Terry Nutkins

Terry Nutkins, who has died of leukaemia aged 66, left school at 11 to live in a remote cottage in the West Highlands with the Scottish naturalist and author Gavin Maxwell and a romp of otters.

As an adult he became one of the best-known presenters of wildlife programmes on British television, co-hosting Animal Magic with Johnny Morris for seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then creating The Really Wild Show, which he also presented from 1986 to 1992.

Nutkins was a passionate and charismatic presenter, who looked more like a rock star than a naturalist, with his distinctive, unruly hair, which he continued to wear long, despite changing fashions and baldness.

Although he spent much of his life in Scotland, he was born Terence Paul Nutkins in London and as a young boy lived in a terraced house near Marylebone railway station.

He was interested in animals from an early age and truanted from school to climb over the fence and spend time with the elephants at London Zoo. The zookeepers were none too keen on his visits at first, but he won them round with his persistence, enthusiasm, charm and a seemingly natural affinity with creatures.

"I had this instinctive bond with these animals," he said in an interview six years ago. "I used to go home at night and when I went to bed I didn't wash my hands because I liked to smell the elephants on them."

Through the XYZ Club (Exceptional Young Zoologists) Nutkins met the naturalist Gavin Maxwell and went to stay with him at his remote cottage near Glenelg in the West Highlands, near Skye. Maxwell had already published several books and would shortly begin work on his famous book Ring of Bright Water.

It was a difficult time for Maxwell. He suffered from depression and his relationship with the poet Kathleen Raine had ended. Raine later revealed it was platonic, as Maxwell was homosexual.

And Mijbil, the beloved otter he brought back from Iraq, had died. "Mij" was the subject of Ring of Bright Water – the title comes from a poem by Raine.

Eventually Maxwell adopted Nutkins and he took personal responsibility for his education, while also writing Ring of Bright Water. Nutkins helped rear and look after the otters with whom they shared their lives. "I wouldn't see people for months," Nutkins said. "It was just the otters and Gavin and me."

When Nutkins was in his mid-teens one of the otters, Edal, bit off two of his fingers. It was apparently a case of mistaken identity. Edal had taken a dislike to a visiting zookeeper and bit her ankle. She left her jumper behind when she went and Nutkins was putting it on when Edal suddenly launched his attack. Maxwell recounted the episode and Nutkins's matter-of-fact acceptance of the lost digits in The Rocks Remain, the 1963 sequel to Ring of Bright Water.

Ring of Bright Water was published in 1960 and turned into a film with Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna in 1969. Maxwell died of cancer shortly after the film opened. Nutkins continued working with animals, spent time as a zookeeper and got his big television break in 1978 on Animal Magic.

It had been running for 16 years by that point and was well-established, an appealing mixture of natural history and comedy, with Johnny Morris giving voice to the thoughts of the various animals. Nutkins famously hand-reared a sea lion cub called Gemini.

The two men became great friends and when Morris died in 1999 he left his house to Nutkins, much to Morris's family's disgust.

Animal Magic was finally axed in 1984, but Nutkins was a key figure in the creation of The Really Wild Show, which ditched the anthropomorphic approach in favour of glorying in the strange diversity of the world's wildlife.

The Really Wild Show continued after his departure in 1992. Meanwhile Nutkins went on to appear on various other shows, including Celebrity Squares (1994), Brilliant Creatures (1998) and the reality show I'm Famous and Frightened! (2004), in which celebrities stayed in a haunted house.

He also presented My Life as an Animal (2009), a short-lived reality show in which people had to live and sleep with various animals, including pigs and penguins.

Nutkins, who was married with eight children, had returned to the Glenelg area of the West Highlands, where he lived with Maxwell as a teenager.

He was involved in various business ventures in Scotland. In 2001 he bought Fort Augustus Abbey and wanted to develop it as a tourist attraction, though it was eventually sold for conversion to housing.

For a while, he also owned and ran the nearby Lovat Hotel, but felt "caged in".

He is survived by his wife Jackie, his eight children and eight grandchildren.