Howie Watkins

Howie Watkins (born July 17 1969) is a British television broadcaster and (in his words) "Performance Biologist" who was educated at the University of Portsmouth.

Howie Watkins, best known for presenting BBC1's Really Wild Show, is a full-time broadcaster and "Performance Biologist". He divides his time between various television and radio projects; writing; campaigning for wildlife conservation and environmental organisations; lecturing, and running the Art Alert Project (an environmental art co-operative). When not working, he indulges his passions for nature, music and reading. He lives in South Wales along with three snakes and a menagerie of creepy-crawlies.

Animals and nature have been life-long passions for Howie. His early years on the Island of North Uist in Scotland may well have something to do with this. Free to explore at will with his dog Melanie he developed a fascination for the natural world that has never left him.

Howie graduated from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1990 to find the world unprepared for a biologist quite like him - so he moved into a zoo, Penscynor Wildlife Park in South Wales.

He spent four years there as the Education Co-ordinator where he was involved in everything from running captive breeding and public education programmes to aid endangered species, to giving impromptu talks at animal feeding times, handling animals, running drama sessions and locking himself in empty enclosures (he claims this was to illustrate aspects of enclosure design).

Reluctantly, he left Penscynor in 1994 to give more time to his broadcast career.

Howie worked on BBC1's long running wildlife programme The Really Wild Show from 1993 until 2000 (7 series). Howie has also been involved in a number of other projects for the BBC's Natural History Unit, including two series of The Really Wild Guide to Britain which toured the UK in search of wildlife and showed viewers how to get close to animals.

After leaving the Really Wild Show in 2000 Howie was kept busy filming two series of Animal Planet Unleashed for Discovery Animal Planet.

During 2001 Howie reduced the amount of Broadcast work he took on, concentrating instead on writing and lecturing projects but still squeezed in work for Channel 4, presenting their schools' programme Stop, Look, Listen and contributing a variety of news and current affairs programmes. Including Earth & Space for Now-TV and Get Gardening for HTV-Wales.

Recent work also includes, in 1999, filming Crazy Creatures, a series about animals - wild and domestic - and the people who live/work alongside them for HTV-Wales. Also in 1999 Howie filmed a series of inserts for a BBC-Science series about meteorology, The Essential Guide to Weather.

Other credits include; BBC2's daily series The Countryside Hour; BBC Education's Science in Action; BBC1's daytime series The Complete Guide to the Twentieth Century; The Weather Show, a daily programme on BBC1.

Howie has also acted as one of the judges and presenters for BBC Country File's competition in association with The Radio Times to find The Photographer of the Year in1997 and 1998.

Howie has been a regular contributor to GMTV with a variety of reporting from live coverage of an oil spill on the Welsh coast to presenting an Animal Week in 1996.