31 May 1963, seven series and roughly forty two episodes, with Charles Lagus behind the camera throughout.
34. 2019 - Magnificent bird of paradise. New Guinea birds of paradise were the object of a Zoo Quest expedition in the late 1950s and returned repeatedly across his career. Male display in this family is among the most elaborate in birds and depends on light, angle and stage, which is why filming it is a technical problem as much as a natural history one.
35. 2019 - Red bird of paradise. Endemic to two small islands off western New Guinea. The plumes of this family reached Europe as trade goods centuries before any European saw a living bird, which is where the family's name and the myth that they never landed both come from.
36. 2019 - Wilson's bird of paradise. The male clears a display court on the forest floor and performs on a vertical sapling. Sequences of this kind require a hide, days of waiting and a camera operator who is not in shot, which is the labour the crew facet of this archive exists to make visible.
37. 2019 - Walrus on Svalbard. The Our Planet walrus sequence of 2019 remains disputed. The programme attributed mass falls from cliffs in northeast Russia to shrinking sea ice concentrating animals ashore. The zoologist Susan Crockford argued the animals may have been driven off by polar bears; the director Sophie Lanfear of Silverback Films rejects that directly. Crockford is herself a contested figure amplified by climate sceptic outlets, and the LSE Grantham Institute published a rebuttal.
38. 2019 - Walruses hauled out on ice. Walruses rest on sea ice between dives when it is available and haul out on land in large numbers when it is not. Our Planet was a Netflix and Silverback Films production made with WWF, not a BBC programme, which is often lost when the dispute is reported.
39. 2019 - Polar bear in drift ice north of Svalbard. The BBC admitted that newborn cub footage in Frozen Planet in 2011 was shot in a Dutch animal park using artificial snow and intercut with wild material. The defence offered at the time was that filming a wild den would endanger the animals. That is conceded by the broadcaster, and it attaches to the production rather than to the narrator.
40. 2019 - Female polar bear with cub, Svalbard. Polar bear dens are dug into snow drifts and the cubs emerge in spring. Doug Allan, the principal polar cameraman on Frozen Planet and Life in the Freezer, worked the sea ice for months at a time. He died on 8 April 2026.
41. 2019 - Humpback whale calf, Moorea. The Blue Planet in 2001, series produced by Alastair Fothergill, was the first natural history series to take the whole ocean as its subject, and it depended on new underwater and deep sea camera platforms.
42. 2019 - Blue whale blow. The largest animal that has ever lived. Blue Planet II in 2017 was cited by Theresa May when she launched the UK 25 Year Environment Plan, which documents its political salience. A peer reviewed Imperial College London and Oxford study published in 2020 found viewers' knowledge rose but their plastic choices did not significantly change.
43. 2019 - Leaf-cutter ant carrying a leaf fragment. Leaf cutter ants farm a fungus on cut vegetation and were one of the set pieces of Life in the Undergrowth in 2005, the series that pushed macro and probe optics hardest. Filming animals of this size needs a lens that can move inside the nest, not just look at it.
44. 2019 - Leaf-cutter ants on the trail. A colony can strip a tree overnight and moves along worn trails between the cutting site and the nest. Invertebrate sequences of this quality became possible only when macro sliders, motion control rigs and high speed cameras came into routine use.
45. 2019 - Brown-throated sloth. Sloths move slowly enough to grow algae in their fur and were one of the animals Attenborough's Zoo Quest era South American expeditions encountered. Filming an animal that barely moves is its own problem: the sequence has to be built from time lapse or from patient framing.
46. 2019 - Desert locust. Planet Earth II filmed a locust swarm from inside using a DJI Ronin three axis gimbal, which let the operator travel with the swarm on foot. Rob Drewett is credited on the gimbal and locust work.
47. 2019 - Resplendent quetzal, male. A cloud forest bird of Central America with tail streamers far longer than its body. Birds like this drove the demand for the long lens and stabilised aerial work that defines the blockbuster look.
48. 2019 - Scarlet macaw. Attenborough's earliest expeditions went to British Guiana and Paraguay, and South American forest birds were among the animals Zoo Quest set out to collect for London Zoo. The practice was already falling out of favour by the end of the run in 1963.
49. 2019 - Chimpanzee feeding. Filming great apes requires habituation, the slow process by which a group stops treating human observers as a threat. Dian Fossey's habituated gorilla groups at Karisoke are what made the 1978 Virunga sequence possible at all, and she was wary of granting film crews access.
50. 2019 - Orangutan, Kalimantan. Borneo was a destination Attenborough returned to across his career. Orangutans are the only great apes in Asia and are now confined to Borneo and Sumatra, both under continuing forest loss, which is the change his late programmes were built to show.
51. 2019 - Killer whales hunting a seal. Wave washing, in which orcas coordinate to tip a seal off an ice floe, was one of the sequences Frozen Planet is best remembered for. It is behaviour that had been described by scientists long before television could show it happening.
52. 2019 - Green sea turtle, Moorea. Blue Planet II in 2017 gave sustained screen time to plastic in the ocean, which is what made it politically consequential. Theresa May cited the series when launching the 25 Year Environment Plan; the study that tested whether it changed viewers' plastic choices found no significant change.
53. 2019 - Common octopus. The octopus that used shells as armour against a shark, in Blue Planet II, became one of the most discussed animal sequences ever broadcast. Filming it took an operator returning to the same animal repeatedly over many dives.
54. 2019 - Weaver ants carrying a gecko, Laos. Life in the Undergrowth in 2005 was the series that took invertebrates seriously as protagonists. It depended on macro optics, probe lenses and lighting small enough not to cook the subject.
55. 2019 - Weaver ant nest. Weaver ants bind leaves together using silk drawn from their own larvae, which they hold and use as tools. Behaviour of this kind is precisely what the invertebrate series existed to make visible to a mass audience.
56. 2019 - Venus flytrap in flower. The Private Life of Plants in 1995 used time lapse to give plants the appearance of behaviour, which is one of the genuinely original contributions television made to botany. A flytrap closes in well under a second and needed high speed rather than time lapse.
57. 2019 - Round-leaved sundew in flower. Sundews trap insects on sticky glands and digest them, an adaptation to nitrogen poor bog soils. The carnivorous plants were a set piece of The Private Life of Plants and connect directly to the pitcher plant named after him in the Philippines.
58. 2019 - Moon jellyfish. Cnidarians are the group Auroralumina attenboroughii, the Ediacaran fossil named after him, is thought to belong to. If that placement holds, the lineage runs unbroken from Charnwood Forest 560 million years ago to the animals in the water today.
59. 2019 - Swallowtail butterfly. Insect flight was one of the things ultra high speed cameras finally made visible: a wingbeat that the eye reads as a blur resolves into a sequence at a thousand frames a second.
60. 2019 - Koala. Australia and New Guinea are where the monotremes and most marsupials survive, including Zaglossus attenboroughi, the egg laying long beaked echidna named after him in 1998 and known from a single 1961 specimen for decades.
61. 2019 - Malagasy green lynx spider. Madagascar was a Zoo Quest destination in the late 1950s and remains one of the most endemic faunas on Earth. Prethopalpus attenboroughi, a goblin spider, is among the arachnids named after him.
62. 2019 - Orchids. The pollination mechanisms of this family were one of the running subjects of The Private Life of Plants, which showed the process as machinery rather than decoration. Lepanthes attenboroughii, a Central American species, is among the plants that carry his name.
63. 2021 - The Marine Iguana | A Perfect Planet | BBC Earth. Marine iguanas in A Perfect Planet, broadcast in 2021. The Galapagos marine iguana is the same species as the Planet Earth II hatchling sequence, filmed at a different life stage.
64. 2021 - David Attenborough meets some very clever insects 🐞🦋 BBC. Attenborough with insects for Life in Colour. The series used cameras built to show colour and polarised light that human vision cannot detect.
65. 2021 - Scorpion VS Centipede: A Deadly Fight | David Attenborough's Micro Monsters | Nature Bites. A scorpion and a centipede in Micro Monsters, narrated by Attenborough. Predation sequences of this kind are staged encounters in controlled conditions rather than chance field observations.
66. 2022 - David Attenborough will make you think about weeds in a different light⁣ 🌱 The Green Planet - BBC. Attenborough on weeds in The Green Planet, broadcast in 2022. The series used robotic motion control to move around plants filmed over weeks of time lapse.
67. 2022 - David Attenborough Explains: Spiders | David Attenborough's Micro Monsters | Nature Bites. Attenborough explains spiders in Micro Monsters. The series was made for a smaller platform than the landmark BBC strands, showing how widely his narration is distributed.
68. 2023 - Alpha male chimpanzee, Kibale Forest. Chimpanzee tool use was one of the sequences that made Life on Earth in 1979 an argument rather than a catalogue. The series was built to carry evolutionary sequence, and it drew more than fifteen million viewers in Britain on its original run.
69. 2024 - Emperor penguin chicks jump off a 50-foot cliff in Antarctica NEVER-BEFORE-FILMED FOR TV | Nat Geo. Emperor penguin chicks leap from an ice cliff, filmed for National Geographic. Attenborough's late work is largely not BBC: Silverback Films for Netflix and National Geographic, and Apple for Prehistoric Planet.
70. 2025 - Komodo dragon on Komodo Island. Photographed on Komodo Island in August 2025. Attenborough's 1956 expedition reached the island and filmed the animal, though the collecting objective itself was not met. The footage was shot on colour stock and transmitted in black and white.
71. 2025 - Marine iguana, Plaza Island. The only sea going lizard in the world, which grazes algae underwater and basks to recover body heat. The iguana and snakes chase was shot with lightweight three axis gimbals that let an operator run with the animals rather than tracking them from a tripod.