Chris Packham

As a broadcaster, Chris is a presenter of BBC’s BAFTA Award-winning Springwatch and Winterwatch series. He presents notable natural history series such as Earth (2023), Nature’s Weirdest Events, World’s Weirdest Events, World’s Sneakiest Animals, Cats v Dogs, The Burrowers, Inside the Animal Mind, Operation Iceberg and Secrets of our Living Planet. He was featured on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon (NBC – US) where he introduced Jimmy to a Porcupine and baby spotted Hyena, and sent a Black Vulture flying to him as he stood in the audience.

Since sharing his autism diagnosis with the world, Chris has shared the benefits of being autistic with the world, with his latest project seeing him tackle the subject of autism in the new two-part BBC Two documentary, Inside Our Autistic Minds. Over the years, he has been flooded with letters and emails from other people with autism who find it difficult for their friends, families and colleagues to understand what they’re going through.

In 1974, he climbed on his bike and began cycling lanes of Hampshire entering all sightings of kestrels and other wildlife in the diary which he kept throughout his youth. At the same time he had the great good fortune to meet a teacher at his school, John Buckley, who immediately quelled the young rougues interest in egg collecting and set him on a course of scientific examination instead.

Thus Chris found nests, counted eggs and chicks and made maps of all their locations and within a couple of years he embarked on his first proper scientific study – The Population and Breeding Density of Kestrels in the Lower Itchen Valley. This was written up in his last year at secondary school and won the Prince Philip Zoology Prize a couple of years later. Chris was hooked as a young scientist and so sparrowhawks followed kestrels, barn owl pellets were examined with monthly regularity, graphs were drawn, tables formulated and results published.

In parallel with all this fieldwork at home Chris had expanded his collection of reptiles until the bedroom walls were lined with tanks and he was soon keeping kestrels, barn owls, buzzards and sparrowhawk in the garden and flying them free every day before school. Fox cubs came, grew and went as did baby squirrels, hedgehogs and badgers. John had also taught Chris the elementary skills of taxidermy and he supplemented his pocket money by stuffing birds – a worthy pursuit for any teenage boy!