Wild about the forest

Chris Packham’s Marchwood home is not what you might expect from the binocular-toting wildlife expert.

The white walls are hung with Andy Warhol-style prints and Sex Pistols album covers (a nod to Chris’s punk days) while Mondrian inspired cabinets share the living room with a mammoth stereo system.

It’s definitely a bachelor pad, shared with Chris’s beloved poodles Itchy and Scratchy, who scamper around after him adoringly.

“I’ve been living on my own for a few years and I’m set in my ways now,” says Chris, who turns 48 this month. “I like my own space, I always have done. I was never a particularly sociable bloke.”

He is, he tells me, between homes, which partly accounts for the minimalist decor.

Most of his belongings are either at his home in France or boxed up ready to take to his new place, half a mile away in the heart of the New Forest.

Despite owning a property across the Channel (bought cheaply after splitting from his partner) cutting ties with Hampshire completely would be unimaginable for Chris, who grew up in Southampton.

“I’m a home-is-where-the heart-is guy,”

he says. “My interest in wildlife was formed here even before I could speak.

I was crawling around the garden picking things up. By the time I got to three or four I was torturing things in matchboxes and jam jars and shoe boxes.”

Understanding parents allowed a young Chris to keep a menagerie that included slow-worms, lizards and even foxes, badgers and owls. “One of the significant differences between then and now was that children were allowed to run out and experience things firsthand.

“We have a great tradition in this country of rearing fine amateur naturalists but it’s all going to go because of parent’s paranoia,” he says, warming to his subject.

“We used to go out and build camps and have our own little social hierarchy.

“Now kids just go home and communicate with their mates via computer. I don’t like the way the media presents every tenth person as a threat to children. For us to imprison generations of our youth on that premise is very sad.”

There was no such cosseting for a young Chris who found “everything a budding naturalist needed to stimulate their passion”

on his after-school roamings (to the irritation of local landowners).

His favourite “playground” was the Lower Itchen Fisheries – now the Itchen Valley Country Park – where he spent hours rambling and flying his birds of prey.

“I tend not to look back,” he says philosophically. “I don’t look at old photos, I don’t read old diary entries and I don’t go back to places I’ve left. I’m always looking forward. I don’t like nostalgia.”

Yet a walk through the New Forest must spark a great many fond memories for a man who cut his naturalist teeth there.

“I’ve known the New Forest all of my life and studied my badgers here for five years.

I won’t say I know every nook and cranny but I do have my favourite spots. Not only for wildlife reasons but places I took my first car and (I won’t say my first kiss!) but significant emotional moments of gain and loss over the years.

“There are even trees that I know. I go back there to see them every now and then and they’ll be there long after I’ve finished checking on them.”

He becomes serious: “There is a tremendous amount of pressure on the Forest and it needs managing if we’re going to preserve it. It has lots of management bodies but it needs one to unify them and sort their various priorities out. That’s going to be a challenge.”

I’m getting the feeling that all conversational routes might lead to politics.

“My vocational ambition is to engage people with the wildlife they share their community with, whether it’s a garden, a school ground or a nature reserve,”

he enthuses. “That’s the most important wildlife because they can enjoy it first hand and they’re best placed to protect it.

“It’s about empowering yourself to make a difference. I have a deeply rooted and widespread mistrust of our politicians.

“We can’t wait for these (he struggles not to swear) people in Westminster.

“They’re not going to do it. So I do it myself and I’ll do what I can to stimulate other people – the wildlife charities or people in their back gardens.”

He sighs. “Don’t get me on to politics!”

Chris’s latest venture – taking over from his “friend and mentor” Bill Oddie as co-presenter of Springwatch – is a chance to champion British wildlife to a mass audience.

“It’s all about engaging people with little dramas – heartbreaking or happy ending – which occur all over the country behind bushes and under sheds. It’s an exciting time to join because there’s going to be even more audience participation online and through events, which is good for me because it kills two birds with one stone.”

He pauses and chuckles sheepishly at his unfortunate choice of words.

With more than 20 year’s experience in the business (The Really Wild Show was first broadcast in 1985) Chris was perhaps the most logical choice to take over from Bill.

“He’s always been someone I have a lot of respect for. He’s a brilliant birder and he’s a great bloke. It does feel a bit weird but we both have the same sort of passion for the subject and our interest comes from that.

I know a lot of viewers will miss him but I hope to bring something new. I’m younger than he is and come from a different background and time. Bill’s a hippy and I’m a punk rocker!”

Conversations with Chris are intense.

He expresses his opinions with passion whether he’s talking about his all-time favourite location (Antarctica) his hobbies (photography) or pet hates (don’t mention the abundance of domestic cats in the UK).

“Springwatch doesn’t focus on the rarities,” he continues. “It looks at the wildlife in people’s own communities.”

Appropriately, Chris’s career may have taken him around the globe but he remains a champion of the nature in his own backyard.

“I prefer the girl next door when it comes to wildlife. I’d rather spend my time thinking about things I can actually see than something I can’t access because it’s a long way away.”

It’s a philosophy he also applies to his personal life.

“It sounds awful but all my girlfriends have been from my own community.

“My girlfriend at the moment is the only girl I’ve been out with whose house I couldn’t walk to from mine.”

You can take the man out of Hampshire… “I like coming back from France and seeing the place I love without rose-tinted spectacles.

“I will always be a visitor in France but I’m made of Hampshire. This is the landscape I understand and feel comfortable in because I fit in it. I’ve got a history here and understand its history.”

“Hampshire is context, France is exotica.

Hampshire is the girl next door.”