IT DOESN’T feel like summer is really here until the annual post-winter pick-me-up dose of Springwatch.
For three weeks in June an hour each weekday evening is set aside for basking in the wonders of nature, and never was this more welcome than during the first lockdown of 2020.
Bewildered, scared, and often alone, viewers found Springwatch to be the perfect tonic, even though Michaela Strachan, one of the lynchpins of the show over the past decade, could only watch from afar, with travel bans keeping her at home in South Africa.
Another lockdown kept her away from last year’s edition of Winterwatch but she has been back ever since, and will be teaming up with her old friend and colleague Chris Packham – one of television’s more unlikely, and enduring, double acts – for this month’s Springwatch.
Michaela has lived in South Africa for 20 years now but she grew up in Surrey, before making her way to London when her career in television took off. And although best-known for her work making nature documentaries that wasn’t how she first made her name.
Born in Ewell in July 1966, Michaela’s first love was actually ballet but, despite being enrolled in dance school by her mother, any dreams she had of becoming a ballet dancer were dashed because her feet turned out to be the wrong shape.
Undeterred, she
