Ben Fogle’s wild adventures

The adventurer and author beds down with an armadillo and joins the UN

MIDNIGHT IN MISSOURI and I am in my sleeping bag next to a dozing armadillo. This is the Ozarks, described as the Redneck Riviera in the namesake Netflix series. It is a beautiful land of lakes and trees and I am spending the week in a shelter made from fallen leaves and branches. I am here with Bo, an off-the-grid survivalist who practises primitive skills and who also moonlights as a bluegrass musician.

The nights are getting colder and the armadillo has decided my hand-built survival shelter is a perfect home. It ’s cosy in there with both of us; luckily, he doesn’t snore.

The deprivations of my bed are more than made up for by the incredible music. Bo has brought his old band together and their melodies dance through the forest. Banjo, violin, double bass, washboard and guitar turn songs I have heard a thousand times before into poetic storms of music, all lyrical, eclectic and funny. It is a joy to lie in the leaf litter while the band of old-timers jam. Even the armadillo is listening.

I HAVE RECENTLY returned from New York, where I attended a United Nations ceremony and was named UN Environ- ment Patron of the Wilderness. I have spent more than 25 years travelling to 200 countries and territories, exploring the wildest corners of the world, and my new role brings a sense of purpose to my adventures.

The term ‘wilderness’ encompasses mountains, deserts, jungles, forests and oceans – in short, an area uncultivated and uninhabited by man. Once, we considered the wilderness to be self-preserving, but according to a 2016 study by the journal Current Biolog y, only 23 per cent of the planet can now be considered wilderness.

We have lost around 1.2 million square miles of it over the past 20 years; that’s a tenth of the world’s wilderness in two decades. If we continue at the current rate of destruction, there will be no wilderness left in ‘less than a century’, according to that study. Add to this some terrifying statistics about how polluted our oceans are (with 165 million tons of plastic) and the predictions by scientists that plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish by 2050, and it all sounds rather depressing.

But despite all of that, I hope to give the wilderness a voice.

IT IS 6AM ON A Saturday morning and I am off to feed farm animals with my wife Marina and our children, Ludo and Iona. Every weekend, my family and I escape to this little part of heaven close to Henley where the children can dust off the grime of city life and embrace the countryside. They ride horses and build camps in the woods. We mess around on the river and we take the dogs for long bracing walks in the hills.

Our neighbours keep a menagerie of exotic animals and today we have joined their head keeper on the morning feed. It ’s still cold as we board the all-terrain buggy stacked with buckets of feed. First, it’s the llamas and alpacas. Six-year-old Iona spreads the feed confidently, occasionally buffeted by a hungry llama. Next, it ’s the huge herd of three-legged deer, saved and rehomed here. ‘If a three-legged deer has a fourlegged baby, will the baby hop like its mummy?’ asks Iona.

We feed the coati, lemurs, meerkats and tapirs before heading home for breakfast, happy and recharged.

English: A Story of Marmite, Queuing and Weather, by Ben Fogle (William Collins, £20), is out now. To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

The armadillo has decided my hand-built survival shelter is a perfect home