Television has played a wonderfully informative and exciting role in showing the wonders of the natural world around us, especially animals big and small, and birds.
Attenborough is perhaps the brightest star among these teachers, but there are many others. Eamon de Buitlear, for example. Even people who feel themselves to be moderately well informed on the creatures around us can always learn something. But seeing it on the screen and seeing the real thing is another matter. Television, indeed, can become a substitute for reality among the young, making it superfluous to go out into the fields and up the mountains to see for themselves. A friend of old who used to keep a nature diary - does that sound old-fashioned? - recently looked it over and spoke of some of the days that were highlights to him. How many young TV watchers of nature programmes have ever seen, for example, a newt in its normal habitat? It was one of the bright spots of this diary for the year X - well, he's saying nothing. He had been to see, not for the first time, an abandoned millpond, with built-up earth walls. Abandoned from its original purpose, it became overgrown with weeds and a source of great frog-croaking and mating in spring. There they were in hundreds, many riding on the back of another frog. Even at his tender age he knew the joke behind the rhyme: "They were only playing leapfrog", and so on.
When he had his jar full of frogspawn he saw something he never forgot - a long slim, primeval creature, a few inches in length: the colours, the sinuosity, and the ease of swimming! He was dazzed by its beauty as much as he was startled at its newness. Eamon de Buitlear, our great writer of and filmer of the wild, has a bit to say about them in Ireland's Wild Countryside, an essential volume. Often mistaken for lizards because of the reptile-like features, they overwinter on land under stones or in the soil. "They wake in early spring, and migrate to the edges of ponds and lakes, when the male develops a prominent crest along the length of his back and tail. Compared with the dull-coloured female, the male newt in breeding condition takes on a range of bright greens and browns with darker speckles and stripes along his sides. He even has the ability, like certain fish, to change body colour to provide camouflage against a particular habitat background." And that creature made for one young boy an experience that no television screen could replace. Of course, there was no TV then.