Even though Sir David has well passed his retirement age, he moved on to present Life in the Freezer (1993) as part of his more specialised natural surveys, paying attention to the natural history of Antarctica. Sir David and his crew travelled to previously inaccessible areas to capture yet another set of rare footages of the seasonal life in the continent for three years. Leopard seals can be seen hunting penguins while large glaciers can be seen disintegrating into the Southern Ocean. The following scene shows the feeding and mating season of the King Penguins.
“At a time when it’s possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it’s possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what’s more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.”
— Sir David Attenborough, in concluding Life in the Freezer
Both Sir David and the producer had the idea to present a documentary of plants, but there was a problem. In his words, “How could you construct the dramatic narratives needed for a successful television documentary series if your main characters are rooted to the ground and barely move?” However, his team managed to find a solution to this, by being one of the first documentary makers to use time lapse photography to show the ‘dramatic’ growth of plants. And thus, The Private Life of Plants is produced and aired with much success in early 1995. The following scenes show the growth of fungi and the ‘largest’ flower in the world.
“Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we’ve cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we’re doing so on a greater scale than ever… We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it — for without it, we will surely perish.”
— Sir David Attenborough, in concluding The Private Life of Plants
Even though Sir David is not an expert on birds, he was nevertheless very excited to embark on the project in making The Life of Birds (1998). One of the challenges his team faced was to record the sound of the bird calls simultaneously with the footage, without the background noises. To do so, the team enticed the birds with recordings of potential mates, so that they will approach the crew and thus engage in their unique calling. The following scene shows the lyre bird and its mimicking skills in sound production.
“Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were. They reached the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, long before we did. They can survive in the hottest of deserts. Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe. Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky, but with skill and care and knowledge, we can ensure that there is still a place on Earth for birds in all their beauty and variety — if we want to… And surely, we should.”
— Sir David Attenborough, in concluding The Life of Birds