Springwatch's Chris Packham: 'It's tough out there for life'

After the first few days of tense excitement when we are wondering what we will find, what we can get on screen and we all stop checking the weather forecast every five minutes, the mood in the Springwatch camp settles into that of a joyful festival of wildlife. It’s like the Glastonbury of natural history TV. We have tents, we have a main stage, we have decent plant-based food, we are powered by green energy and occasionally we have mud. But our toilets are always much, much better! 

This year is the 20th anniversary so we are even more excited. Everyone loves a milestone and there is plenty to celebrate in terms of how our programmes have evolved. We have all learned a lot on the job but the technological changes have driven enormous opportunities to bring people closer to the stars of the show. Our cameras are smaller, more reliable, sharper, cheaper, they can see in the dark, some don’t even need light – they are sensitive to a thermal signature.

And the ability to sensitively place them very close to the wildlife and monitor them 24 hours a day for three weeks means we get to see things we would never get to see twitching the curtains in a hide while peering through our steamed-up binoculars. As a consequence we are now learning a lot more, a lot more quickly, about the creatures we share our communities with. 

And that’s another key ingredient to our line-up. We aren’t obsessed with celebrity, we don’t mind the Taylor Swifts or Sabrina Carpenters of the wildlife world – but if they don’t show up we don’t care. We are inclusive not exclusive, we never go anywhere where the viewers can’t follow in our footsteps and we focus on the ‘birds next door’.

Golden eagles are great – but blue tits are what connect us to our audience because they visit 92% of UK gardens in winter. And as all naturalists are nosy neighbours, we love finding out new stuff about the everyday species in our lives. 

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This year we will be taking a look back. There have been a lot of changes since the first Springwatch episode – many of them negative: catastrophic declines and whole groups of species which have disappeared from our lives.

Last year was the worst ever for UK bumblebees and butterflies, woodland and farmland birds are in freefall, seabirds too and some of our favourite mammals like hedgehogs and water voles and red squirrels continue to struggle.

Habitat loss and intensive farming are the key drivers on land and destructive fishing practices are the problem at sea. Polluted rivers, human mistreatment and urban development exacerbate the crisis but now we have climate breakdown having a significant impact too. It’s tough out there for life.

But there are significant good news stories too. Otters have recovered their range, red kites and sea eagles continue to spread following successful reintroductions and we’ve seen the rise of rewilding with amazing projects like Knepp and Cairngorms Connect which have proved that if you build it, they will come.

In truth we have all the tools we need to repair, restore, reinstate and reintroduce nature – we just haven’t been implementing them broadly or rapidly enough. And now, when we need that more than ever, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. We must change that.

• Chris Packham: ‘My younger self would be my biggest critic’
• These 11 pioneering rewilding projects are helping bring nature back in Britain
• Photographer of the year Zed Nelson on documenting the decimation of nature by humans

I love working on Springwatch. I like being able to focus on one job in one place for three weeks. I like working in a team which is totally committed to getting the very best show on air, I like catching up with Michaela [Strachan] and I like getting stuck into learning more about all the things that scurry, slither or slime across our screens.

Most of all I look forward to the surprises, those wholly unpredictable things that happen which leave us with questions. Why did the female nightjar just wake up and eat one of its own young? We don’t know, we maybe never will. I’m cool with that. 

If I were forced to choose a single highlight from the last 20 years it would be very hard. Rampaging reptiles munching nestlings, live goshawk nests, so much great new science, some simple tranquil moments to lose ourselves in nature, fox cubs, badger cubs, the weird stuff – tree slugs and bagworms… all so good.

But in terms of a TV triumph, for me the rise of Spineless Si the stickleback has to take the crown. Any programme which can engender enough collective interest/love/hysteria for a five-centimetre-long fish living in a muddy ditch in Suffolk to see its daily fortunes reported in the national newspapers and across all the major news media is clearly punching its weight when it comes to engaging its audience with its subject. 

What on paper would look like a mission impossible was a massive mission accomplished.

I’ve no idea who or what will be the star of our series this year when we all rock up at the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate and Iolo starts exploring Northern Ireland’s hidden gems of nature, but I’m certain that something will prove that wildlife’s got talent, something will steal the hearts of the UK’s millions of animal lovers, something will grab the mike, strut the stage and bring the house down.

Springwatch returns to BBC Two and iPlayer broadcasting live from 26 May for three weeks.

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