I stepped from the half-light of the rainforest into the inky blackness of a cave: the flickering and rattling of cave swiftlets at the cave mouth; the spectral chittering of bats, high and invisible in the roof, and above all, the lung-scratching ammoniacal stench. In the dim light near the front I could just make out the scurrying of a legion of cockroaches. And I rejoiced.

Of course I rejoiced, because this was a deeply wild and deeply special place. But for once, I rejoiced not in the wildness of the place, but in the wildness of the man who had first shown it to me 20 years before. I recognised the place at once, even though I hadn’t been there before.

I remembered this cave in Borneo because of the joy of a man standing up to his ankles in bat shit. “AND ... even HERE ... there is LIFE!” Oh, this was echt Attenborough, this was Attenborough unbound. For Sir David A it was, all those years ago, telling us about the ecology of the most monumental pile of shit in the entirety of the known world. Or some such dimension.

The cave is ancient, and the swiftlets and the bats have inhabited it for millennia. Lord knows how far away the original floor is: you walk on a springy carpet of guano, inhaling it as you go. And across the floor of the cave there are cockroaches nibbling the offerings that fall from the ceiling, extracting the last scintilla of nourishment from it. Number crunchers put this at 100 roaches per square metre.

Naturally, there are creatures that eat the cockroaches; black sexton beetles eat their bodies when they die. Where the great carpet meets the walls of the cave, there are spiders’ webs set to catch cockroaches.

Here is a food chain, simple and brutal and disgusting. The relish with which Attenborough discussed it was glorious. It was clear, abundantly, gloriously, hilariously clear that life in all its endless forms most beautiful was enough to leave any sane person breathless with wonder. Once again, Attenborough had taught me a lesson that I would never forget.

Wild man of Borneo

It’s a while since I was last in those caves, but I have been reading about them. Attenborough is just completing a series of 15-minute talks on Radio 4, and they have just been published in a book called Life Stories. In these pages, Attenborough — more discursive than he can be on television, and more anecdotal — takes us back to these caves.

He climbed the mountain of droppings with his trousers wisely tucked into his socks, gagging on the fumes as he reached the top. He turned and addressed the camera: “Many people might be afraid that bats would get tangled up in their hair. But bats have an amazing navigational system based on echo location and there is no chance whatever of them doing that.”

Attenborough then recalled: “I managed to raise a wan smile. Hugh turned off the battery light. And a bat hit me four-square in the face.”

This is a great read, with the master in relaxed end-of-term form: forever fascinating because forever fascinated. The moral is that the more we can enlarge our scope for wonder, the more we enrich our lives.

There are aspects of that cave that make you wince with disgust, that made your flesh creep with bemused horror. But this is the wild world and the wild world can take a heap of shit and turn it into the Garden of Eden. This is a vital lesson to learn, and I don’t think I’d have managed it by myself.

Colour-coded

I love that strange feeling of holding the key in your hands, of knowing the code, of being able to crack the enigma. When you see almost nothing: but understand a great deal. So let me tell you about two white bums, both glimpsed from the back of a horse.

The first, along a narrow lane: a bird that flew from one chunk of hedge and vanished into another farther up, that serial mode of escape that saves energy and keeps potential danger at wing’s length. Not many other clues, other than a chunkiness and my knowing the place and who lived there.

A white bum, and I knew that I was looking at one of the prettiest and brightest birds you would wish to see: a bullfinch, a bird that likes to keep its bright colours hidden. A flash of white was all I was given, but, as a low-level code-cracker, I knew about the colours and the beauty.

The other white bum was a clue to a still gaudier bird: big, with serrated wing tips, vanishing in that single bum-flash. But I knew that the bird was actually bright pink with flashes of iridescent blue: a jay, sometimes called Britain’s bird of paradise. Just knowing one or two small secrets of the code and two flashes of a white bum became revelations of the most extravagant colour. Only the wild world can do that.

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