Zoo Quest to Guiana

This is Attenborough's second book in his Zoo Quest series, the first took place in Sierra Leone, this one in British Guiana (now Guyana), with others in Madagascar, Paraguay, Australia and one to Indonesia for the Komodo Dragon. This book was published in 1956.

The premise is that the London Zoo are looking for a team to collect animals, and the BBC are interested in making a tv series about it. Attenborough, while still in the infancy of his career was a part of the team, although due to one of the members taking ill, he ended up presenting the series, and this of course kicked off a lifetime of nature documentary presentations.

Not unexpectedly, one of the highlights of any Attenborough book, is reading it in his voice. This of course slows the reading down a lot, but it really is unavoidable!

Some aspects of the book, as expected, are dated - the wholesale capture of animals for a zoo in modern time would be tackled with far more discretion - if at all. At its most simple, they visited a lot of villages and asked the Indians to sell them the animals they had taken as pets, and asked if they could capture specific (target) species nearby. They also hunted and live captured and of course filmed a lot of the animals in natural (or near-natural) settings for the documentary series. It is obvious that they were pioneering this type of filming, and at least with some trial and error under their belts from Sierra Leone, they knew what to expect. Have to say I felt the capture of the manatee was uncomfortable reading, especially considering its transportation back to the UK. Still, it was a different time and the ethics around this have all developed since.

The writing is accessible, and easy to read. There is a good balance of the expedition - behind the scenes, the way they lived and worked, the hunt, the capture, but also a lot of information about the animals - as we would expect with the future direction of Attenborough's career.

I have a couple more of the Zoo Quest books in my shelf to look forward too as well.

4 stars