After a chilly day spent wandering through the Chiltern Hills, I stopped at the corner of a field, pausing for a moment to take in the view. Suddenly, a stag burst through the hedgerow to my right. Then – after a split-second pause – twenty wild roe deer followed him, one after another. They dashed across the field at an astonishing speed before disappearing out of sight. Our encounter lasted only a few seconds, but it was a potent reminder that, despite our attempts to tame our land, we are surrounded by wildness each day.

After more than 50 years at the BBC, Sir David Attenborough is currently broadcasting his last major series, Life in Cold Blood. He has spent his life urging people, in his characteristically hushed tones, to be attentive to the natural world, to look vigilantly and be surprised by the life that surrounds them. We have much to be grateful for in his work.

Attenborough’s documentaries are often years in the making. Requiring concentrated care and patience, sometimes in extreme conditions, they are sacrificial labours of love. When we are properly attentive to nature we realise that we are not the sole inhabitants of this earth. Rather, we share it, existing as we do in close connection with our environment. By one definition, culture is the accumulated collection of stories we tell each other about ourselves; but an encounter with the wildness of nature reminds us that not all the earth’s stories are human.

The poet Gary Snyder observed: ‘Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world … Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains … a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.’

Perhaps as well as becoming sophisticated readers of our culture we need also to become seasoned readers of the natural world around us, responding to Jesus’ invitation to ‘consider how the lilies grow’ (Luke 12:27). In an age of increasingly apocalyptic environmental rhetoric, we need to heed the voices that call us to be enjoyers of this earth, that invite us to read the Bible as, in Wendell Berry’s words, ‘an outdoor book … a book open to the sky.’