Wild,Wild NICK!

For starters,he truly deserves the honour of being crowned as the Master of the Jungle. Well,he is one of them,and while others are messing around with the big animals,Nick Baker’s busy chasing creepy crawlies out of their dens,and on Animal Planet. A herpetologist and explorer,Nick’s back on Animal Planet with Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures. But before that,here’s a lowdown on the man of the wild: Nick,a graduate in Biological Sciences,co-founded Exeter University’s national Bug Club. Member of the Royal Entomological Society’s Youth Development Committee,his ‘bug’ affair began from the Natural History Museum,London. “Which is a second home to me….I just fell in love with the diverse and bizarre world of animals,” Nick emails from Dartmoor where he lives along with a growing menagerie of small animals including spiders,scorpions,stick insects,amphibians,reptiles,butterflies and moths. He keeps pet leeches in the fridge at home and often feeds them by attaching them to his leg! Among his favourites are cane toads and a collection of hissing cockroaches!

A celebrated author,wildlife presenter,contributor,Nick loves to literally get under the skin of animals. “Which I did – grizzly bears,penguins,rattlesnakes and rhinos,and went on to examine their habitats and behaviour,” he says. But it’s is fascination for weird creatures that gets us asking about his encounters of the creepy kinds. “The whole idea of the series,Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures,is that I have watched so much TV and I keep seeing lions and tigers and elephants over and over again. They’re very important,but they aren’t the only animals on earth. The whole idea is to show people animals that don’t necessarily make the headlines.” But can insects and reptiles qualify as pets? “People run at the very mention of a lizard. That’s because people don’t actually bother to see beyond—they don’t understanding them. So what happens is this sort of fear,this irrational fear of these things gets passed on down through the generations.”

He wants to see the pink fairy armadillo before he dies,but he’d also want to come back to India one more time. “The food,the people…I loved the chaos here. There’s so much of India that people just don’t even realize exists. The biodiversity,great animals and fantastic wild places….here’s a country that was more beautiful and more tunning than anything I expected to see,” Nick’s filmed the gharial crocodile in India,and during this course,he had a ball with the skittering frogs,chickens,peacocks,fabulous varieties of birds and,freshwater dolphins.

There’s a high risk in such activities,but Nick feels that all you need to do is treat animals with respect. “If you look at the number of millions of people on this planet and the very few number of casualties created by the natural world,then you realize that actually,we live in a very tiny world now. I’d much rather live in a world where there is some risk to me,there’s some kind of threat,there is some kind of reality to it all. To walk about feeling safe is also to walk about feeling bored and to get too comfortable in an artificial situation.” Right said Nick! Catch him on Animal Planet.