People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.

The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

Natural history is not about producing fables.