Quotes from Steve Backshall

When kids ask questions there is a painful honesty at times and they will ask things that throw me.

People are used to seeing natural history programmes that have been filmed over many years which are concentrated, focused visions of natural history.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I made my first conservation series for National Geographic in 2000. Ever since I've been finding ways of making my own life as sustainable as it possibly can be.

A lot of people think it's insane to swim out in blue water with a great white shark, but my experience tells me I can do it safely. Other people might consider it mad, granted, but then I might think what they do is mad.

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.

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.

If the world's oceans have had nearly half a billion years with sharks as the apex predators, then the delicate balance of its food webs must rely on their presence in complex ways we cannot possibly predict.

Lose the sharks, the mighty, mysterious lords of the deep, and our planet's oceans would be infinitely poorer places.

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.

My favourite climb is St Kilda, west of Benbecula in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. It's incredibly remote, with the highest sea cliffs in Britain.

There's nothing more paralysing or more likely to make people fall into a malaise of believing they are powerless than just hearing that everything's negative and everything's shot to bits. It's really important that we know we can change this planet for the better and that every single one of us, no matter how small we may feel, has that power.

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.

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.

We have a fantastic array of birds of prey here in the U.K.

I'm not a great technical climber, but over the years it has given me the opportunity to see wonderful corners of Britain that I wouldn't have been able to experience any other way.

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.

A crocodile just swung around and hit me with its teeth. It took a big chunk off my leg.

Many of the animals that are traditionally seen as vermin are my life's fascination.

It's going to sound terribly glib and cliched but the more I learn about animals, the more convinced I am that almost all the fears we have about them are unfounded.