LIFE STORY: Many Lives, One Epic Journey

Following the gripping BBC One natural history series, Life Story explains the amazing lengths to which animals will go to secure their future. Packed with dramatic pictures and stills from the programme and with a foreword by David Attenborough, it is written by the Executive Producer and the Series Producer, and best of all are the high quality close-up colour photographs, many full page, in this outsize hardback showcasing the miracles and wonders of life on earth. The chapters are organised by the following: First Steps, Growing Up, Home, Power, Courtship and Parenthood. A baby wildebeest spends eight months in its mother's womb. It then slithers out of her vent on to the open savannah and staggers to its feet. Within an hour it has to be able to walk well enough to follow her as she waders away, searching for grazing. By contrast a kangaroo is born at a mere 30 days or so, a tiny, naked, worm-like creature with stump-like forelegs and no sign whatever of rear ones. It takes refuge in its mother's skinny pouch for another ten months. The book surveys some of the most fascinating ways of dealing with the trials of life - seduction and a male satin bower bird spending years learning the skills to create a bower impressive enough for his female to consider mating with him; a male Japanese puffer fish whose way of seducing a female is to create an architectural sand construction so extraordinary that until recently no one realised it had been made by a fish. On page 15 we meet an inquisitive young langur investigating its reflection in the camera, its playful curiosity held in check by its mother. Here are transformations like the snake-mimic hawkmoth caterpillar and the false eyes of the spice bush swallow tail caterpillar. An extraordinary aerial photograph at first glance of pink and black dots show groups of flamingos with their chicks nesting in the middle of a lake red from the cyanobacteria that thrive in alkaline conditions. Marabou storks discover the breeding flamingos and are a persistent menace, striding through the colony snapping up as many chicks as possible. Here are baby humpbacks who have to drink their mothers dry, prides of lions, meerkats learning to take the sting from the scorpion, the hard life of the Arctic fox and birds and fish and sharks and eagles and grouse and chimps and the fabulous colours of the male greater bird of paradise in the final stages of his courtship display. Finally the programme makers include pictures of themselves at work achieving these astonishing images. 288pp, colour photos, 25 x 26.7cm.
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