Meet the Autumnwatch presenters prepared to pull on the thermals and head north to watch the season unfold with some of our rarest wildlife

The fact he’s currently sitting within the cosy confines of a restaurant is irrelevant, it seems. He and his co-presenters, Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham, will need every layer they can lay their hands on when they present this year’s programme. The show has a breathtaking, but potentially bitingly cold, new home this year, at Aigas Field Centre in Beauly, where they and their team of experts will aim to capture the best of wildlife action over four days.

“It’ll be tartan and whisky in terms of the wildlife,” says 51-year-old Packham, a zoologist and naturalist. “Scotland’s got a unique semblance of species and some of them are quite rare and many are quite shy so, for British naturalists, they’re all in the grail basically. Wild cat, pine marten, golden eagle – these are all super, sexy animals.”

He’s not kidding. In fact, he’s deadly serious, as he is for the duration of the interview, bar the moment he threatens to hunt out his 1970s tartan trousers to help him get in the Scottish spirit. Hughes-Games, 56 – a zoologist who used to hang out with the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Greta Scaachi in his twenties – is the loud and flamboyant one of the group. Strachan sits somewhere in the middle and, if she’s not shaking her head, she’s eye-rolling with mock exasperation at her co-presenters.

The programme’s new location at Aigas Field Centre nestles in a wooded glen and is surrounded by dramatic mountains, and is home to some of the UK’s most iconic animals, from highland specialists to familiar garden birds. In the forest, there are red squirrels, pine martens, red deer and crested tits. Birds of prey cruise over the moorland, while foxes and small mammals hunt in the undergrowth, and a loch is home to a family of beavers.

Autumnwatch will use cutting-edge technology to track animals 24 hours a day during this series. Many mammals are only active at night, so thermal cameras will provide a unique insight into their rarely glimpsed nocturnal lives. The latest macro camera technology will also reveal the fascinating, hidden worlds of tiny creatures that normally go unnoticed. And a network of live mini cameras will follow all of the key species on site. For the first time Autumnwatch plans to show viewers what happens inside a beavers’ lodge as they prepare for winter. And the cameras will attempt to capture the secretive world of the pine marten.

Hughes-Games is particularly excited about showcasing the red deer that roam the island of Rum, as Autumnwatch is set to capture the annual rut, where stags will battle it out for the right to mate. With all of the dominant stags having disappeared, for the first time in a generation of deer, scientists have no idea who will prove the most powerful. “It’s life and death. Imagine 180kg of furious muscle behind a point that could bore straight through your skull,” says Hughes-Games. “I’d say it’s the greatest wildlife spectacle we have.”

Across the four days of Autumnwatch, the programmes will follow the stories of individual stags as they battle for dominance in what promises to be the most dramatic rut ever seen. The stakes couldn’t be higher – the winner will get the right to mate. The loser may lose his life.

The programme will also try to capture a spectacle never before filmed in the UK– a family of Golden Eagles hunting – and Packham will attempt to unlock the secrets of the ancient Caledonian forest, home to crossbills, capercaille and red deer.

Autumnwatch will be more interactive than ever, with 24-hour live action available for viewers. Fans of the programme will also be asked to contribute their own photographs and to share experiences of wildlife spotting in their own neighbourhood.

With so much rich material on their doorstep, none of the presenters are worried about filling empty time during the hour-long live shows. “We’re always very confident we can produce a programme,” says Packham. “If the animals don’t turn up or if it pours with rain it’s actually part of our story. In fact I can’t think of a programme over the series where we couldn’t have run it for another hour, because we’ve had so much material.

“I mean, I’d happily tell you about the life of a worm for five minutes if you’re interested, so there’s always something there.”

Unsurprisingly, each of them are different in the way they prepare for the cameras to start rolling. “When you’re 60 seconds to air, Chris will start some joke or random story, Martin tests himself to see if he can listen and react at the right time and I’m the type that needs to focus,” says Strachan, 46, though she does try to keep things in perspective.

“You want to do the best you can but it’s only telly. I’m not doing brain surgery on someone. Imagine being a brain surgeon and having a bad day?” she adds, laughing.

Packham is particularly relaxed before shows: “I never feel nervous, ever. It’s an hour-long conversation and you frequently have hour-long conversations in the pub, that’s the way I see it. I don’t prepare to talk to my mates down the pub. I go down there and see what’s happening and join in.”

“But Chris, I’ve been to the pub with you and sometimes it’s very boring,” says Strachan, who has known Packham since they presented The Really Wild Show along with the late Terry Nutkins in the early 1990s.

“I quite like it when it all goes completely wrong,” says Hughes-Games. He recalls a time when his show’s generators shut down and they went off air. “When it’s so disastrous, you just think, ‘Oh well’,” he says with a shrug.

And at least they have one another to lean on. “That’s the benefit of there being three of us, as we’re all there to help each other out,” says Packham.

“And Chris’s mind works incredibly well,” says Strachan. “He’s the one that knows the inside leg measurement of every animal. He has the most incredible brain for facts. It’s all just there.”

This will be the eighth series of Autumnwatch, and over the years the show’s accrued some “super-fans”.

“Yes, well we do have some people who are a bit over enthusiastic,” says Hughes-Games. “We do like people to send stuff in, but we’ve had a mummified bird that someone had dragged out from a chimney, and we’ve opened packages and there was stuff crawling inside. But that’s great.”

And it’s that viewer interaction that sets the show apart, he says. “There’s an intimacy about it, which is quite unusual. It’s like a family almost. A very dysfunctional one, but you do want to be there with that family, and that relationship with the audience is critically important. We want to nurture that.”

• Autumnwatch is on BBC Two from Tuesday 30 October to Friday 2 November.  www.bbc.co.uk/autumnwatch