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Zoologist and presenter Lucy Cooke reveals which animals she'll be chatting to in Talk to the Animals and who her favourite creature conversationalist is...

Hi Lucy, how did the idea for Talk to the Animals come about?

Ever since I was a kid I’ve longed to be a real-life Dr Doolittle and talk to animals. I think it is something we’d all love to be able to do. Who wouldn’t want to quiz their cat about what it did last night or ask their dog what makes them so happy? Communication is the key to getting inside animals’ heads and unlocking the secrets of their lives.

In recent years there have been huge scientific advances in cracking the animal code. The idea with this series was for me to travel to the far corners of the planet to join experts in the field and take part in key research experiments and demos that reveal what animals are really saying to each other. It was an absolute dream job.

Tell us about some of the animals you’ll be meeting in the series…

I roared, croaked, squeaked and bellowed my way across three continents to talk with creatures great and small; from flirting with fireflies to saying hello in hippo.

I was introduced to hidden worlds filled with languages I never knew existed: I met the James Bond of the bat world - a sonic spy that eavesdrops on frogs; I was serenaded by a jumping spider’s seismic love song and met a clever squirrel that’s evolved a secret infra-red language to communicate specifically with its arch enemy - the rattlesnake.

I was blown away by how sophisticated animal speak is, I discovered that dolphins have names, horses know who their friends are and I even met a bird that speaks meerkat.

And then there were the chimpanzees with a language so similar to ours it gave me goose bumps to watch. My translator of intimate wild chimp chatter was the scientist behind the world’s first chimp dictionary and the tenacious persistence of all the scientists I met continually amazed me. Animals do not give up their secrets easily.

You have a Masters degree in Zoology – did you have any idea as a student that we’d be able to communicate with so many animals today?

I was lucky to be taught by Richard Dawkins whose own tutor was the late, great Niko Tinbergen - one of the big names in animal communication science. We learnt about Tinbergen’s breakthrough work on seagull signals, but I had no idea that animal communication would prove to be so complex.

What was your favourite animal featured in the series?

I had so many favourites it is hard to choose, but hippos have a special place in my heart. They are such grumpy misfits - big freaks whose roar sounds like the chuckle of an evil Father Christmas.

Bill Barklow has devoted 20 years of his life to figuring out how hippos communicate. Many of the scientists I met came up with ingenious ways of working out what animals are saying. Bill is like biology’s Inspector Gadget; he’s fashioned his own homespun kit so that he can listen in on the hippos. He uses an underwater microphone attached to a long stick with wire wrapped around an old hamster run which records the sounds hippos make under water. The water is coffee coloured and visibility is very poor so baby hippos make what sound like croaks, it means their mums know where they are and that they’re safe – it’s like a baby monitoring system.

...And what was the cutest?

Probably the mongooses, they are very chatty. They chirrup the whole time, constantly updating each other on what they’re up to; it’s like social networking mongoose-style. They were very charismatic and incredibly endearing - the whole crew fell in love.

Were any discoveries you were particularly surprised by?

Again so many - every story is surprising in its own way. Take the mongooses; I was surprised that their simple squeaks contain so much meaning. Their contact calls are less than a second long, but they indicate the identity of an individual and what it is doing. Understanding that there’s such complexity in seemingly simple sounds make you look at all animals in a different light.

If there was any animal in the world you could talk to, what would it be and why?

I’d love to talk to a whale; to find out whether they get lonely and what they are singing about.

You’re well known for your love of sloths and the Sloth Appreciation Society, but are sloths too sleepy to engage in conversation?

Sloths are not social animals. They live solitary lives high up in the canopy and have little use for communication other than for finding a mate. Female three fingered sloths scream - a very high pitched squeal that travels a long way through the forest. Scientists also think they leave scent messages for potential mates and this explains their bizarre bathroom behaviour. They descend from trees to do their business at the base of the tree - an exercise that is both dangerous and costly in terms of energy. But perhaps they are also leaving love messages which would explain the motivation.

Baby sloths, when separated from their mother; make a high pitched squeak that is perhaps the cutest noise on the planet. It makes you want to protect them, which is of course what it is meant to do to mother sloths. This suggests to me that perhaps there are universal cute noises that encourage nurturing feelings in the same way that we go all gooey when we see cute baby animal faces.