麻豆约拍

In 麻豆约拍 Radio 4’s The Poet Laureate Has Gone To His Shed, Simon Armitage talks to guests about life, language and music. As he translates The Owl and the Nightingale, a long middle English poem in which the two birds debate many things, Simon asks guests to both help him with the poem and to distract him from it.

In this episode, wildlife expert Chris Packham couldn’t join Simon in his shed due to Covid-19, so the pair spoke online, discussing solace in nature and in art, the future of the planet and sniffing owls.

Here are seven things we learned about the naturalist…

A life’s work in nature has seen Chris make use of his living space in unorthodox ways. Talking about his younger days, Chris reveals: “I took up at least half the freezer space with road casualties. Animals that I recovered were stored, much to my mother’s horror, alongside the frozen peas and fish fingers. There was always something there heading on its way to taxidermy or dissection.” Not much has changed since. Today Chris has a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex model head in his garage.

Unsurprisingly, Chris knows his owls. Especially, tawny owls whose ‘Twit-Twoo’, he explains, is actually a conversation between the female and male of the species. His knowledge of the tawny even extends to its smell. “One of the most personal ways of engaging with an animal is being able to know its scent, which is essentially quite a private thing or a distant thing, and I love the smell of tawny owls,” says Chris. “It gives me no end of pleasure to stick my nose into the back of their head and have a good whiff. It’s a dry, musty carboard sort of smell which, again, is so reminiscent of my youth when I was sometime keeping these animals or trying to rehabilitate them.”

I became very angry, frustrated and disappointed and I needed some sort of outlet, and the punk thing allowed me to physically identify myself as being different.” Despite finding the mosh pits a challenge because, by his own admission, he’s “not a very tactile person”, Chris loved the raw power of the music, and names The Clash, Ramones, The Damned and Buzzcocks among his favourites. However, it was the defiant attitude and ‘do it yourself’ mentality that really engaged him. “These are things that I recognised as important then and hold true in my life now.”

“I have an enormous collection of skulls and feathers and pellets and bones, and all sorts of things. They’re all neatly catalogued in their little boxes and I can tell you where each one of them is, ditto my punk rock collection of flyers and badges and tickets… they are all catalogued and stored, as are my singles, in alphabetical order. So, yes, order is very, very important to me.”

“We’ve all learned a lot about our lives and our planet and our place in it during this tragedy and crisis and surely, surely, as an adaptable, intelligent and resourceful species we’re not going to go back to where we were? We don’t want business as usual, that was bad business, we want very much a ‘new normal’, a ‘new normal’ for the environment too.”