For pictures taken by Austin Stevens please go to Animals Animals Earth Scenes. Austin will launch his official website www.austinstevens.net before the end of the year.
On the move: Austin Stevens
Charmed life of the snake chaser

Born in South Africa in 1950, Austin Stevens is a reptile expert, a wildlife film maker and the holder of the world record for living in a tank full of snakes. He is the author of The Last Snake Man and is filming a new series of Austin Stevens’ Adventures, to be shown on Five in the autumn. He recently married Amy Wilcher, an Australian model; they live in Namibia

Austin Stevens, celebrity snake chaser and extreme wildlife film maker, is reminiscing about the fun-packed three months he spent in a tank, getting up close and personal with 36 snakes in a bid to break a world record.

“It was like being massaged, you know? When the snakes crawled across you and you felt that long body going over your neck, it used to put me to sleep. It was magic.”

The reptiles giving him a bedtime back-rub were black mambas, the second most venomous snakes in the world, and probably the fastest, with enough poison in a single bite to kill 130 men. Stevens did break the record, despite being bitten by a cobra, clocking up 107 days in his tank.

Like the late Steve Irwin, the Australian wildlife expert who died in 2006 after his chest was pierced by a stingray, Stevens has something of Crocodile Dundee about him, with his crumpled khakis, shaggy blond mop of hair and boundless, childlike enthusiasm. Also like Irwin, Stevens favours interactive, often dangerous, wildlife film-making.

In television series such as Austin Stevens’ Adventures, which returns to Five this autumn, the cameras follow him as he creeps through the undergrowth, eyeballing king cobras or manhandling giant pit vipers, all the time offering a breathless commentary, underscored by a dramatic soundtrack. The main difference between Stevens and Irwin is that he’s South African and a herpetologist (an expert in reptiles and amphibians), specialising in snakes rather than crocs.

His love of snakes was kindled at the age of 12, when he picked one up while wandering in the bush and brought it home to show his horrified parents. It was only a harmless red-lipped herald snake, but perhaps Stevens enjoyed the reaction, because from then on he was hooked.

Somehow he’s made it to the age of 58, despite being bitten by “every kind of bloody snake in the book”. He was bitten by a puff adder while working as a snake catcher for the South African army in the late 1960s, losing a chunk of one finger. He’s been bitten by a 20ft python and nailed by a second cobra, that time while filming in Namibia.

“I got bitten in a vein, which usually means you have minutes to live,” he recalls. “I had some [antivenom] serum with me and I knew that unless I shot myself full of serum, I didn’t have a chance. But I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t succumbing quicker – I kept waiting for it. Then I saw a 6in line of blood on the ground and I realised the vein had been cut, rather than injected, and it had squirted most of the venom out. That’s what saved me. You couldn’t plan it in a hundred years; that was hairy.”

But it was the motorbikes that almost did for him. “After the army I became a motorbike freak; I lost all direction,” he says, suddenly subdued.

“I went through 13 bikes in about two years,” he adds, gradually warming to his theme. “Each one was bigger and more powerful than the last. The final one was a four-cylinder Honda CB750. Before that we had all been struggling with the iron bikes, the British bikes, the ones the [Hell’s] Angels rode. They would never allow us into their groups because they said we were riding ‘plastics’ – Japanese bikes. But when that Honda came along, they couldn’t say a word. Then we started to break into their ranks.”

Stevens rode around for a few years, being a “loose cannon and looking for direction in a world I didn’t fit in”. What saved him, he says, was being offered a job at the Hartebeespoort Dam Snake and Animal Park, near Johannesburg, which rekindled his passion for wildlife.

He gave up the bikes in about 1974, “before they killed me”, but has adopted a similarly unrestrained attitude to car ownership. Over the years he’s had a string of Mazda RX sports cars – “Each time a new model came out, I had to have it” – and countless modified Land Rovers. Stevens’s latest acquisition is a 2.6 litre Mazda pickup truck, adapted for bush travel. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he whispers. “The car I’m driving now, it’s the 55th one I’ve owned . . . sounds mad, eh?”

At an age when many British men are pondering the freedoms presented by the impending arrival of their bus pass, Stevens is still in search of bigger adventures. He insists his primary goal is to educate but admits to being “a bit of a showman” as well.

“But when I’ve picked up a snake, shown it to the public and done a little demonstration with it, I let it go back to the bush,” he insists. “We sometimes take a risk, but the animals are always safe.”

Stevens describes his parents as “conventional”. His mother lost a lung in a car accident as a girl, was often ill, and died when Stevens was in his thirties; his father owned a small typewriter repair business. He traces his adventurous streak back to his grandfather from Bristol, England – also named Austin James Stevens – who helped set up a motorbike factory and took the boat to Africa.

His own restlessness ended his first marriage to Barbara, a dancer, and in December he married Amy Wilcher, a 24-year-old Australian model, who is presumably too young to want to settle down, although they share a home in Namibia between travels. He wonders sometimes if he’ll ever grow up. “My whole life is like a bull in a china shop,” he laughs. “When am I going to grow up? I really don’t know. It worries me a lot. I have no securities, no insurances, I’m not covered by anything. I’m like a child running amok.

“Sooner or later something is going stop me dead in my tracks and I’m worried about that. I’d better be ready for it, you know what I mean?”

My stuff...

On my CD player
A few years ago, after a terrible year of misfortune, I found myself, disillusioned, directionless and on the skids, in a sports bar in Swakopmund, Namibia. Suddenly my ears were treated to the sound of Shakira’s Whenever, Wherever and for some reason my spirits soared. The next day I bought my first Shakira album and I’ve never looked back

On my DVD player
Planet Earth, the BBC nature series

In my parking space
A Mazda B2600 4x4 off-road pickup, above, fitted with everything for bush and desert travel

I would never throw away
My collection of tribal weaponry, collected over the years from remote parts of the world