Chris Packham

Chris Packham is the much loved BBC TV presenter of Springwatch. Well, perhaps not universally loved as his recent campaigning against the issuing of licences to shoot birds has led to death threats and a selection of dead animals being nailed to his garden gate. During the lock-down in the U.K. in the second quarter of 2020, as the country as a whole developed a new found interest in the natural world, he presented the ‘Self-Isolating Bird-Club’ on YouTube with his step-daughter Megan McCubbin, a zoologist in her own right.

Back to Nature is a call to arms to all those people who started to think about the natural world during lockdown, as well as those who were already interested in conservation. A polemic against everything that Chris feels in wrong with the natural world in the U.K., with poor management of National Parks, industrialisation of farming, persecution of raptors, and managed grouse moors all very high up the list. And it’s also an argument for what we should be doing instead: from large scale rewilding to managing our small garden plots for wildlife. While it does touch on the wider picture, the focus is very much on conservation in the U.K. and I’m not sure it would appeal to a wider audience. There is a fair amount of detail at times (and consequently at times it can get a little dry), but Chris’s enthusiasm wins through. While Chris Packham has provided the main body of the work, Megan McCubbin has written a number of interesting vignettes on aspects of the natural world, to remind the reader of what it is that they should be saving.

This is one of those books that has left me with a very large list of ‘things I ought to be doing’ from joining the R.S.P.B., to writing to my M.P. about a large number of topics, to having another go at persuading Mr SandDune to cut a hole in the garden gate for any passing hedgehogs. I’ll be referring back to a number of the sections to follow up on some of the topics in more detail.

I would also recommend Chris Packam’s memoir Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (which I read a few years ago) about growing up as a nature obsessed child with undiagnosed Aspergers.… (mais)

An illuminating and honestly honest autobiography of growing up different.
I’m a couple of years younger than Chris Packham, so I recognised a lot of the references to late sixties and early seventies culture; the sweets, toys and TV programmes. But his intense interest in biology and the natural world was very different from my own, even though I was bookish.
This interest is illustrated by a patchwork of word portraits, which bob back and forth through Packham’s life, to allow you to glimpse how he lived. Fragments of his experience, which you can put together to piece together his motivations.
As he puts it: “It’s actually just about never actually achieving anything. It’s all about the trying, the striving, the grinding on towards getting a little bit better. In truth I suppose it’s not really about winning at all, it’s about not giving up”… (mais)