An Evening With Mike Dilger

"So you want to be a
Wildlife Presenter?!"

As part of our 40th anniversary celebrations, the Essex Badger Protection Group is delighted to announce that on Thursday, 11th December we will be hosting an evening with ecologist, TV wildlife presenter, publisher writer and our groups's Patron, Mike Dilger.

Being a Wildlife TV presenter may appear fun and exciting job , but it’s also very public and high-pressured… and like Marmite, everyone either loves or hates you! Having been onscreen for 25 years, Mike Dilger talks about the graft, attributes and resilience needed to make a living from this most bizarre profession.

As an ecologist, natural history presenter and writer, Mike Dilger has a life-long passion for British and tropical flora and fauna, of which he has profound experience and encyclopedic knowledge.

Mike will also be signing copies of his new book “One Thousand Shades of Green”. This book is about Mike's quest to find 1,000 different wild plants in one calendar year, and assess how our fascinating flora is faring in modern Britain.

Taking in city centres, mountain tops and every conceivable habitat in between, One Thousand Shades of Green is a manifesto on how to love and conserve our green and pleasant land, and celebrates the beauty and diversity of the nation's plants.

About Mike

Born in Stafford, Mike Dilger has been an obsessive naturalist since childhood, equally at home either on his hands and knees identifying British orchids or surveying the Amazon for hummingbirds.

Having graduated with a degree in Botany from Nottingham University and then a Master’s in Ecology from the University of Bangor, Mike’s obsession with the tropics began when studying moths in the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest. This first trip led to a period of over five years surveying the forests of Vietnam, Tanzania and Peru.

After spending long periods in the back-of-beyond, which included meeting both remote tribes and rare wildlife along the way, he also managed to accumulate an impressive array of diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis & bilharzia, earning him the nick-name ‘Britain’s most diseased man’. Returning back to the UK to reacquaint himself with his first passion, British wildlife, Mike then made the sideways move from conservation to natural history television.

After a period spent presenting wildlife programmes for Channel 5 between 2000 and 2002, Mike then worked at the BBC Natural History Unit as a reporter for Britain Goes Wild and Springwatch and as a presenter for Hands on Nature on BBC2, and a number of series on BBC Radio 4. Starting a new life as a freelance presenter in 2005, Mike worked as the co-presenter for CBeebies Autumnwatch in 2006, and as a presenter on Nature’s Calendar and Nature’s Top 40 for BBC2 in 2006 & 2007. Perhaps best known for his regular appearances as the ‘Wild Man’ on BBC1’s The One Show, for which he has made over 400 films during the last nine years, and also regularly reports on BBC1’s regional affairs programme Inside Out.

He briefly held the Guinness World Record for "The Most Snails on the Face in One Minute". At 37, the record was claimed in Covent Garden on the set of The One Show in 2009, before being beaten later that year.

In 2010 and 2011, at the Rutland Birdfair, he managed to beat all other wildlife presenters to become Wild Brain of Britain. He was also in a team of Celebrity Eggheads, which beat the 'real Eggheads' in 2011 and featured for the University of Nottingham on Celebrity University Challenge in 2013.

More recently he has continued to make appearances on The One Show showing short wildlife films he has made together with his son Zachary.

Living in the Chew Valley, south of Bristol with his wife and their son, Mike’s lists his interests as gardening, birding and watching any sport!