How To Shoot An Amateur Naturalist

“If you were trying to film badgers in the New Forest, would you throw peanut butter sandwiches to attract them? How would you feel about creeping up to a Great White Rhino before saying your lines nervously to the camera?

Gerald Durrell found himself doing these thing and worse during the filming of his highly successful TV series, The Amateur Naturalist. It took him and his wife Lee from one of the world’s largest sea-bird colonies, on the northernmost Shetland Isle, to the lush Umfolozi reserve in southern Africa, where he saw giraffes kissing, and Canada, where a buffalo demonstrated how to take a snow bath. Through it all he is his characteristically hilarious, irrepressible self, coping with uncooperative animals and TV producers alike, and passionate as ever about the natural world mankind is rapidly destroying.”