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Brett Westwood
“It was a pigeon that flew into my bedroom when I was a few months old, and liberally decorated the cot, that set me off on a career with wildlife. That’s if you believe my parents anyway. Whatever the reason, in my early years, nothing hopping, crawling, flying or blooming really escaped my attention, and close encounters with wildlife have included a grass snake which regurgitated a frog in my pocket, and an adder which reacted, not unreasonably, to being penned in tank in my bedroom by biting me. At least I know I’m not allergic to anti-venom,” says Brett Westwood.
Many years on, with the promise of a life in the legal profession fast fading, Brett is now a freelance writer and broadcaster after more than 15 years working as a radio producer and presenter at the ѿý Natural History Unit. Here he produced and presented many programmes for ѿý Radio 4 including and . He also presented or co-presented the live series and and the “ …” series about birds and their habitats. More recently he has written the scripts for and co-authored the accompanying book with Stephen Moss.
Brett is also involved with various wildlife and conservation groups in Worcestershire where he lives and he still thinks that nothing beats a productive field-trip combined with a picnic. “Natural history never lets you age” he says, and those aspects of wildlife which absorbed him as a child still continue to do so, although he watches adders from a distance now.