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My mom was a rescue veterinarian, and I grew up helping her nurse injured animals back to health. Any deer hit by a car, fox caught in a trap, whatever it was that got hurt, everyone brought them to my mom.

My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.

My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.

In 2008, I was in a London park when I came across a fledgling crow that had fallen from the top of an oak tree. A woman happened to be passing, and she said that she rescued animals, so she invited me back to her house. It turned out she was the wife of Jeff Beck. Jeff was there, and we ended up jamming together.

I grew up in Alabama in a very small town and didn't have access to the finest of anything, really. But my mother was the kind of woman who just wanted us, me and my sisters, to be exposed to any and anything she could find.

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.

My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.

Since I was a boy, from this house, I was out rescuing crocodiles and snakes. My mum and dad were very passionate about that and, I was lucky enough to go along.

I have nine children... and one of them is an invalid. Her mother is obliged to take her away in the winter, and when one bird is off the nest, the other has to go on.

I have always brought home stray animals - everything from squirrels to wild rabbits to foxes and turtles.