Non Fiction Authors From England

"It's equally astonishing that the birds are able to measure its relative strength with such accuracy that they can trace it back to its source simply by sensing in which direction it becomes marginally stronger. But a turkey vulture is exceptionally well-equipped among birds, with wide-open nostrils and extremely well-developed sense organs within them."

"A spider. Quite big enough and succulent enough to provide a snack for a Scops."

"Living on the bodies of mammals, oxpeckers manage to get quite a varied diet. A maggot here, a tick there, a little sip of blood, perhaps a little tasty earwax."

"I'll bet when our prehistoric ancestors first dug for tubers and planted seeds in Europe, one of these little robins appeared within a couple of days. Other animals must have done the same job for them before human beings did. Once, not so long ago, wild pig were common all over Europe, and they're great diggers and rootlers. So maybe the robin's boldness and friendliness with other kinds of animals started in prehistory, even before human beings arrived in Europe."

"Without thermals, [raptors] can't travel far. But the snow geese fly on... They navigate by the stars."

"As the last thermals of summer start to rise, the birds [hawks and vultures] circle up to great heights, 10,000 feet or more, to give themselves a good start for the long journey ahead. As they glide southwards, slowly losing height, they will look for another thermal and make for its base so that, once again, they will be lifted high enough to reach the next."

"Its heart that in flight contracted a thousand times a minute, slows until its beat is virtually undetectable. Its body temperature falls dramatically, and its breathing seems to cease altogether. [...] It's hibernating; but for a hummingbird, winter comes 365 times a year."

"How is it that [birds] can withstand the pull of gravity that keeps the rest of us tied so firmly to the ground? The secret is a wing with a thick, rounded front edge that curves gently downwards toward the back edge which is very thin. As thin, in fact, as a feather. As the bird glides forward, the air flowing under the wing is impeded by the wing's downward curve so it becomes slightly compressed, and that pushes the wing up. At the same time, the air flowing across the top of the wing is deflected upwards by the wing's front edge, so reducing its pressure. If the air is moving fast enough, then the slight suction from above, combined with the push from beneath will be enough to lift the bird into the air [...] and ample to keep it aloft."

"[The Kiwi.] It's the bird equivalent of a badger."

"Many of New Zealand's birds flew here from Australia fifteen hundred miles away across the sea to the west. They started to do so millions of years ago, and they are still doing so today... So, if you know Australian birds, you will recognise quite a lot, particularly those that are relatively recent arrivals."

"The island is immense. It's 1,000 miles long, if you discount a narrow arm of sea that crosses it in the middle, and it contains mountains over 12,000 feet high. It's New Zealand. The first land-living mammals to get here were human beings and they didn't arrive until a mere 1,500 years ago. So here you can glimpse what the world would have been like if the birds had won that battle with the early mammals and now ruled the Earth, for here they once did."

"Birds are the most accomplished aeronauts the world has ever seen. They fly high and low, at great speed, and very slowly. And always with extraordinary precision and control."

"Wallace's emotions on discovering such marvels must surely be echoed by all of us who follow him. This is what he wrote: "I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course. Year by year being born and living and dying amid these dark gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man, many of them have no relation to him, their happiness and enjoyment's, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone.""

"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."

"Midwinter, and the countryside is so still, it seems almost lifeless. But these trees and bushes and grasses around me are living organisms just like animals. And they have to face very much the same sort of problems as animals face throughout their lives if they're to survive. They have to fight one another, they have to compete for mates, they have to invade new territories. But the reason that we're seldom aware of these dramas is that plants of course live on a different time-scale."

"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."

"I am at the very centre of the great white continent, Antarctica. The South Pole is about half a mile away. For a thousand miles in all directions, there is nothing but ice. And, in the whole of this continent, which is about one-and-a-half times the size of the United States and larger than Europe, there is a year-round population of no more than 800 people. This is the loneliest and coldest place on Earth, the place that is most hostile to life. And yet, in one or two places, it is astonishingly rich."

"If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation. Most do so directly, by breeding. In the few examples that don't do so by design, they do it indirectly, by helping a relative with whom they share a great number of their genes. And in as much as the legacy that human beings pass on to the next generation is not only genetic but to a unique degree cultural, we do the same. So animals and ourselves, to continue the line, will endure all kinds of hardship, overcome all kinds of difficulties, and eventually the next generation appears. This albatross is over 30 years old, she's already a grandmother, and this year once again she has produced a chick. She will devote the next 10 months of her life looking after it. She has faced the trials of life and triumphed, for her little 2 day old chick the trials are just beginning."

"The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It's November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. And in a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched."

"Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we're going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what's more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. […] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands."

"Our planet, the Earth, is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. It contains life. Even in its most barren stretches, there are animals. Around the equator, where those two essentials for life, sunshine and moisture, are most abundant, great forests grow. And here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species. Here, animals and plants, insects and birds, mammals and man live together in intimate and complex communities, each dependent on one another. Two thirds of the surface of this unique planet are covered by water, and it was here indeed that life began. From the oceans, it has spread even to the summits of the highest mountains as animals and plants have responded to the changing face of the Earth."

"This is the last programme in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him."

"There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive. This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are."

"It used to be said, that in places like this, nature eventually failed to support man, the truth is exactly the reverse, here man failed to support nature. Ten thousand years ago man regarded the natural world as divine, but as he domesticated animals and plants so nature lost some of its mystery and appeared to be little more than a larder that could be raided with impunity."

"And this is where it went. In places all around the eastern Mediterranean the sea is separated from the mainland by strips of flat marshy land like this. Made up of the soil that once clothed the hills beyond. All this was deposited during the last 2000 years. This is the marsh that now separates the sea from the city of Ephesus. These ruined buildings mark the edge of the quay where once merchant ships lay moored. As the harbour died, so did the trade upon which the city's wealth was based, and so, well, ultimately did Ephesus itself. What was once one of the most splendid cities in the Roman Empire fell into decay and was abandoned."

"And yet, today the harbour is silted up, most of the city lies buried beneath sand dunes and the land has become a desert. As the population had grown and more people wanted more fields, so more of the forest that once stood around the city was cut down, until eventually it was all gone. With no roots to hold the soil, and no attempt to conserve it, it was carried away by the wind and the rain."

"The Roman public's thirst for blood and pleasure in witnessing pain seems to have been unquenchable and without limit. The caged animals were kept in dungeons below the main arena. The terrified animals in their cages were hoisted up from this pit. And not only animals, human beings too, criminals, slaves and prisoners of war. And here in this arena they were set one upon the other to provide the crowd with spectacles of the most appalling carnage. It still continues to this day in Spain."

"Trade is a proper and decent relationship, with dignity and respect on both sides."

"This City in Ukraine was once Home to almost 50 thousand people. It had everything a community would need for a comfortable life. But on the 26th of April 1986, it suddenly became uninhabitable. The nearby Nuclear Power Station of Chernobyl exploded. And less than in 48 hours the city was evacuated. No one has lived here since"

"We are going to have to live more economically than we do. And we can do that and, I believe we will do it more happily, not less happily. And that the excesses the capitalist system has brought us, have got to be curbed somehow."

"We must change our diet. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters."

"I don't think any human society is prepared to make decisions which they may not like if they're made by people who don't speak the same language... It's very easy, as we all know, to be very tolerant of minorities until they become majorities and you find yourself a minority. It's easy to say 'Oh yes, these lovely people – I love the way they wear such interesting costumes.' You know, that's fine until some day you find that they're actually telling you what to do and that they've actually taken over the town council and what you thought was your home was not. I'm not supporting it; I'm saying it's what it is."

"In moments of great grief, that's where you look and immerse yourself. You realise you are not immortal, you are not a god, you are part of the natural world and you come to accept that."

"People who accuse us of putting in too much violence, [should see] what we leave on the cutting-room floor. My conscience troubles me more about reducing the pain and savagery that there is in the natural world than the reverse."

"If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off [making the point that the reverse is not true]."

"I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing."

"I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, "Why don't you admit that the hummingbird, the butterfly, and the Bird-of-Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?" And I always say, "Well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a riverbank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, that's in its eye and boring through its eyeballs and is slowly turning it blind. The creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm." Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate and so therefore [sic] when I make these films, I prefer to show what I know to be the facts, what I know to be true, and then people can deduce what they will from that."

"'Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in disputes about the natural world, in opposition to reason; lest time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture to assert … We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the natural world can be an enemy to religion; for truth cannot be an enemy to truth, God is not divided against himself."

"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due."

"The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians."

"The enemies of Freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."

"Racialism is a superstitious variety of nationalism. A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours."

"There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better.""

"Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive."

"When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition.""

"On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so."

"Looking back, I think I can separate the years when I was happy and those when I was unhappy. But perhaps at the time I should have judged differently."

"There are of course no beginnings or ends in history. We may walk for a few miles by the side of a river, noting its shadows and its rapids, the gorges which confine it and the plains through which it meanders; but we know that we have seen neither the beginning nor the end of its course, that the whole river has an unbroken continuity, and that sections, whether of space or time, are purely arbitrary. We are always sowing our future; we are always reaping our past."

"So the pendulum swings, now violently, now slowly; and every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival."

"I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour."