Animal attraction

CHARLOTTE Uhlenbroek is getting used to labels. Plenty have been have hung on her by newspapers: "The barefoot beauty", "The Charlie Dimmock of wildlife," "An eco-friendly Lara Croft." But there is one comparison Uhlenbroek clearly takes a little more seriously - "the next David Attenborough".

"I understand why people do it because they want to hang people on a peg. Who is this woman? Oh, she's another Charlie Dimmock or the next David Attenborough," she says. "So I don't take it terribly seriously, though I do always feel slightly apprehensive with the David Attenborough comparison because it's an awful lot to live up to!"

Attenborough has always been an inspiration to Uhlenbroek - but in taking over from him the mantle of nation's favourite wildlife presenter, she has one big advantage.

OK, two. One is her sex appeal, which even the most enthusiastic of fans would never have claimed was one of Attenborough's strong points. The other is technology.

Her latest series, Talking With Animals, uses state-of-the-art technology to allow Charlotte to 'eavesdrop' on animal conversations that until recently most people weren't even aware were going on. The song of whales, the long-distance 'talk' of elephants - and the courtship of stink bugs.

Viewers of the series will have seen how the tiny creatures call to each-other in the mating season by 'singing' - sending tiny vibrations through the leaves, stems and even root systems of the vine plants where they live. The male follows the female's song, occasionally replying himself, until they meet up for a romantic encounter.

Using hi-tech equipment to pick up and broadcast the tiny vibrations, Charlotte was able to 'eavesdrop' on the stink bugs' courtship. It left her with a changed perspective.

We might not be aware of it, she says, but all around us, in our gardens, fields and hedgerows, there is a 'parallel universe' which is trembling with a multitude of minute conversations - some of them, certainly, carried out using sound, but others using everything from smell to light and even electricity.

"It does make you think, walking through the fields, if you brush past a branch are you completely disrupting some message that is being sent by some small bug," she says with a laugh. "All these places are just trembling with different messages. Which is fantastic."

They may take a multitude of different forms, but most of those conversations are about the same things - food, friendship, rivalries, dominance. And sex.

"Sex is the most fundamental subject right across the board," says Charlotte. "Even the smallest single-cell organism has signals to allow them to reproduce."

We're sitting in the riverside lounge of the Moat House Hotel in York over a cup of tea. She's in town to give a talk at Borders to promote both her series and the book that goes with it.

She's beautiful, intelligent, animated - arms semaphoring wildly to punctuate her conversation - but oddly detached. It's hard to get a sense of who she is, even when she's describing her childhood in Nepal. At times she might be talking from a script. Ask her about her new series and the 35-year-old zoologist is expansive and eager, but her phrases, while vivid, have a slightly careworn feel as though she's repeated them too often.

"In an attempt to find out what animals are saying to each other we cover everything from stink bugs to hump-backed whales," she says. "I go swimming with giant cuttlefish, howl with wolves and am bitten by vicious fire ants. I also discover the strange and unexpected ways in which they send messages."

She is modest when it comes to describing how she ended up as a TV presenter. "I just got very, very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time," she says.

Hardly. With her PhD in animal behaviour, natural good looks and easy way with a camera, she's a natural. If anything, it's a surprise she wasn't snapped up sooner.

The third daughter of an English mother and Dutch United Nations official father, Uhlenbroek spent much of her childhood in Nepal. It was there, wandering the streets of Kathmandu picking up strays, that she first discovered her love of animals.

"When I was young I just wanted to hang out with animals," she says. "And I loved wild places, exploring and adventure."

Eventually the barefoot tearaway was sent to boarding school in England for a proper education. But she soon returned to her first love - animals. After taking a degree in zoology and psychology at the University of Bristol, she found herself "hanging out" with animals again, this time with wild chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Forest.

Her work with the chimps helped gain her a PhD in animal communication and an invitation to take part in a couple of BBC wildlife documentaries - the 'Chimp Diaries'.

The TV crew had come to Africa to film her for part of a series about scientists working in the field. She took them round the forest to see her chimps. "The producer said 'these chimps are really like a soap opera,'" she says. Before she knew it, she was being asked to present her own series.

She insists she found the cross-over from academia to television easy.

"It happened unexpectedly but so easily because they just asked me to talk about the chimps I was studying and hanging out with," she says. "I would just turn to the camera and introduce what was going on as if I were talking to a friend."

It's when talking about her beloved chimps that she really comes to life. She spent four years in the Gombe Forest; two years in getting a new group of wild chimps used to human company so that they could be observed, and two years studying chimp communication.

Becoming accepted by a group of chimps, she says, requires a great deal of patience; often simply sitting around at the base of trees until your presence becomes familiar. Gradually, you could progress to offering them bits of banana to eat. "You break pieces off, and one or two of the more co-operative chimps would come down."

Chimps, Charlotte says, are complex, intelligent creatures, with a sophisticated social system. Being accepted by them "is rather like moving into a new town or village. Somebody will eventually knock on your door and then introduce you to somebody else".

Eventually, she was accepted almost as part of the scenery. She accompanied groups of male chimps who were patrolling their clan's boundary, and made friends with a male called 'Freud'.

He became quite playful, she says. "I would be making notes, and I would look up and realise that Freud was peering over my shoulder."

She's so animated when talking about her chimps it comes as quite a shock to find how uptight she is when the conversation threatens to touch on anything remotely personal.

We've been chatting about how filming for her new series took her all over the world - North America, Africa, Australia, Europe. It must be disruptive to her personal life, I venture. Doesn't her partner mind her being away all the time?

Suddenly she's stiff, tense, and withdrawn, the elaborate semaphoring gestures stilled. No, he doesn't object. Then: "I don't really like talking about personal things."

There's nowhere to go from there. She's like a snail that's drawn in all its feelers after running into an unpleasant object. I try to get her talking about her next series, Jungles, filming for which will be starting next month.

Then, abruptly, the interview is over, Charlotte's 'minder' reminding me with an intense gaze that I've had quite long enough.

She's great on TV, though.

Talking with Animals is on BBC One on Sundays. The book Talking With Animals by Charlotte Uhlenbroek is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £18.99 and is available now.

Updated: 08:43 Tuesday, July 16, 2002