Sir David Attenborough, no place like home

In six weeks, Sir David Attenborough will turn a hundred. The British presenter and naturalist has transformed the way we look at the planet through his documentaries. He has dedicated more than seventy years to television, from the BBC, travelling around the world to teach us about wildlife and make us aware of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. To celebrate his birthday, however, Sir David has stayed home to discover the fauna of the city of London for us. Wild London (Londres salvaje) you will find it on Movistar+. At Hammersmith station, you will see how pigeons have learned to travel by tube to find food on the next platform, and you will contemplate the growth and first flights of a peregrine falcon chick in front of Charing Cross Hospital. You will also see a young doe learning to walk among the trees of Harold Hill and the risks faced by a pair of toads crossing the road in Ealing.London is the city with the most gardens per square kilometre. It has four million private gardens that have fragmented the territory. But the desire to maintain native fauna has created an extraordinary circuit for hedgehogs to maintain their social life. Sir David Attenborough patiently awaits the arrival of a pair of foxes just before sunset. The charm of Wild London is that, despite being an urban landscape, the narrative codes of wildlife documentaries in the most distant and remote places on the planet are maintained. The fight between coots on a lake in a London park will have the epic of the confrontations we have seen on other occasions in the African savannah. The struggle for territory does not change. A dragonfly nymph mercilessly devours a tadpole in the depths of a pond in the South Kensington Natural History Museum. The mating of two slugs near Buckingham Palace is of extraordinary visual poetry. As with all BBC nature documentaries, there is a clear aesthetic desire to explain urban wildlife. And however annoying the tens of thousands of London parakeets may be, their flight over a cemetery and their collective rest on a tree are of extraordinary beauty.Sir David also explains how the effects of pollution and the heat from the asphalt will have consequences for the insects that live alongside pedestrians. Near a pub, with humans having a beer, bees are also victims of the effects of alcohol in a very curious way. If you ever take a walk along Regent's Canal, it will be inevitable that you think of the snakes that inhabit the undergrowth. Wild London is a very different tour of the city, which surely makes it seem friendlier than it is. But in such a turbulent era when the world is so violent and discouraging, Attenborough's documentaries serve to regain an attentive and humble look at life.