By Tom Wark

The connection between milking 100 snakes for their venom in one go and the much-loved British naturalist Sir David Attenborough might not seem obvious.

But a super-charged snake spectacular is just one of the quintessentially Australian ways the country plans to celebrate Sir David’s 100th birthday on Friday.

Becoming a centenarian is the latest impressive achievement of the naturalist, broadcaster and documentarian universally admired by those both inside and outside the scientific world.

Encouraging everyone to care for and conserve our natural world will define Sir David’s legacy, Ecological Society of Australia president Dieter Hochuli says.

“He told us stories about these animals and plants and what they were doing while they were doing it,” Professor Hochuli told AAP.

“That little bit of knowledge we all got from the different bits just all of a sudden gave us a really strong connection with them, compared to if you just saw a picture or a comment on something being in decline.”

While he hasn’t been lucky enough to meet Sir David in person, Prof Hochuli vividly remembers watching one of his seminal documentaries, Life on Earth, as a teenager in the late 1970s.

“I’d always liked nature and been interested in animals and plants …  but it was just a really different way of looking at nature,” he said.

“The real focus wasn’t just on what was living there, but why it was doing it and how it was doing it.”

Sir David has had a long connection to Australia throughout his seven-decade career, showcasing our unique flora and fauna since the 1950s.

The Great Barrier Reef and the vast inland deserts are among some of the great natural treasures the pioneering filmmaker has explored.

Events are planned around the country to mark his major milestone, including at the Australian Reptile Park on the NSW Central Coast.

Park manager Billy Collett will milk the venom of 100 snakes, one for every year of Sir David’s life, on Sunday to show the importance of interacting constructively with the natural world.

Milking the venom of the country’s most dangerous snakes allows clinicians to create life-saving antivenom for those unfortunate enough to be bitten, and Mr Collett shows the hair-raising feats weekly in his online series Venom Diaries.

The Australian Museum, where Sir David is a lifetime patron, will host a celebration for the British naturalist, with grateful well-wishers invited to write letters of thanks to be sent to the master storyteller.