Living Planet: A new, fully updated edition of David Attenborough’s seminal portrait of life on Earth

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Further south, the warmer climate sees the pine trees give way to broad-leaved species, such as the oak and beech. The chain is more continuous than most maps show, for other volcanoes are erupting below the surface of the sea. Often it is an ugly tide of hot basalt boulders that advances over the land in a creeping unstoppable flood.

There are few trees because of little water and during the dry season, caiman and turtles vie for space in such pools as there are. I watched the first episode the same day I finished this and it actually included one or two examples of things that I’d read in this book, which was awesome, especially as one of them was footage of turtles laying eggs on a beach in Costa Rica. How this came about was, until the middle of the 20th century, the subject of great controversy among geologists and geographers. So there are small, brilliantly coloured birds feeding from large blossoms on the slopes of the Andes which look very like the sunbirds of the Himalayas, but which belong to a quite different family of birds, and the heavy-fleeced sure-footed beast of burden that the Andean people use is the llama, a kind of camel, and not a kind of cow like the Himalayan yak.Indeed, you may walk all day without seeing any living creature, except for a flight of choughs or ravens and, high above, patrolling the hillsides, griffon vultures. However, before the latter, Attenborough wrote and presented two shorter series: The First Eden (1987), about man's relationship with the natural habitats of the Mediterranean, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989), concerning the discovery of fossils. Its woolly coat is so thick and warm that it has to shed much of it during the summer months to prevent over-heating, and it can live permanently at higher altitudes than any other large mammal except human beings.

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). It begins to form lakes, and where the water flows into basins created by geological faults, they can be immense. Only the very smallest plants and animals can defy gravity, but some seeds, such as those of the sycamore, cheat this by simulating the movement of a helicopter. In years when the vole population is high, the numbers of their main predator, the owls, increase correspondingly and spread out. In this new edition, the author, with the help of zoologist Matthew Cobb, has added all the most up-to-date discoveries of ecology and biology, as well as a full-colour 64-page photography section.In places, erosion is causing the land to retreat, while in others – such as the tropics – the expansion of mangroves causes it to advance. The difficulties are those that are encountered by the cameramen, directors and recordists, who actually have to get an animal doing something which perhaps nobody's ever even seen before. Life on Earth [with] The Living Planet [with] The Trials of Life [with] The Private Life of Plants [with] The Life of Birds [with] The Life of Mammals [with] Life in the Undergrowth [with] Life in Cold Blood. The birds had to be reared by hand from birth so that they would respond to the voice of their 'mother', and this eventually enabled them to be photographed as they flew alongside a moving open-top car.