Quotes from Steve Backshall

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.

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 was always really into the facts and figures and the statistics about nature and I always loved learning about it and having a new fact on hand. For me it was non-stop dirt, climbing trees and catching lizards and beetles. That was my thing as soon as I could crawl.

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.

I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I will write on long journeys. I will write sitting in my hammock in the middle of the rainforest. When everybody else is chilling out after filming, I am usually writing!

Most of my job is out in the wild, miles away from the public and it's nice to see people and hear what they like and don't like about the shows. It's really helpful.

Climbing is never going to be 100% safe, but the climbing I do with work is done under much stricter guidelines than the climbing I do in my spare time.

The scariest animal is without doubt human beings. We are the only species that decimates the very environment that we require to live.

Several of my books are 'How to' guides, specifically about getting outdoors, giving kids and parents ideas for what to do in the wild world, so they can take them along!

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.

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.

I surround myself with books, kind of hoping the vast knowledge will just seep into my mind through osmosis.

Well, there are without doubt species of jellyfish around the world that are potentially lethal to human beings, some of which shut beaches for entire seasons. The box jellyfish of Australasia is officially the world's most venomous creature, and has killed swimmers in the past.

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 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.

In the Himalayas, I spent some of the most exhilarating moments of my life, shooting white water rapids in a kayak.