Sunday, July 8, 2012

Salim Ali.....A Great Birdman....


                            


Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali (November 12, 1896 – July 27, 1987) was an Indian ornithologist and naturalist. Known as the "birdman of India", Salim Ali was among the first Indians to conduct systematic bird surveys across India and his bird books helped develop ornithology. He became the key figure behind the Bombay Natural History Society after 1947 and used his personal influence to garner government support for the organization, create the Bharatpur bird sanctuary (Keoladeo National Park) and prevent the destruction of what is now the Silent Valley National Park. He was awarded India's second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.

Early life

Salim Ali was born into a Sulaimani Bohra Muslim family of Bombay, the ninth and youngest child. His father Moizuddin died when he was one year old and his mother Zeenat-un-nissa died when he was three. The children were brought up by his maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and childless aunt, Hamida Begum, in a middle-class household in Khetwadi, Mumbai. Another uncle was Abbas Tyabji, well known Indian freedom fighter. Salim was introduced to the serious study of birds by W. S. Millard, secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), who identified an unusually coloured sparrow that young Salim had shot for sport with his toy airgun. Millard identified it as a Yellow-throated Sparrow, and showed Salim around the Society's collection of stuffed birds. Millard lent Salim a few books including Eha's Common birds of Bombay, encouraged Salim to make a collection of birds and offered to train him in skinning and preservation. Millard also introduced young Salim to (later Sir) Norman Boyd Kinnear, the first paid curator at the BNHS, who later provided help from the British Museum.In his autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow Ali notes the Yellow-throated Sparrow event as the turning point of his life that led him into ornithology, an unusual career choice, especially for an Indian in those days. His early interest was in books on hunting in India and he became interested in sport-shooting, encouraged by the hunting interests of his foster-father Amiruddin. Shooting contests were often held in the neighbourhood in which he grew and among his playmates was Iskandar Mirza, a distant cousin who was a particularly good marksman and who went on in later life to become the first President of Pakistan.
Salim went to primary school at Zanana Bible Medical Mission Girls High School at Girgaum along with two of his sisters and later to St. Xavier's College in Bombay. Around the age of 13 he suffered from chronic headaches, making him drop out of class frequently. He was sent to Sind to stay with an uncle who had suggested that the dry air might help and on returning back after such breaks in studies, he barely managed to pass the matriculation exam of the Bombay University in 1913.

Burma and Germany

Yellow-throated Sparrow
Salim Ali's early education was at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Following a difficult first year in college, he dropped out and went to Tavoy, Burma (Tenasserim) to look after the family's Wolfram (Tungsten) mining (tungsten was used in armour plating and was valuable during the war) and timber interests there. The forests surrounding this area provided an opportunity for Ali to hone his naturalist (and hunting) skills. He also made acquaintance with J C Hopwood and Berthold Ribbentrop who were with the Forest Service in Burma. On his return to India in 1917 after seven years, he decided to continue formal studies. He was to study commercial law and accountancy at Davar's College of Commerce. His true interest was however noticed by Father Ethelbert Blatter at St. Xavier's College and was persuaded to study zoology. After attending morning classes at Davar's College, he began to attend zoology classes at St. Xavier's College and was able to complete the course in zoology.During this break in Bombay he was married to a distant relative, Tehmina in December 1918.
Ali was fascinated by motorcycles from an early age and starting with a 3.5 HP NSU in Tavoy, he owned a Sunbeam, Harley-Davidsons (three models), a Douglas, a Scott, a New Hudson and a Zenith among others at various times. On invitation to the 1950 Ornithological Congress at Uppsala in Sweden he shipped his Sunbeam aboard the SS Stratheden from Bombay and biked around Europe, injuring himself in a minor mishap in France apart from having several falls on cobbled roads in Germany. When he arrived on a fully loaded bike, just in time for the first session at Uppsala, word went around that he had ridden all the way from India! He regretted not having owned a BMW.
Ali failed to get an ornithologist's position which was open at the Zoological Survey of India due to the lack of a formal university degree and the post went instead to M. L. Roonwal. He was hired as guide lecturer in 1926 at the newly opened natural history section in the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai for the salary of Rs 350 a month.He however tired of the job after two years and took a study leave in 1928 to Germany, where he was to work under Professor Erwin Stresemann at the Zoological Museum of Berlin University. Part of the work involved examining the specimens collected by J. K. Stanford in Burma. Stanford being a BNHS member had communicated with Claud Ticehurst and had suggested that he could work on his own with assistance from the BNHS. Ticehurst did not appreciate the idea of an Indian being involved in the work and resented even more, the involvement of Stresemann, a German. Ticehurst wrote letters to the BNHS suggesting that the idea of collaborating with Stresemann was an insult to Stanford. This was however not heeded by Reginald Spence and Prater who encouraged Ali to conduct the studies at Berlin with the assistance of Stresemann. In Berlin, Ali made acquaintance with many of the major German ornithologists of the time including Bernhard Rensch, Oskar Heinroth and Ernst Mayr apart from meeting other Indians in Berlin including the revolutionary Chempakaraman Pillai. Ali also gained experience in bird ringing at the Heligoland observatory.

Ornithology

With Mary and Dillon Ripley on a collection trip (1976)
On his return to India in 1930, he discovered that the guide lecturer position had been eliminated due to lack of funds. Unable to find a suitable job, Salim Ali and Tehmina moved to Kihim, a coastal village near Mumbai. Here he had the opportunity to study at close hand, the breeding of the Baya Weaver and discovered their mating system of sequential polygamy. Later commentators have suggested that this study was in the tradition of the Mughal naturalists that Salim Ali admired. A few months were then spent in Kotagiri where he had been invited by K M Anantan, a retired army doctor who had served in Mesopotamia during World War I. He also came in contact with Mrs Kinloch, who lived at Longwood Shola, and her son-in-law R C Morris, who lived in the Biligirirangan Hills. He then discovered an opportunity to conduct systematic bird surveys of the princely states that included Hyderabad, Cochin, Travancore, Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal with the sponsorship of the rulers of those states. He was aided and supported in these surveys by Hugh Whistler who had surveyed many parts of India and had kept very careful notes. Interestingly, Whistler had initially been irritated by the unknown Indian. Whistler had in a note on The study of Indian birds mentioned that the long tail feathers of the Greater Racket-tailed Drongo lacked webbing on the inner vane. Salim Ali wrote that such inaccuracies had been carried on from early literature and pointed out that it was incorrect on account of a twist in the rachis. Whistler was initially resentful of an unknown Indian finding fault and wrote "snooty" letters to the editors of the journal S H Prater and Sir Reginald Spence. Subsequently Whistler re-examined his specimens and not only admitted his error but became a close friend.
Whistler also introduced Salim to Richard Meinertzhagen and the two made an expedition into Afghanistan. Although Meinertzhagen had very critical views of him they became good friends. Salim Ali found nothing amiss in Meinertzhagen's bird works but later studies have shown many of his studies to be fraudulent. Meinertzhagen made his diary entries from their days in the field available and Salim Ali reproduces them in his autobiography:
    30.4.1937 'I am disappointed in Salim. He is quite useless at anything but collecting. He cannot skin a bird, nor cook, nor do anything connected with camp life, packing up or chopping wood. He writes interminable notes about something-perhaps me... Even collecting he never does on his own initiative...
    20.5.1937 'Salim is the personification of the educated Indian and interests me a great deal. He is excellent at his own theoretical subjects, but has no practical ability, and at everyday little problems is hopelessly inefficient... His views are astounding. He is prepared to turn the British out of India tomorrow and govern the country himself. I have repeatedly told him that the British Government have no intention of handing over millions of uneducated Indians to the mercy of such men as Salim:...
He was accompanied and supported on his early ornithological surveys by his wife, Tehmina, and was shattered when she died in 1939 following a minor surgery. After Tehmina's death in 1939, Salim Ali stayed with his sister Kamoo and brother-in-law. In the course of his later travels, Ali rediscovered the Kumaon Terai population of the Finn's Baya but was unsuccessful in his expedition to find the Mountain Quail (Ophrysia superciliosa), the status of which continues to remain unknown.
Label for a specimen collected by Salim Ali during his Mysore State survey
Ali was not very interested in the details of bird systematics and taxonomy and was more interested in studying birds in the field.Ernst Mayr wrote to Ripley complaining that Ali failed to collect sufficient specimens : "as far as collecting is concerned I don't think he ever understood the necessity for collecting series. Maybe you can convince him of that."Ali himself wrote to Ripley complaining about bird taxonomy:
    My head reels at all these nomenclatural metaphysics! I feel strongly like retiring from ornithology, if this is the stuff, and spending the rest of my days in the peace of the wilderness with birds, and away from the dust and frenzy of taxonomical warfare. I somehow feel complete detachment from all this, and am thoroughly unmoved by what name one ornithologist chooses to dub a bird that is familiar to me, and care even less in regard to one that is unfamiliar ----- The more I see of these subspecific tangles and inanities, the more I can understand the people who silently raise their eyebrows and put a finger to their temples when they contemplate the modern ornithologist in action.
    —Ali to Ripley, 5 January 1956
Ali later wrote that his interest was in the "living bird in its natural environment."
Salim Ali's associations with Sidney Dillon Ripley led to many bureaucratic problems. Ripley's past as an OSS agent led to allegations that the CIA had a hand in the bird-ringing operations in India.
Salim Ali took some interest in bird photography along with his friend Loke Wan Tho. Loke had been introduced to Ali by JTM Gibson, a BNHS member and Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Indian Navy, who had taught English to Loke at a school in Switzerland. A wealthy Singapore businessman with a keen interest in birds. Loke helped Ali and the BNHS with financial support.Ali was also interested in the historical aspects of ornithology in India. In a series of articles, among his first publications, he examined the contributions to natural-history of the Mughal emperors. In the 1971 Sunder Lal Hora memorial lecture and the 1978 Azad Memorial Lecture he spoke of the history and importance of bird study in India.

Other contributions

Salim Ali was very influential in ensuring the survival of the BNHS and managed to save the then 100-year old institution by writing to the then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru for financial help. Salim also influenced other members of his family. A cousin, Humayun Abdulali became an ornithologist while his niece Laeeq took an interest in birds and was married to Zafar Futehally, a distant cousin of Ali, who went on to become the honorary Secretary of the BNHS and played a major role in the development of bird study through the networking of birdwatchers in India. Ali also guided several M.Sc. and Ph. D. students, the first of whom was Vijaykumar Ambedkar, who further studied the breeding and ecology of the Baya Weaver, producing a thesis that was favourably reviewed by David Lack.
Ali was able to provide support for the development of ornithology in India by identifying important areas where funding could be obtained. He helped in the establishment of an economic ornithology unit within the Indian Council for Agricultural Research. He was also able to obtain funding for migration studies through a project to study the Kyasanur forest disease, an arthropod-borne virus that appeared to have similarities to a Siberian tick-borne disease. This project partly funded by the PL 480 grants of the USA however ran into political difficulties. In the late 1980s, he also guided a BNHS project that aimed to reduce bird hits at Indian airfields. He also attempted some early citizen science projects through the birdwatchers of India who were connected by the Newsletter for Birdwatchers.
Dr. Ali had considerable influence in conservation related issues in post-independence India especially through Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi was herself a keen birdwatcher, influenced by Ali's bird books (a copy of the Book of Indian Birds was gifted to her in 1942 by her father Nehru who was in Dehra Dun jail while she herself was imprisoned in Naini jail) and by the Gandhian birdwatcher Horace Alexander. Ali influenced the designation of the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and in decisions that saved the Silent Valley National Park. One of Ali's later interventions at Bharatpur involved the exclusion of cattle and graziers into the sanctuary and this was to prove costly and resulted in ecological changes that led to a decline in the numbers of many species of waterbirds. Some historians have noted that the approach to conservation used by Salim Ali and the BNHS followed an undemocratic process.
Dr. Ali was a frequent visitor to The Doon School where he was an engaging and persuasive advocate of ornithology to successive generations of pupils. As a consequence, he was considered to be part of the Dosco fraternity and became one of the very few people to be made an honorary member of The Doon School Old Boys Society.

Personal views

Salim Ali held many views that were contrary to the mainstream ideas of his time. A question that he was asked frequently was about the collection of bird specimens particularly in later life when he became known for his conservation related activism. Although once a fan of shikar (hunting) literature, Ali held strong views on hunting but upheld the collection of bird specimens for scientific study. He held the view that the practice of wildlife conservation needed to be practical and not grounded in philosophies like ahimsa. He suggested that this fundamental religious sentiment had hindered the growth of bird study in India.
    it is true that I despise purposeless killing, and regard it as an act of vandalism, deserving the severest condemnation. But my love for birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is essentially aesthetic and scientific, and in some cases may even be pragmatic. For a scientific approach to bird study, it is often necessary to sacrifice a few, ... (and) I have no doubt that but for the methodical collecting of specimens in my earlier years - several thousands, alas - it would have been impossible to advance our taxonomical knowledge of Indian birds ... nor indeed of their geographic distribution, ecology, and bionomics.
    — Ali (1985):195
Brought up in a Muslim household, he had in his younger life been taught to recite the Koran without understanding any Arabic. In his adult life he despised what he saw as the meaningless and hypocritical practices of prayer and was put off by the "ostentatiously sanctimonious elders".
In the early 1960s the national bird of India was under consideration and Salim Ali was intent that it should be the endangered Great Indian Bustard, however this proposal was overruled in favour of the Indian Peafowl.

Honours and memorials

Although recognition came late, he received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards. The earliest was the "Joy Gobinda Law Gold Medal" in 1953, awarded by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and was based on an appraisal of his work by Sunder Lal Hora (and in 1970 received the Sunder Lal Hora memorial Medal of the Indian National Science Academy). He received honorary doctorates from the Aligarh Muslim University (1958), Delhi University (1973) and Andhra University (1978). In 1967 he became the first non-British citizen to receive the Gold Medal of the British Ornithologists' Union. In the same year, he received the J Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation prize consisting of a sum of $ 100,000, which he used to form the corpus of the Salim Ali Nature Conservation Fund. In 1969 he received the John C. Phillips memorial medal of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The USSR Academy of Medical Science gave him the Pavlovsky Centenary Memorial Medal in 1973 and in the same year he was made Commander of the Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The Indian government decorated him with a Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1985.
Dr. Salim Ali died in 1987, at the age of 91 after a prolonged battle with prostate cancer in Mumbai. In 1990, the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) was established at Coimbatore by the Government of India. Pondicherry University established the Salim Ali School of Ecology and Environmental Sciences. The government of Goa set up the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary and the Thattakad bird sanctuary near Vembanad in Kerala also goes by his name. The location of the BNHS in Bombay was renamed to "Dr Salim Ali Chowk". In 1972, Kitti Thonglongya discovered a misidentified specimen in the collection of the BNHS and described a new species that he called Latidens salimalii, considered one of the world's rarest bats, and the only species in the genus Latidens. The subspecies of the Rock Bush Quail (Perdicula argoondah salimalii) and the eastern population of Finn's Weaver (Ploceus megarhynchus salimalii) were named after him by Whistler and Abdulali respectively. A subspecies of the Black-rumped Flameback Woodpecker (Dinopium benghalense tehminae) was named after his wife, Tehmina by Whistler and Kinnear.
    The International Jury for the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize of the World Wildlife Fund has selected for 1975
    Salim A. Ali
    Creator of an environment for conservation in India, your work over fifty years in acquainting Indians with the natural riches of the subcontinent has been instrumental in the promotion of protection, the setting up of parks and reserves, and indeed the awakening of conscience in all circles from the government to the simplest village Panchayat. Since the writing of your book, the Book of Indian Birds which in its way was the seminal natural history volume for everyone in India, your name has been the single one known throughout the length and breadth of your own country, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as the father of conservation and the fount of knowledge on birds. Your message has gone high and low across the land and we are sure that weaver birds weave your initials in their nests, and swifts perform parabolas in the sky in your honor.
    For your lifelong dedication to the preservation of bird life in the Indian subcontinent and your identification with the Bombay Natural History Society as a force for education, the World Wildlife Fund takes delight in presenting you with the second J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize. February 19, 1976.

Writings

The 10 volume "Handbook" (second edition)
Salim Ali wrote numerous journal articles, chiefly in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. He also wrote a number of popular and academic books, many of which remain in print. Ali credited Tehmina, who had studied in England, for helping improve his English prose. Some of his literary pieces were used in a collection of English writing. A popular article that he wrote in 1930 Stopping by the woods on a Sunday morning was reprinted in The Indian Express on his birthday in 1984.His most popular work was The Book of Indian Birds, written in the style of Whistler's Popular Handbook of Birds, first published in 1941 and subsequently translated into several languages and numerous editions. The first ten editions alone sold more than forty-six thousand copies. The first edition was reviewed by Ernst Mayr in 1943, who commending it while noting that the illustrations were not to the standard of American bird-books.His magnum opus was however the 10 volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan written with Dillon Ripley and often referred to as "the handbook". This work started in 1964 and ended in 1974 and a second edition was completed by others, notably J S Serrao of the BNHS, Bruce Beehler, Michel Desfayes and Pamela Rasmussen, after his death.A single volume "compact edition" of the "Handbook" was also produced and a supplementary illustrative work A Pictorial Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent with illustrations by John Henry Dick and coauthored with Dillon Ripley was published in 1983, these plates were also used in the second edition of the "Handbook".
Some of the books written by Salim Ali
He also produced a number of regional field guides, including "The Birds of Kerala" (the first edition in 1953 was titled "The Birds of Travancore and Cochin"), "The Birds of Sikkim", "The Birds of Kutch" (later "The Birds of Gujarat"), "Indian Hill Birds" and the "Birds of the Eastern Himalayas". Several low-cost book were produced by the National Book Trust including "Common Birds" (1967) written with his niece Laeeq Futehally which was reprinted in several editions with translations into Hindi and other languages. In 1985 he wrote his autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow. Ali also wrote about his own vision for the Bombay Natural History Society, noting the importance of conservation related activities.In the 1986 issue of the Journal of the BNHS he noted the role that it had played, the changing interests from hunting to conservation captured in 64 volumes that were preserved in microfiche copies, and the zenith that it had reached under the exceptional editorship of S H Prater.
A two-volume compilation of his shorter letters and writings was published in 2007, edited by Tara Gandhi, one of his last students.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Sir David Frederick Attenborough....An Amazing Naturalist & Narrator.....

Sir David Frederick Attenborough (born 8 May 1926 in London, England) is a broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the respected face and voice of British natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine "Life" series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of all terrestrial life. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s.

He is the younger brother of director and actor Richard Attenborough.

Early life

Attenborough grew up in College House on the campus of University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal. He was the middle of three sons (his elder brother, Richard, became a director and his younger brother, John, an executive at Alfa Romeo). During World War II his parents also adopted two Jewish refugee girls from Europe.
Attenborough spent his childhood collecting fossils, stones and other natural specimens. He received encouragement in this pursuit at age seven, when a young Jacquetta Hawkes admired his "museum". A few years later, one of his adoptive sisters gave him a piece of amber filled with prehistoric creatures; some 50 years later, it would be the focus of his programme The Amber Time Machine.
Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and then won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge where he studied geology and zoology and obtained a degree in Natural Sciences. He continued academic study at the London School of Economics, studying anthropology between 1944 and 1946. In 1947, he was called up for National Service in the Royal Navy and spent two years stationed in North Wales and the Firth of Forth.
In 1950, Attenborough married Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel; the marriage lasted until her death in 1997. The couple had two children, Robert and Susan.
His son, Dr Robert Attenborough, is a senior lecturer in Bioanthropology for the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.

First years at the BBC

After leaving the Navy, Attenborough took a position editing children's science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned with the work, however, and in 1950 he applied for a job as a radio talks producer with the BBC. Although he was rejected for this job, his CV later attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head of the Talks (factual broadcasting) department of the BBC's fledgling television service. Attenborough, like most Britons at that time, did not own a television, and he had seen only one programme in his life. However, he accepted Adams' offer of a three-month training course, and in 1952 he joined the BBC full time. Initially discouraged from appearing on camera because Adams thought his teeth were too big, he became a producer for the Talks Department, which handled all non-fiction broadcasts. His early projects included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk music presented by Alan Lomax.
Attenborough's association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series The Pattern of Animals. The studio-bound programme featured animals from London Zoo, with the naturalist Sir Julian Huxley discussing their use of camouflage, aposematism and courtship displays. Through this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester, the curator of the zoo's reptile house, and they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first broadcast in 1954, which Attenborough presented at short notice, due to Lester being taken ill.
In 1957, the BBC Natural History Unit was formally established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked to join it, but declined, not wishing to move from London where he and his young family were settled. Instead he formed his own department, the Travel and Exploration Unit[5], which allowed him to continue to front the Zoo Quest programmes as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers’ Tales and Adventure series.

BBC administration

From 1965 to 1969 Attenborough was Controller of BBC Two. Among the programmes he commissioned during this time were Match of the Day, Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, The Likely Lads, Man Alive, Masterclass, The Old Grey Whistle Test and The Money Programme. He also initiated televised snooker. This diversity of programme types reflects Attenborough's belief that BBC Two's output should be as varied as possible. In 1967, under his watch, BBC Two became the first television channel in the United Kingdom to broadcast in colour.
From 1969 to 1972 he was BBC Television's Director of Programmes (making him responsible overall for both BBC One and BBC Two), but ultimately turned down an offer of promotion that would have made him Director General of the BBC. In 1972 he resigned his post and returned to programme making.

Major series

Foremost among Attenborough's TV documentary work as writer and presenter is the "Life" series, which begins with the trilogy: Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990). These examine the world's organisms from the viewpoints of taxonomy, ecology and stages of life respectively.
They were followed by more specialised surveys: Life in the Freezer (about Antarctica; 1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002), Life in the Undergrowth (2005) and Life in Cold Blood (2008). The 'Life' series as a whole comprises 79 programmes.
Attenborough has also written and/or presented other shorter productions. One of the first after his return to programme-making was The Tribal Eye (1975), which enabled him to expand on his interest in tribal art. Others include The First Eden (1987), about man's relationship with the natural habitats of the Mediterranean, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989), which demonstrated Attenborough's passion for discovering fossils. In 2000, State of the Planet examined the environmental crisis that threatens the ecology of the Earth. The naturalist also narrated two other significant series: The Blue Planet (2001) and the British version of Planet Earth (2006) (which in its American cable television edition was narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver). The latter is the first natural history series to be made entirely in high-definition.
In May–June 2006, the BBC broadcast a major two-part environmental documentary as part of its "Climate Chaos" season of programmes on global warming. In Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth?, Attenborough investigated the subject and put forward some potential solutions. He returned to the locations of some of his past productions and discovered the effect that climate change has had on them. These two programmes were released on DVD under the title The Truth About Climate Change on 23 June 2008.
In 2007, Attenborough presented "Sharing Planet Earth", the first programme in a series of documentaries entitled Saving Planet Earth. Again he used footage from his previous series to illustrate the impact that mankind has had on the planet. "Sharing Planet Earth" was broadcast on 24 June 2007.
Life in Cold Blood is Attenborough's last major series. In an interview to promote it, he stated:
The evolutionary history is finished. The endeavour is complete. If you'd asked me 20 years ago whether we'd be attempting such a mammoth task, I'd have said 'Don't be ridiculous'. These programmes tell a particular story and I'm sure others will come along and tell it much better than I did, but I do hope that if people watch it in 50 years' time, it will still have something to say about the world we live in.
However, in subsequent interviews with Radio Times, Parkinson and on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he said that he did not intend to retire completely and would probably continue to make occasional one-off programmes. In 2008, he stated that he is planning a series about Charles Darwin and evolution.
Although Attenborough's documentaries have attained immense popularity in the United States, several have never been made available on DVD in NTSC format; most notably, the ones that cast doubt upon Conservative religious or political positions. These include:
■Life on Earth, which examines the evidence for evolution.
■State of the Planet
■The Truth About Climate Change

Other work

In 1975, the naturalist presented a BBC children's series about cryptozoology entitled Fabulous Animals. This represented a diversion from Attenborough's usual fare, as it dealt with the creatures of myths and legends, such as the griffin and kraken. It was a studio-based production, with the presenter describing his subjects with the aid of large, ornately illustrated books.
From 1983, Attenborough worked on two environmentally-themed musicals with the WWF and writers Peter Rose and Anne Conlon. Yanomamo was the first, about the Amazon rainforest, and the second, Ocean World, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1991. They were both narrated by Attenborough on their national tour, and recorded on to audio cassette. Ocean World was also filmed for Channel 4 and later released.
Between 1977 and 2005, Attenborough also narrated over 250 editions of the half-hour BBC One nature series Wildlife on One (BBC Two repeats were retitled Wildlife on Two). Though his role was mainly to narrate other people's films, he did on rare occasions appear in front of the camera.
Attenborough also serves on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine.

Achievements, awards and recognition

■1970 : BAFTA Desmond Davis Award
■1974 : Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
■1979 : BAFTA Fellowship
■1983 : Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
■1985 : Knighthood
■1991 : Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) for producing Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas broadcast for a number of years from 1986
■1996 : Companion of Honour (CH) "for services to nature broadcasting"
■2000 : International Cosmos Prize
■2003 : Michael Faraday Prize awarded by the Royal Society
■2004 : Descartes Prize for Outstanding Science Communication Actions
■2004 : Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum
■2005 : Order of Merit (OM)
■2005 : Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest
■2006 : National Television Awards Special Recognition Award
■2006 : Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management - Institute Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the public perception and understanding of ecology
■2006 : The Culture Show British Icon Award
■2007 : British Naturalists' Association Peter Scott Memorial Award

On 13 July 2006, Attenborough, along with his brother Richard, were awarded the titles of Distinguished Honorary Fellows of the University of Leicester "in recognition of a record of continuing distinguished service to the University." David Attenborough was previously awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the university in 1970.
In 1993, after discovering that the Mesozoic reptile Plesiosaurus conybeari had not, in fact, been a true plesiosaur, the paleontologist Robert Bakker renamed the species Attenborosaurus conybeari in Attenborough's honour.
Out of four extant species of echidna, one is named after him: Sir David's Long-beaked Echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi, which inhabits the Cyclops mountains in the Papua province of New Guinea.
In June 2004, Attenborough and Sir Peter Scott were jointly profiled in the second of a three-part BBC Two series, The Way We Went Wild, about television wildlife presenters. Part three also featured Attenborough extensively. The next month, another BBC Two programme, Attenborough the Controller, recalled his time as Director of Programmes for BBC Two.
In November 2005, London's Natural History Museum announced a fundraising campaign to build a communications centre in Attenborough's honour. The museum intends to open the David Attenborough Studio in 2008.
An opinion poll of 4,900 Britons conducted by Reader's Digest in 2006 showed Attenborough to be the most trusted celebrity in Britain. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted tenth in the list of "Heroes of our time".
It is often suggested that David Attenborough's 50-year career at the BBC making natural history documentaries and travelling extensively throughout the world has probably made him the most travelled person on Earth ever.
His contribution to broadcasting was recognised by the 60-minute documentary Life on Air, transmitted in 2002 to tie in with the publication of Attenborough's similarly titled autobiography. For the programme, the naturalist was interviewed at his home by his friend Michael Palin (someone who is almost as well-travelled). Attenborough's reminiscences are interspersed with memorable clips from his series, with contributions from his brother Richard as well as professional colleagues. Life on Air is available on DVD as part of Attenborough in Paradise and Other Personal Voyages.
In May 2008, the oldest known prehistoric mother — a fossilised fish giving live birth, was given the name Materpiscis attenboroughi. It honoured David Attenborough's role in highlighting the scientific importance of the ancient fossilised Gogo Reef, Western Australia, in his 1979 Life on Earth TV series.
Attenborough received three honorary degrees in 2008; one from the University of Aberdeen on 1 July 2008, another from the University of Exeter on 11 July 2008 and the other on 4 November 2008 from Kingston University London .

Favourite Attenborough moments

In April 2006, to celebrate Attenborough's 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments, out of twenty candidates. The results were announced on UKTV on 7 May. Each is given with its series and advocate:
1.Attenborough watching a lyrebird mimicking various noises (The Life of Birds, selected by Bill Oddie)
2.Mountain gorillas (Life on Earth, Sanjeev Bhaskar)
3.Blue whale encounter (The Life of Mammals, Alan Titchmarsh)
4.His description of the demise of Easter Island's native society (State of the Planet, Charlotte Uhlenbroek)
5.Chimpanzees using tools to crack nuts (The Life of Mammals, Charlotte Uhlenbroek)
6.A grizzly bear fishing (The Life of Mammals, Steve Leonard)
7.Imitating a woodpecker to lure in a real one (The Life of Birds, Ray Mears)
8.The presenter being attacked by a displaying male capercaillie (The Life of Birds, Bill Oddie)
9.Chimps wading through water on two feet (The Life of Mammals, Gavin Thurston)
10.Observing a male bowerbird's display (The Life of Birds, Joanna Lumley)
11.Watching elephants in a salt cave (The Life of Mammals, Joanna Lumley)
12.Wild chimps hunting monkeys (The Trials of Life, Alastair Fothergill)
13.Freetail bats leaving a cave and Attenborough holding one of their young (The Trials of Life, Rory McGrath)
14.Being threatened by a bull elephant seal (Life in the Freezer, Björk)
15.A wandering albatross chick and its parent (Life in the Freezer, Ellen MacArthur)
16.Spawning Christmas Island red crabs (The Trials of Life, Simon King)
17.In a tree with gibbons (The Life of Mammals, Steve Leonard)
18.Burrowing under a termite mound to demonstrate its cooling system (The Trials of Life, Björk)
19.Observing a titan arum (The Private Life of Plants, Alan Titchmarsh)
20.Timelapse footage of a bramble growing (The Private Life of Plants, Rory McGrath)

Parodies and artistic portrayals

Attenborough's accent and hushed, excited delivery have been the subject of frequent parodies by comedians, most notably Spike Milligan, Marty Feldman, The Goodies and South Park. Especially apt for spoofing is Attenborough's pronunciation of the word "here" when using it to introduce a sentence, as in, "He-eah, in the rain forest of the Amazon Basin..."
Attenborough is portrayed by Michael Palin in the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where he searches the African jungle for the legendary Walking Tree of Dahomey (Quercus Nicholas Parsonus), sweating excessively and accompanied by native guides wearing saxophones.
In an episode of Are You Being Served?, "Anything You Can Do!", Mrs. Slocombe refers him by name, by mistake, she says Richard Attenborough.
Attenborough also appears as a character in David Ives' play Time Flies, a comedy focusing on a romance between two mayflies.
In the documentary In the Wild: Lemurs with John Cleese, while trekking through the forest in Madagascar, Cleese points as if to have seen an exotic creature and exclaims, "It's David Attenborough!"
On an episode of The Ricky Gervais Show, Karl Pilkington speculates that David Attenborough is likely careful not to kill any insect pests, imitating Attenborough's inevitable recognition that "that's where I make me money."
In the late 1980s, an Australian weekly programme called The Comedy Company featured a segment with "David Rabbitborough" played by Ian McFadyen. He got around in a safari suit touring the Melbourne suburbs in the same format as Attenborough, but his specimens were human beings and garden objects, like gnomes, garden hoses and water caps.
In the 1980s, a TV advertisement for Guinness featured an Attenborough impersonator investigating the odd "species" of humans who prefer bland lager to flavoursome stout.
In a Finnish TV commercial, Attenborough is impersonated, looking at fireflies - until the lights are turned on by a studio employee going to a soft drink vending machine.
Portuguese comedian Herman José played a caricature of Attenborough (David Vaitenborough, roughly translated as David Go-away) in the "Herman Geographycal Society" sketches in his TV Show Herman Enciclopédia (1997).
Another group of TV advertisements produced in 2008, this time for GEICO automobile insurance, has an Attenborough impersonator observing the Geico gecko making his sales pitch in various settings.
Attenborough's voice-over is included in the Japanese band Coaltar of the Deepers' song "Cell".

Views and advocacy

Environmental causes

From the beginning, Attenborough's major series have included some content regarding the impact of human society on the natural world. The last episode of The Living Planet, for example, focuses almost entirely on humans' destruction of the environment and ways that it could be stopped or reversed. Despite this, his programmes have been criticised for not making their environmental message more explicit. Some environmentalists feel that programmes like Attenborough's give a false picture of idyllic wilderness and do not do enough to acknowledge that such areas are increasingly encroached upon by humans.
However, his closing message from State of the Planet was forthright:
The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there's a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I've been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species.
In the last few years, Attenborough has become increasingly outspoken in support of environmental causes. In 2005 and 2006 he backed a BirdLife International project to stop the killing of albatross by longline fishing boats. He gave public support to WWF's campaign to have 220,000 square kilometres of Borneo's rainforest designated a protected area. He also serves as a vice-president of BTCV, Fauna and Flora International, president of Butterfly Conservation and president of Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust. In 2003 he launched an appeal to create a rainforest reserve in Ecuador in memory of Christopher Parsons OBE, the producer of Life on Earth and a personal friend, who had died the previous year. Attenborough also launched ARKive in May 2003, a global project which had been instigated by Christopher Parsons to gather together natural history media into a digital library, an online Noah's Ark. He later became Patron of the World Land Trust, and an active supporter.
Attenborough has repeatedly said that he considers human overpopulation to be the root cause of many environmental problems. Both his series The Life of Mammals and the accompanying book end with a plea for humans to curb population growth so that other species will not be crowded out.
He has recently written and spoken publicly about the fact that he now believes global warming is definitely real, and caused by humans. At the climax of the aforementioned "Climate Chaos" documentaries, the naturalist gives this summing up of his findings:
In the past, we didn't understand the effect of our actions. Unknowingly, we sowed the wind and now, literally, we are reaping the whirlwind. But we no longer have that excuse: now we do recognise the consequences of our behaviour. Now surely, we must act to reform it: individually and collectively; nationally and internationally — or we doom future generations to catastrophe.
In a 2005 interview with BBC Wildlife magazine, Attenborough said he considered George W. Bush to be the era's top "environmental villain". In 2007, he further elaborated on the USA's consumption of energy in relation to its population. When asked if he thought America to be "the villain of the piece", he responded:
I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.

Other causes

In May 2005, Attenborough was appointed as patron of the UK's Blood Pressure Association, which provides information and support to people with hypertension.
Attenborough is also an honorary member of BSES Expeditions, a youth development charity that operates challenging scientific research expeditions to remote wilderness environments.

Religion and creationism

In a December 2005 interview with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio Five Live, Attenborough stated that he considers himself an agnostic. When asked whether his observation of the natural world has given him faith in a creator, he generally responds with some version of this story:
My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'.
He has explained that he feels the evidence all over the planet clearly shows evolution to be the best way to explain the diversity of life, and that "as far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then he chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world."
In a BBC Four interview with Mark Lawson, Attenborough was asked if he at any time had any religious faith. He replied simply, "No."
In 2002, Attenborough joined an effort by leading clerics and scientists to oppose the inclusion of creationism in the curriculum of UK state-funded independent schools which receive private sponsorship, such as the Emmanuel Schools Foundation.

Television work

Writer and presenter (documentary series)

■Zoo Quest (1954-1963)
■The People of Paradise (1960)
■Attenborough and Animals (1963)
■Zambezi (1965)
■Life: East Africa (1967)
■Eastwards with Attenborough (1973)
■Natural Break (1973)
■Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: The Language of Animals (1973)
■Fabulous Animals (1975)
■The Tribal Eye (1975)
■Life on Earth (1979)
■The Living Planet (1984)
■The First Eden (1987)
■Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989)
■The Trials of Life (1990)
■Life in the Freezer (1993)
■The Private Life of Plants (1995)
■The Life of Birds (1998)
■State of the Planet (2000)
■The Life of Mammals (2002)
■Life in the Undergrowth (2005)
■Life in Cold Blood (2008)

Writer and presenter (single documentaries)

■A Blank on the Map (1971)
■The Million Pound Bird Book (1985)
■Heart of a Nomad (1994) (interviewer)
■"Attenborough in Paradise", screened as part of the Natural World series (1996)
■The Origin of Species: An Illustrated Guide (1998)
■The Lost Gods of Easter Island (2000)
■The Song of the Earth (2000)
■"Bowerbirds: The Art of Seduction", screened as part of the Natural World series (2000)
■"The Amber Time Machine", screened as part of the Natural World series (2004)
■Gorillas Revisited (2006)
■"Are We Changing Planet Earth?" and "Can We Save Planet Earth?", part of the BBC's Climate Chaos season (2006)
■"Tom Harrisson: The Barefoot Anthropologist", part of BBC Four's Anthropologists season (2007)
■Climate Change: Britain Under Threat (2007) (as co-presenter)
■"Sharing Planet Earth", part of the BBC's Saving Planet Earth season (2007)
■Attenborough Explores... Our Fragile Planet (2007)

Narrator (documentary series)

■Travellers' Tales (1960)
■Adventure (1961–1963)
■The World About Us (narrator of approximately 20 episodes between 1969 and 1982)
■The Miracle of Bali (1969)
■The Explorers (1975)
■The Discoverers (1976)
■Wildlife on One (1977–2005)
■The Spirit of Asia (1980)
■Natural World (narrator of approximately 25 episodes between 1983 and 2008)
■BBC Wildlife Specials (1995-2008) (also appears on screen to introduce some of the programmes)
■Winners and Losers (1996)
■The Blue Planet (2001)
■Animal Crime Scene (2005)
■Planet Earth (British version) (2006) (American cable television version narrated by Sigourney Weaver)
■The Frozen Planet (2011 — in production)

Narrator (single documentaries)

■The Ark in South Kensington (1981)
■Wildlife 100 (1993)
■Survival Island (1996)
■"The Secret Life of Seahorses", screened as part of the Q.E.D. series (1996)
■"Sharks - The Truth", screened as part of BBC One's Shark Summer season (1999)
■Living with Dinosaurs (2000)
■The Greatest Wildlife Show on Earth (2000)
■Great Natural Wonders of the World (2002)

Producer

■Coelacanth (1952)
■Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (1952-1959)
■Song Hunter (1953)
■The Pattern of Animals (1953)
■The Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1955-58 (1955-1958)
■Japan (1961)
■Destruction of the Indian (1962)
■The Queen's Christmas Message (1986-1991)

Attenborough also acted as producer for many programs in which he had other roles, particularly those produced by the BBC's Travel and Exploration Unit in the 1950s and 1960s. These programs have already been listed where Attenborough had a narrating or presenting role.

Other television and film work

■A Zed & Two Noughts, narrator in film drama (1985)
■State of the Ark, participant in on-screen debate (1994)
■2000 Today, guest, interviewed about the environmental state of the planet and his up coming TV trilogy of the same name (2000)
■Robbie the Reindeer, voice of the museum commentary in episode "Legend of the Lost Tribe" (2002)
■Life on Air, archive footage and interviewee (2002)
■Attenborough the Controller, archive footage and interviewee (2002)
■Attenborough in Conversation with Mark Lawson, interviewee (2002)
■Great Wildlife Moments, introduced (2003)
■The Way We Went Wild, archive footage and interviewee (2004)
■Selfish Green, participant in on-screen debate (2004)
■How Art Made The World, interviewee (2005)
■Time Shift, episode "The Lost Road: Overland to Singapore", on-screen participant (2005)
■Favourite Attenborough Moments, archive footage (2006)
■Suez: A Very British Crisis, interviewee (2006)
■Planet Earth: The Future, interviewee (2006)
■Watching Desmond Morris (2007), on-screen participant
■100 Years of Wildlife Films, archive footage (2007)
■Fossil Detectives, interviewee (2008)

Books

Bibliography

■Zoo Quest to Guyana (Lutterworth Press, 1956)
■Zoo Quest for a Dragon (Lutterworth Press, 1957)
■(book club edition with 85 extra pages, Quest for the Paradise Birds, 1959)
■Zoo Quest in Paraguay (Lutterworth Press, 1959)
■The Zoo Quest Expeditions (Lutterworth Press, abridged compilation of the above three titles with a new introduction, 1980)
■paperback (Penguin Books, 1982)
■Quest in Paradise (1960)
■People of Paradise (Harper & Brothers, 1960)
■Zoo Quest to Madagascar (1961)
■Quest Under Capricorn (1963)
■Fabulous Animals (BBC, 1975) ISBN 0-563-17006-9
■The Tribal Eye (1976)
■Life on Earth (1979)
■Discovering Life on Earth (1981)
■Journeys to the past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the northern territory of Australia (1983) Penguin Books ISBN 0-14-00.64133
■The Living Planet (1984)
■The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man (1987)(Little Brown & Co (T); 1st American ed edition (March 1990))
■The Atlas of the Living World (1989)
■The Trials of Life (Collins, 1990) ISBN 0-00-219912-2
■The Private Life of Plants (BBC Books, 1994) ISBN 0-563-37023-8
■The Life of Birds (BBC Books, 1998) ISBN 0-563-38792-0
■The Life of Mammals (BBC Books, 2002) ISBN 0-563-53423-0
■Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (autobiography; 2002) ISBN 0-563-53461-3
■paperback: ISBN 0-563-48780-1
■Life in the Undergrowth (BBC Books, 2005) ISBN 0-563-52208-9
■Amazing Rare Things - The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery with Susan Owens, Martin Clayton and Rea Alexandratos (The Royal Collection, 2007) Hardback - ISBN 978 1 902163 46 8; Softback - ISBN 978 1 902163 99 4
■Life in Cold Blood (BBC Books, 2007) ISBN 9780563539223

Introductions

Attenborough has written the introduction or foreword for a number of books, including:
■African Jigsaw: A Musical Entertainment, Peter Rose and Anne Conlon (published: 1986, Weinberger)
■Tomorrow Is Too Late, Various (The Macmillan Press, 1990)
■Life in the Freezer: Natural History of the Antarctic, Alastair Fothergill (BBC Books, 1993), ISBN 0-563-36431-9
■Birds of Paradise: Paradisaeidae (Bird Families of the World series) Clifford B. Frith, Bruce M. Beehler, William T. Cooper (Illustrator) (Oxford University Press, 1998) ISBN 0-19-854853-2
■The Blue Planet, Andrew Byatt, Alastair Fothergill, Martha Holmes (BBC Books, 2001) ISBN 0-563-38498-0.
■Light on the Earth (BBC Books, 2005), two decades of winning images from the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, ISBN 0-563-52260-7
■Planet Earth, Alastair Fothergill (BBC Books, 2006), ISBN 0-563-52212-7

Audio recordings

■Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson (available on audiocassette, 1978)
■Yanomamo (musical entertainment, 1983) by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon; on-stage narration and published audio recording
■Ocean World (musical entertainment, 1990) by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon; on-stage narration (including at The Royal Festival Hall), for audio recording and video broadcast (both published)
■Peter and the Wolf for BBC Music Magazine (free CD with the June 2000 issue).

In addition, Attenborough has recorded some of his own works in audiobook form, including Life on Earth, Zoo Quest for a Dragon and his autobiography Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Austin James Stevens……A Renowned Herpetologist….

Austin James Stevens (born 19 May 1950) is a South African-born herpetologist and wildlife photographer best known for hosting a series of snake documentaries. Austin is also the author of 2 books.

Biography
Austin Stevens was born in Pretoria, South Africa,[citation needed] and became interested in snakes at the age of 12. By the time he finished school, his reptile collection included some of the most exotic and venomous species in the world, and was considered one of the most important in South Africa

Early Snake Fascination
Stevens was first interested with snakes at the age of 12. He brought snakes home when he found them.His house was inhabited by many snakes.His parents did not like this but they were proud to tell people of how their son kept snakes. Stevens describes his parents as “conventional”. His mother lost a lung in a car accident as a girl, was often ill, and died when Stevens was in his thirties; his father owned a small typewriter repair business. He traces his adventurous streak back to his grandfather from Bristol, England – also named Austin James Stevens – part founder of the AJS motorbike corporation, but later took the boat to Africa.

South African Army
Austin served in the South African Army during the war in Angola, during which he was called upon to identify and remove snakes from the battlefield or anywhere where they bothered his fellow troops. During this time, he suffered his first bite from a puff adder while removing it from a machine-gun trench. As a result, he found himself in a desperate race against time to save his life that included an approximately 300-kilometer trip through rugged bush and enemy territory and later a 1,600-kilometer flight, which made an emergency landing on the road at the front of a hospital in Namibia. Stevens remained in a coma for the next five days. Doctors worked for more than three months to save his hand from being removed. However he did lose part of his finger to the effects of the venom.

After leaving the Army
Austin got heavily into motorbikes and motorbike gangs and spent years riding around being a self described "loose cannon". He gave up the world of motorbikes in 1974 after a disastrous near fatal accident. What saved him, he says, was being offered a job at the Transvaal Snake Park, near Johannesburg, which rekindled his passion for wildlife. Austin took up the position as curator of reptiles at the Transvaal Snake Park, where he spent the six years undergoing hands-on training to become a fully qualified herpetologist.

Photographer and film maker
After Austin left the Transvaal Snake Park he took up a position as Curator of Herpetology at the Nordharzer Shlangenfarm in Germany, a park which he helped design and bring into operation before later again returning to Africa, where he took up the position as Curator of Reptiles at the Hartebeespoort Dam Snake and Animal Park. In an effort to generate funds and public interest in the plight of African gorillas, Austin set a record by spending 107 days and nights in a cage with 36 of the most venomous and dangerous snakes in Africa. On the 96th day, he was bitten by a cobra, but to many people's amazement he refused to leave the cage and was instead treated in the cage. Although he was very sick at that time, Austin completed the 107 days and beat the existing Guinness World Record (documented in the Guinness Book of Animal Records). This record has never been broken. From this experience, he authored a book entitled Snakes in my Bed.
Thereafter, Austin relocated to Namibia where he became involved in wildlife photography and film making.
Nowadays Austin's career in herpetology includes presenting a series of TV programmes about reptiles and other wild animals. The main program Austin Stevens: Snakemaster is also known as Austin Stevens: Most Dangerous on Animal Planet, and Austin Stevens Adventures broadcast on five in the United Kingdom. His latest book The Last Snake Man has been published in the UK by Noir Publishing.
Some of the cameras he uses while photographing wildlife include the Samsung GX-10, Canon EOS 50E and the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT.

Personal life
Stevens lives in Swakopmund, Namibia, sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the desolate vastness of the Namib Desert.Stevens stays fit and sharp by practising martial arts, in particular, nunchaku. He claims it keeps his reflexes heightened when working with venomous snakes.

In December of 2007, Stevens married Amy Wilcher, a young photo model and python keeper from Australia.

He has a passion for cars, specially the Mazda RX series. Stevens’s latest acquisition is a 2.6 litre Mazda pickup truck, adapted for bush travel.

Works
Some of his works:

* Dragons Of the Namib, a documentary about the life of the Namaqua Chameleon. Listed as of the Producers and Director of Photography.
* Africa's Deadliest Dozen, a documentary about the venomous snakes of Africa. Listed as Cinematographer.
Also, his photos are shown in these sites:
* Jeff Corwin's Carnival of Creatures, where a picture of a common krait was shown.
* Animals Animals/Earth Scenes, where he has submitted images of not just snakes, but dozens of other animals such as birds and lizards(search for "Austin Stevens").
* He is a media donor on ARKive and his photos used in the site are shown here.

Books:
* Snakes In My Bed (Penguin 1992)
* The Last Snake Man (Noir Publishing 2007) ISBN-13: 978-0953656462

DVDS:
* Snake Bite - In Search Of The King Cobra (Go Entertain 2005)
* Deadliest Snakes (Green Umbrella 2007)
* Austin Stevens: Snakemaster (series)