Other estuary wading birds, which have developed a multitude of techniques for gathering food from mud flats, include godwits, curlews, dunlins, ringed plovers and avocets.

Walking over the corded, blistered surface, you can see in the cracks that, only a few inches beneath, it is still red hot. David Attenborough is always good for the most pleasant and intense cranial massage, getting the brain going and thinking. However, the index has been compiled to serve as a glossary in which each organism is given not only a page reference but also its scientific name, so a reader who wishes to know precisely what family, genus or species is being referred to can discover by looking it up in the index. Signed by David Attenborough to the special signed edition endpaper, also with the publishers Signed by the author sticker to the front of the dust jacket.

The series comprises: Life on Earth (1979); The Living Planet (1984); The Trials of Life (1990); The Private Life of Plants (1994); The Life of Birds (1998); The Life of Mammals (2002); Life in the Undergrowth (2005); Life in Cold Blood (2007); Life on Earth (revised and expanded edition 2018).

Signed and inscribed by the author to half-title in the year of publication: "To Martine with best wishes David Attenborough Christmas 1984". A new fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, Living Planet . Here and there, gas within the lava has formed an immense bubble, the roof of which is so thin that it can easily collapse beneath your boot with a splintering crash.Unlike other animals, they did not have to depend solely on bodily changes to protect themselves from the cold. The ridge volcanoes, in fact, are creating the ocean floor which is slowly growing away from them, on either side of the ridge. By the time it has settled down and fallen over its last cascade, the water becomes tranquil and rich with nutrients from its banks. All of them lie on one great ridge of volcanic rocks that runs roughly midway between Europe and Africa to the east, and the Americas to the west. Mussels keep their shells closed at low tide to deter attackers but the oystercatcher is adept at dealing with them.

Much of the UK's landscape is man-made: for example, the South Downs were once a forest and the Norfolk Broads are the flooded remains of pits dug 600 years ago. Sixty-six million years ago, the non-bird dinosaurs disappeared in a cataclysm and birds and eventually mammals assumed the dominance of the land which they still hold today.

Their leaves are not broad like those of the rhododendron which catch snow and sometimes break under the weight of it, but are long tough needles which shed the snow and can withstand very low temperatures. At the onset of winter, many animals in these forests hibernate, and in America, Attenborough uncovers the den of a black bear, which can be asleep for six months at a time. It worms and wriggles its way downwards through the giant interlocking buttresses as the mountains on either side of it grow higher and higher. David Attenborough discusses the biomass and life in a variety of eco-systems spanning many of the environments found on Earth (from tropical to polar). The new, fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough's seminal biography of our world, The Living Planet.

Somewhat shy and not always easy to film in his natural habitat, we're lucky here to see the David Attenborough at work on his latest and greatest project, The Living Planet. Its temperatures range from those of the tropics in its lower reaches to that of the poles higher up. Some animals are filter feeders and examples include the manta ray, the basking shark and the largest, the whale shark. Broadcast 16 February 1984, this programme looks at a plant of which there are some 10,000 species and which covers over a quarter of vegetated land: the grasses.Today, their blood contains 30 per cent more corpuscles than that of people living at sea level and is in consequence able to carry more oxygen per litre.