Steve Backshall

“Many of the animals that are traditionally seen as vermin are my life's fascination.”

“I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I will write on long journeys. I will write sitting in my hammock in the middle of the rainforest. When everybody else is chilling out after filming, I am usually writing!”

“I was a big reader when I was a kid.”

“After more than 40 years of living in the British countryside, any day I see a badger is precious. I knew the location of every sett in the woods around my childhood home, but rarely saw them with my own eyes.”

“My dad will sit out in the last tiny corner of the garden that has sunshine until the millisecond the final vestige has gone! As kids we were encouraged to head out of the front door at daybreak, and not come back till we were tired and hungry.”

“I think if you go out with too hard a conservation message, then you convince people that it's all doom and gloom and nothing can be done.”

“We have a fantastic array of birds of prey here in the U.K.”

“Even my fiction novels are all about outdoor adventure, and have plenty of information to encourage the reader to get interested in adventure and conservation.”

“Britain has some of the finest climbing on the planet, with a sense of wilderness that rivals anywhere else on earth. You can be on a rock face watching crashing waves and feeling a million miles away but because we're a small isle, you're never really that remote; there's always a village nearby.”

“Well, there are without doubt species of jellyfish around the world that are potentially lethal to human beings, some of which shut beaches for entire seasons. The box jellyfish of Australasia is officially the world's most venomous creature, and has killed swimmers in the past.”

“The number one piece of advice that you would ever get with working with any large predator is don't run. If you stand confident up in its face it'll probably just wander away, but if you turn and run it triggers what's known as the predatory impulse.”

“Most of my job is out in the wild, miles away from the public and it's nice to see people and hear what they like and don't like about the shows. It's really helpful.”

“More than anything there is the sense of scale: you can fly for hours and hours of Alaska and you look down and all you'll see is forests, lakes and snow-capped mountains, with no sign whatsoever of human beings.”

“I've been doing expeditions for a living for more than 20 years and know all about what you have to go through psychologically to separate yourself from the modern world.”

“If you ask most wildlife film-makers or biologists what the greatest wildlife spectacle on Earth is, they'll say wildebeest migration or the Great Barrier Reef - but to me it's in Alaska is the summer.”

“People are used to seeing natural history programmes that have been filmed over many years which are concentrated, focused visions of natural history.”

“People that love dogs have an emotional connection with them and I just think they are the most loving and fun pets you can have.”

“When kids ask questions there is a painful honesty at times and they will ask things that throw me.”

“I love what I do for a living and even if I wasn't getting paid for it I would still pursue an active, outdoors lifestyle, researching animals and looking after them.”

“I honestly expected me learning Welsh to be met with a certain amount of cynicism, even outright hostility from some. But that hasn't happened.”