Chris Packham’s T-Shirt Designs 2011

WORLD OF WOODLICE Well why not? Woodlice are cool creatures, ask any young naturalist under six who enjoys these crustacial armadillos trundling over their palms. So imagine their glee when visiting a theme park dedicated to these oft’ ignored and sneered at creatures. Aged five I would have had full-on fun with strap-on antennae scrabbling around in the dark trying to find the dampest corner. In fact, I think I did in the classroom cupboard whilst trying to avoid double French. For those fed up with the tiresome preoccupation with exotic zoological celebrities World of Woodlice offers a real creature-next-door experience and I for one would prefer a lifetime of Sundays here than at Disneyland.

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To help identify any Woodlice you find please visit: www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/other-invertebrates/walking-with-woodlice/identification.html

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WASP WORLD! It’s a personal fantasy to open such a theme park and staff it with entomologists who are committed to educating people about the virtues of wasps and how they are easy to live with and not worthy of the insane fear they precipitate in otherwise rational people. If Lions or Tigers were running amok through our summer pubs, cafes and public spaces I could understand the reaction but the overkill wrought on these wonderful little insects is an embarrassment. Of course I would charge £100 to get in, just to make sure that everyone gets stung on their day out!

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For more information about British wasps please visit www.bwars.com

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THE RAT CONSERVATION TRUST Absurd maybe, but why? Perhaps because of our often anthrocentric and entirely subjective choices about which animals we like and choose to preserve. Black Rats are in my opinion quite ‘pretty’ animals and are probably contenders for the title of Britain’s rarest mammal yet we continue to persecute them. They represent no threat to us at all but it seems we can neither forgive nor forget their flea assisted plague spreading past and excite further prejudice as they are deemed to be ‘non-native’. Like 48% of our terrestrial mammal fauna then, yet no one is gunning for Brown Hares, Fallow Deer and potentially . . . Harvest Mice!

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For more information about British mammals please visit www.mtuk.org

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THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF COCKROACHES For me they are probably the greatest animals ever! A body plan that’s lasted 300 million years, able to taste their food without eating it and avoid poisons, capable of going two months without water and six without food, laterally compressible to squeeze into tiny cracks, tolerant of extremes of hot and cold, egg cases that can be boiled and will still hatch, global domination and they are assured to ‘out survive’ our species. And true to form we hate their success and revile them as the uber ‘pest’. For me they are life champions, I tip my hat to cockroaches, not tread on them!

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For more information about British invertebrates please visit www.buglife.org

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RED ADMIRAL It’s nearly everyone’s favourite butterfly and its fore-wing pattern is bold and characteristic, part of our natural consciousness having been tattooed into our brains from the time we first saw one of these beauties. I was keen to simply reduce the creature to a constellation of spots and a stripe to show how little we need to know to identify things but also to highlight that evolutions purpose was nor for us to do this but for the butterflies themselves. It’s a pattern with a honed and perfected purpose.

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For more information about British Butterflies please visit www.butterfly-conservation.org

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ADDER The diagnostic zig-zag which runs down the backs of all Adders, even the black ones, seems to be a curious mix of camouflage and aposomatic colouration. It may break up the outline of the snake as it lies in crumpled foliage, and certainly the animal’s base colours are complementary with those found in its typical environment, but once seen it also sends out a clear message to some observers. That this is the venomous snake and you may be at risk. For my part it is one of Britain’s most beautiful natural ‘birthmarks’.

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For more about British reptiles please visit www.arc-trust.org

2012 T-Shirt Designs »

2010 T-Shirt Designs »

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