Chris Packham is a cult hero of wildlife television, but at 58 he is more of a punk rebel than ever. When it comes to climate change and biodiversity, he says there's no more pussyfooting around

CHRIS Packham is walking through the New Forest, in southern England, with his dogs – two miniature poodles, who gambol, as he puts it, in the winter sunshine – as we speak.

It comes as a surprise to me that there are two dogs, since the last I heard was that he had only one, his beloved Scratchy, the then sole-survivor of a pair of siblings. Earlier this year he had posted footage of his sheer joy at being reunited with Scratchy following the dog's cataract surgery. "Best day of my life!" he declared.

The BBC nature television presenter has made it clear how deeply attached to his dogs he is. He has also been open about the severe depression he plunged into following the loss of his dog, Fish, in 2003, and his contemplation of suicide. In recent years he has even talked about how he has made himself imagine his current dog's death in the hope of better dealing with it when it happens.

It quickly becomes clear that the thing he has dreaded has happened. “Scratchy,” the BBC wildlife presenter says, “unfortunately died in the summer, so now I’ve got Sid and Nancy, who are relatives of Scratchy. They are six-month-old, black, miniature poodle puppies who gambol around like mad.” The imaginary rehearsing of Scratchy's death, he says, did not really prepare him for the devastation of the loss. “It probably didn't help," he says grimly. "When it happens it’s a different thing. I’m ruthlessly pragmatic about life, my own life and so on, and how I think about us as organisms. But it’s very different when it’s something that you love dying. When you’ve got love versus pragmatism, it is never an easy task.”

Rather than further describe this recent loss, he talks chiefly about his new canine loves – who, it turns out, are named Sid and Nancy in a nod to his love of punk. “They’re related to his mother and they are carrying the same ebullient genes, the same heart of anarchy. That anarchy is an essential component in the household. Any systems must be disrupted and poodles are good at that. They were good at that this morning. They sleep on the bed. As soon as it gets light they’re jumping on my chest and licking my face and demanding exercise.”

Packham, as anyone who watches his nature programmes will know, has a distinctive way of looking at the world. He is passionately wildlife focussed, acutely troubled by injustice and rarely one to hold back from stating what he believes to be true. In 2016, when he published in his memoir, Fingers In The Sparkle Jar, he revealed that in his forties he had been diagnosed as autistic. The following year, in the documentary, Chris Packham: Asperger’s And Me, he offered a portrait of what it was like to be inside his busy head, and an exploration of how autism may be a gift to be harnessed. “I’ve spent 30 years on the telly," he said, "trying my best to act normal, when really I’m anything but.”

Has he ever felt that kind of grief he has for his dogs for humans? For instance, his mother, who died in 2011? “No. Not really. I think it’s a very different form of love that people like myself manifest towards animals. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love people. It’s that we love them in a different way. But there is a purity, an uncompromised purity in the relationship that we share with an animal. Which is different from that that we share with other humans. They’re dependents aren’t they? I like that. I need to have something in my life where I have to be unwavering, absolutely unswerving in my commitment and they are it.”

That’s not to say that he isn’t attached to humans. His long-term partner Charlotte Corney, who runs the Isle of Wight Zoo, partly lives with him in the New Forest. “Charlotte and I get on. She has lived with animals all of her life and had a similar relationship with them, in a non-Asperger's way I think. She’s here now. She’s got some giant rabbits and she’s just put them out into the garden.”

I ask him if he has ever felt another kind of grief – the "climate grief" that is so often discussed now. “No," he says. "I haven’t got time to feel anxiety. I’ve got to do something about it. I know that we’re in a very, very dangerous place. But I turn that directly into personal positive energy.”

He does, however, feel “guilt” at the failure of his generation to prevent the climate and biodiversity crisis. Packham has been working in conservation in some way for all his career, having studied zoology, he got a job as a wildlife cameraman and then, with his striking spiked-blonde hair, began his presenting career on CBBC's The Really Wild Show. “We’ve charted the declines with enormous accuracy," he says. "I feel a colossal sense of failure. We’ve just been too polite. We’ve been pussyfooting around.”

Packham, who is these days a semi cult-hero, often seems to occupy a place in our culture as an alternative David Attenborough – both are national treasures who have gone from delivering stories of wildlife wonders to warning us about the climate emergency. “There is no question," he says, "that I shoulder an enormous guilt. We are a generation that has been aware of these problems, the climate, the biodiversity-loss. But our methods in terms of addressing it have been deeply flawed. The State Of Nature report published this year says frankly if I can paraphrase it, that the UK countryside is going to hell in a handcart. Meanwhile we’ve got a million members in the RSPB. We’ve motivated people to care. But what we haven’t done with our million members is get them to take any meaningful action.”

The 58-year-old is markedly upset when he describes this. “One of the things," he says, "that motivates my action now is that sense of guilt and shame. We have failed the young. There is no question about that.”

Among the issues that he thinks we do not talk about nearly enough is human population. “We’ve got to start addressing it in the way that we have the climate emergency, and, of course, they are connected. The more people are consuming, the more climate impact we get. We can cut our resource consumption down. And also we can cut the population growth. But population dynamics are a relatively complex thing. We need to get the balance right and that requires some discussion. But we’re not having that discussion.”

What makes him hopeful at the moment is the activist energy of young people and moments like Extinction Rebellion, with which he has become involved. “I’ve waited a lifetime for people to start taking to the streets and demanding a positive change. There is a degree of activism taking place that had been absent in young people since my generation and the punk thing, where we all marched against racism and later against homophobia and other social ills.”

Among those young people is Megan McCubbin, the stepdaughter whom he was deeply involved in raising. When I ask him what the last object to come into his life that gave him pleasure was, he describes a note from her. “I got home,” he says, “and there was a post-it on the door which Megan had left, and on it it said, ‘Gone to rebel’.”

“I invested quite a bit in Megs. You generate opportunities for young people. You take them into your care. You feed them, you nurture them, you try to keep them healthy and all that stuff. And then you always imagine, selfishly, that some day they might repay you in some way. And that was it. I got my repayment.”

Packham believes that this,“has to be the age of intense change” – in his own life as well as the wider world. He has, for instance, just taken his last internal flight. “I used the train twice last week," he says, "to travel to Scotland. Internal flights in the UK are something I couldn’t countenance any more. It’s more expensive on the train and takes more time, but ultimately I had a great day. I got a lot of work done. They sold me a cup of hot chocolate and it was perfectly reasonable.”

Of course, in his role as presenter, over the decades he has done more than his fair share of travel. He has also been a guide on photographic and bird-watching safaris in Africa, Alaska and Antarctica. But his relationship to travel is changing. When he visits Paris, in the run up to Christmas, he will do so by Eurostar. “I’m also waiting for my electric car to turn up and I’ve become vegan in the last year." He is keen, however, not to come across as berating others. “We’re all doing what we can. We’re doing it at different paces and we’re doing different things. There is no point in being critical of people who are trying to make progress.”

He also acknowledges his own privilege: “I can afford an electric car. A lot of people can’t. So there’s no point in haranguing them. We need to get the prices of the cars down.”

One of the things that is clear is his passion for Scotland, which, over the last year he has visited regularly, spending plenty of time in the Cairngorms, where Winterwatch, Springwatch and Autumnwatch were filmed. On December 17, he will be coming to Perth to do a talk for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society about his photography.

From his visits over the past year, he also has a strong picture of what is going wrong, and what is going right, for nature in Scotland. On the positive side, he cites the Cairngorms Connect project, as “the most exciting project in the UK”.

“It’s up there with some of the other great projects which have taken place across Europe. So you’ve got a private landowner and government agencies and NGOs in this very productive partnership with a long term vision – and the scale of it is truly impressive. If we had a few more projects like that dotted around the UK we would all be in a better place.”

But, it’s not all rosy, he says. “Scotland has still got problems with raptors being illegally persecuted. We’ve still got much of Scotland given over to driven grouse moor, which is a hugely damaging process, environmentally, economically and ecologically. There are issues with the beavers on the Tay and then there's the salmon farming – the impact that’s having environmentally.”

Packham is constantly ruffling feathers – and he doesn’t seem to much mind what reaction he gets. When, earlier this year, Wild Justice, the environmental law group he co-founded, succeeded in putting an end to the license in England which allowed the shooting of 16 species of "pest" birds, campaigners left dead crows hanging outside his home. He and his family also received death threats. At the time, he said, “I’m not going to be intimidated. People like me with Asperger’s are not affected by this sort of thing. It doesn’t weaken our resolve. ”

He still, he says, gets threats. “It’s part of a process. It doesn’t phase me in any way. I expect that in today’s age. What I’m doing is asking people to change their minds for good reasons, but they’re not capable of changing them very quickly. And when they are in a corner because they think they’re losing, which they are, they lash out.”

Packham appreciates Scotland's more pro-EU political climate."Seriously not happy” is how he describes his feelings about Brexit. “If certain things happen there might be a migration to Scotland because it might be a better place to live. There is every danger that I’m not going to be a happy Englishman at some point in the future.”

Might he consider moving here? “Possibly. I did live in Scotland before. I don’t imagine I’ll be alone in moving."

It seems hard, though, to imagine him tearing himself away from his cottage in the New Forest, where he can walk his dogs to his favourite beech, and relax in a bolt-hole in which he has created his own obsessive order. Packham is a self-declared a minimalist who arranges everything in a very particular way – 60 Holmegaard vases, for instance, placed according to a particular pattern of colours. His cleaners take photographs of where everything is before they clean in order to return them to their original place.

It seems remarkable, I suggest, that the same person who desires such control is so at home in the wildness of nature. “The outside world," he says, "does appear to many people to be chaotic, but of course it isn't. It’s complex and that complexity is in fact a unified set of connections which make it sustainable, harmonious, albeit dynamic. So visually, yes, it looks challenging. But in terms of its functionality it’s perfect.”

One of the joys of his memoir, Fingers In The Sparkle Jar, is the way it so vividly describes his early attachments to wildlife, and the way they formed him. Though compelling, not all of it is pretty. At one point he describes holding his own live kestrel, stolen from a nest, for the first time on his wrist as like "climbing through a hole in heaven's fence". Later, it dies, young, leaving him stricken.

There is a story of him rearing tadpoles and eating them. Their taste is described as "like earthy semolina". How does he feel about those poor tadpoles now? “My relationship with wildlife started out destructive,” he says. “But I learned rapidly because I never liked things dying. I always wanted to keep them alive. I made mistakes. But your values change and that’s part of a process of personal evolution. There were jars of tadpoles that got left on the window sill and got cooked in the sunshine. I remember the smell of them. But, even the death of those tadpoles was part of a formative experience, because the regret that I felt when I got home and they weren’t all busily swimming around their little jar was hideous and so it only happened once. You can’t criticise people for their before. If someone was working for a petrochemical company and joins Extinction Rebellion, good. No point in battering them.”

A conversation with Packham is an emotional journey. One moment he seems filled with optimism and the conviction that “the human species is a remarkably adaptable and resourceful animal ”. Another, he is swamped in pessimism at the state of global politics. There is one thing, however, of which he seems certain. “What we’re doing at the moment cannot and will not continue,” he says. “There’s no doubt about that at all. We’re going to see monumental changes and I fear that we will have to hurt before we really start to improve things. But do I think we’ll survive? Yeah, I do. I just think we’re going to make it damned difficult for ourselves.”

Chris Packham will be speaking at Perth Concert Hall, at 7.30pm on December 17, www.horsecross.co.uk