Chris Packham's witness statement, Part 1: Shall I tell you about my childhood life?

                                                       

During boyhood, Chris Packham kept buzzards and other raptors in his garden

As TV's broadcaster Chris Packham's libel case moves into its second week, we look at the evidence so far, starting with his account of how, as a child, his interest in wildlife developed.  

I was born in Southampton in 1961. 

My parents tell me that my interest in wildlife formed before I was even able to speak. 

Both of my parents, but especially my father, encouraged my early interest in common urban wildlife, particularly invertebrates and pond life.

They allowed me to turn our suburban house and garden into a menagerie of reptiles (inside) and birds of prey, foxes, badgers and squirrels etc (generally outside). 

I had early-focused interests, obsessions, with many species of wildlife. 

I quickly expanded my collection of reptiles until the bedroom walls were lined with tanks.

In  the garden, I was keeping kestrels, barn owls, buzzards and a sparrowhawk  which I flew free every day before school. 

I continued keeping wild animals until I was a teenager when I was gifted a pair of binoculars and realised that I could learn more about them by watching them in their environment rather than observing them in mine.

When I was about six, I found a dead starling in the gutter. 

I was astonished by the sheer number of feathers and the dazzling spectrum of colours. 

It was so wonderfully ‘constructed’, and so beautiful that it sowed the seeds of a new and lifelong obsession - birds. 

Every day before and after school I combed local hedgerows and woodland, finding nests, counting eggs and chicks and making maps of all their locations. 

By 1976, and my last year of secondary school, encouraged by my biology master, I had embarked on my first proper scientific study - The Population and Breeding Density of Kestrels in the Lower Itchen Valley - which later won a Prince Philip Zoology Prize. 

By my mid-teens, I was volunteering for the Hawk Trust to protect red kites and peregrine falcons’ nests. 

I studied kestrels, shrews and badgers in my later teens and undergraduate days, reading Zoology in the Department of Biology at Southampton University. 

I was about to embark on a PhD in 1983 to continue my badger work but had a change of heart and started instead taking photographs and decided to train as a wildlife film cameraman. 

* To be continued.