David Attenborough is well known as a leading naturalist and explorer, travelling in little-known countries in search of the rare and exotic, and writing his extrememly popular books about strange encounters and unforgettable scenes. This is the full account of four months he spent travelling several thousand miles throughout the island of Madagascar to meet the varied peoples whose origin stems from the Far East rather than from nearby Africa, study their local customs, and film some of the remarkable animals which occur nowhere else in the world. Spectacular chamaeleons, nearly three feet in length and gaudily coloured, geckos so well camouflaged they are almost impossible to find, millipedes the size of golf-balls, the ceremonies of turning of the dead and sacrificing to crocodiles-these are some of the things described in this fascinating book. But the principal objective of the expedition was to film and observe the unique, and uniquely charming, lemurs. He saw brown lemurs, gentle lemurs, ruffed lemurs, ringed lemurs and mouse lemurs. He spent days tracking the snow-white sifakas which few naturalists have observed in the wild, witnessed their prodigious leap, watched them play and writes about their affectionate family life. Finally, he heard the "weird, deafening wail" of the legendary indris and day after day returned to the same place in the dense rain forest in the hope of seeing this magnificent lemur. At last he was rewarded with the sight of a big male "sitting astride a branch like a child on a see-saw", two youngsters and an old female carrying a baby on her back. For a week he watched this family, entranced by the indris which "of all the creatures we filmed in Madagascar was the rarest, the least known scientifically, and the most enduring". David Attenborough is a lively writer with an incredible understanding of nature and acute powers of observation. Whether he is describeding the emergence from its large cocoon of the spectacular Malagasy comet moth, or telling the amusing story of how a tenrec was lost in and recovered from the coachwork of a car, or writing about his painstaking search for the egg fragments of an extinct bird, he brings to bear his vivid descriptive talents which makes this a most rewarding and entertaining book to read.

Author Biography

"David Attenborough has been interested in natural history for as long as he can remember. As a child he had a succession of pets - grass snakes, salamanders and tropical fish among them - and explored the countryside around his home in Leicester, watching birds and collecting fossils. Eventually, he won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in natural sciences. After doing his national service in the Royal Navy, and a brief spell in educational publishing, he joined the BBC Television in 1952. There he produced a wide variety of programmes - archaeological quizzes, short stories, political discussions among them - but eventually he persuaded the Corporation to let him go to the tropics to make films about animals and so started the series of Zoo Quest Expeditions, three of which are described in this book. In 1965, he abandoned programme-making to become Controller of BBC 2 which at that time was less than a year old. For four years he was responsible for the network's editorial policies and for turning it into the first colour network in Europe. In 1969, he was appointed Director of Programmes, responsible for both BBC Television's networks, but in 1972, after eight years behind a desk, he resigned and returned to programme-making. Since then he has produced several remarkable series, Eastwards with Attenborough, The Tribal Eye, and most recently, Life on Earth."