Words matter. These are the best Steve Backshall Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
All my books draw heavily on my own experiences, and these are not just places I have gone to on holiday, they’re locations I know them intimately from lengthy expeditions, most of which have been spent on the hunt for wildlife.
Baffin Island was extraordinary; one of the most terrifying things I’ve done.
I am very driven by things that scare and frighten me, and things that might be tough for me.
And I’m completely into the idea of being a dad. If the opportunity arises for us to switch roles and let Helen get back into competition, then yes I’d take on the role of a stay-at-home dad. I’d be all over it.
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.
Fiction was a massive, massive part of my formative years, far more so than television ever was, and I always hoped that my future would lie with writing.
The scariest animal is without doubt human beings. We are the only species that decimates the very environment that we require to live.
Many of the animals that are traditionally seen as vermin are my life’s fascination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the Himalayas, I spent some of the most exhilarating moments of my life, shooting white water rapids in a kayak.
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 best generic tip, would be to be always thinking of an escape strategy. Always look around you and think ‘what if’? That and making sure you are correctly trained and experienced.
The night sky, seen from a deserted foothold where no man-made light shines, is more spectacular than any giant cinema screen could ever display.
My job has changed so much over recent years because of social media. You can now watch a programme and see how the audience respond to certain moments and it was overwhelming to see how people responded to ‘Big Blue Live’.
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.
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.
The older I’ve got, the more I’ve yearned for heritage, for a sense of belonging and coming from somewhere.
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.
We have a fantastic array of birds of prey here in the U.K.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I surround myself with books, kind of hoping the vast knowledge will just seep into my mind through osmosis.
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.
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!
I started climbing in my late teens, but I wasn’t passionate about it back then. My first experience was being dragged up peaks by my parents; freezing cold with nothing to see.
