Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin say Britain has masses to see – if you get up early and know where to look…
Chris and Meg’s Wild Summer Sunday 8.30pm BBC2
ED GRENBY - 8 September 2021
Holed up with her stepfather Chris Packham throughout lockdown, it’s no surprise that 25-year-old Megan McCubbin wanted a wild summer afterwards. What she got, however, was Chris and Meg’s Wild Summer – the two naturalists squeezed together (again) in a campervan, in search of Britain’s rural wonders. The pair saw some amazing sights, from dolphins to otters (and smelled some amazing smells) – but they insist that we can, too. “All the places we went to have public access,” says Chris. “You just need to know where to look…”
So, obvious question – where do we look?
Chris: You only need to step off the path a few yards. We went to Snowdon, for instance, and there were loads of people there, absolutely manic, but we were just slightly off the main route looking for Arctic alpine flowers while everyone else was marching to the summit.
Meg: It was the same in south Wales – we went out looking for dolphins on the same public boat that does the day trips. We wanted everything we did to be accessible to everyone
And what did you see?
Meg: My best experience was the gannet colony at Bass Rock, this little island in the Firth of Forth. We went there together when I was about seven, and there were hundreds of thousands of birds – but now there are even more, which is wonderful as you don’t often go back to a place and see an increase in the wildlife. It looks like something from Game of Thrones, all misty and dramatic, and it’s this cacophony of chaos because the gannets are all arguing with one another, or performing mating rituals, or feeding their young. Of course, the smell is a bit funky, and my jeans were absolutely covered in guano, which wasn’t great for the rest of the trip, but that sound and smell are all part of the amazing sensory experience, and it didn’t dampen things at all. Except literally.
Chris: For me, seeing animals is like choosing a restaurant – sometimes you fancy Chinese, sometimes Italian. So today I might say seeing the black-faced otters in Carmarthenshire was my favourite thing, because they’re so rare. But tomorrow it might be the red squirrels we spotted in Whinlatter Forest, in the Lake District; or the gorgeous white-faced darter dragonfly in Foulshaw Moss Nature Reserve.
Sounds like you need a lot of luck to see some of these species…
Meg: Not necessarily. The companies that run dolphin-watching trips in Pembrokeshire have a 90 per cent success rate!
Chris: And it’s not all about animals. One of my very favourite things was a canoe ride along the River Teifi in south Wales – it’s a landscape that’s going to change radically because of ash dieback disease, so it’s a “last chance to see” scenario, with these beautiful forested gorges just dripping with green, green trees. It was so silent, it felt like paddling into the jungle in Apocalypse Now, and then we stopped and listened to this single song thrush – which is my favourite birdsong – and because of the steep sides of the ravine the sound was magnified as if the thrush was singing right into your head. It was just sensational. And no great luck needed – just an early start.
What about the roadtrip element? How did you two handle campervanning together?
Chris: We get on really well – I don’t think there was a single point where we lost our temper with each other. It helps that we have similar taste in music. Well, we overlap about 40 per cent of the time…
Meg: Some of his stuff is OK. During lockdown, I had to film Chris playing punk records every day that he’d tweet out as #punkrockmidnight. I was fine with the Ramones, but some the bands were just… [she raises her eyebrows theatrically]
Presumably you learnt how to put up with each other during lockdown?
Meg: I moved in with Chris [in the New Forest] when lockdown started so that we could work together, because we were writing our book, Back to Nature, jointly. It went pretty well: I think the most controversial thing was that he didn’t much like the idea of washing up after I’d cooked…
Chris: I don’t mind washing up, just not every single saucepan. But lockdown suited people like me [Packham was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in 2005] pretty well. We focused on our Self-Isolating Bird Club YouTube channel, and explored the area around my cottage.
Meg: I did get itchy feet, but lockdown was a wake-up call for me, to say “Hang on, we Britons have got some incredible places right on our doorstep.” And that’s what this new series is about: celebrating the wildlife that we’ve got in the UK while it’s still there – conserving it, protecting it and enjoying it.
Holed up with her stepfather Chris Packham throughout lockdown, it’s no surprise that 25-year-old Megan McCubbin wanted a wild summer afterwards. What she got, however, was Chris and Meg’s Wild Summer – the two naturalists squeezed together (again) in a campervan, in search of Britain’s rural wonders. The pair saw some amazing sights, from dolphins to otters (and smelled some amazing smells) – but they insist that we can, too. “All the places we went to have public access,” says Chris. “You just need to know where to look…”