Steve Backshall

Quotes by Steve Backshall

• I was lucky enough to be surrounded by all sorts of animals from a very young age. My sister Jo was much more into the domestic animals - horses and things. I was absolutely fixated on the blackbirds, and the grass snakes in the manure heap and everything that surrounded us.

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• If there remain places on the planet that are un-known, unspoilt corners, a laboratory for evolution still exists - a snapshot of what the rainforests, polar deserts and high mountains were once like, before man.

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• Climbing is never going to be 100% safe, but the climbing I do with work is done under much stricter guidelines than the climbing I do in my spare time.

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• People do get hurt by jellyfish, as they do by sharks and spiders, and I have great sympathy for the anguish and pain these effects may cause, but if you pay any attention to the statistics it is clear that nature is not out to get us.

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• I think most schoolboys are most excited by scorpions, spiders and snakes, and I never really grew up. I've always had the same fascinations. I think that we as human beings are the most fascinated by those creatures that we consider dangerous.

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• Being charged by a furious matriarch elephant certainly had hearts in mouths, as did the snarling spitting Bengal tiger that gave us a fright in India.

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• I have deliberately stung myself with a small section of box jelly tentacle, and it felt like being burned by a steam iron. Larger stings can lead to cardiac arrest, and mind-blowing pain.

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• I'm actually getting to the stage where places I travelled to for the first time in the early 1990s are now unrecognisable. I go to coral reefs that I went to ten years ago when they were swarming with fish and sharks, and now they are barren deserts.

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• I read most often when I am on the road, travelling on my journeys. In cars, on planes, trains... I'm very lucky that I don't get car sick when I am reading and I can spend really long journeys immersed in a book!

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• 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.

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• The flesh-eating cockroaches and venomous centipedes in the Gomantong cave in Borneo were pretty unsavoury. They turn the floor of the cave, which is itself the world's largest pile of bird and bat poo, into a seething mass of invertebrate horror!

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• 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.

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• If I could be any animal I'd probably be a wandering albatross, the bird with the largest wing span. Being able to cover huge distances of sea every single day would be wonderful!

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• I come from an area of southern England that is utterly homogenous. All the history near me is about royalty and fealty, things which leave me cold. I lack roots, and have great warmth for places that have them.

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• I grew up on a small holding, it was a great way to grow up and incredibly idyllic. We had a donkey and Barney the guard dog, geese, a duckling that followed my mum around and used to sit in the washing up bowl.

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• 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.

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• And there are very few wild animals that can't run down a human being; the big predators would run down Usain Bolt without even thinking about it. So your only chance is to stand your ground!

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• 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.

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• Living my life in conservation, I see far greater tragedies and crimes against wildlife than the loss of a few thousand badgers. The real reason so many people are so unsettled by the cull is its sinister reflection on the democratic process, on our government's attitude to conservation and to science.

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