Just after Phil Drabble started his 90-acre nature reserve, hunting hounds invaded it and began scattering the deer. When Drabble asked the huntsman to remove them, he was told that the hounds had followed their fox into the reserve, as they were legally entitled to do. After some discussion Drabble went back to his house to fetch his rifle. In full view of the hunt, he pushed in a cartridge. "Now are you going to take them out?" he inquired. They were taken out. Somehow, after subsequent frank conversations with the hunt, he found himself invited to its supporters' dinner.
In short, Phil Drabble, who has died aged 93, was a shrewdly militant naturalist who loved the countryside long before BBC2 made him the "star" of One Man and His Dog, in which he succeeded in drawing a television audience of six million for a series of sheepdog trials. He was distinctly not a man to cross, neither before nor after he learned how publicity could help fight his battles against what he called "green welly wallies", "smart-arsed industrial consultants who are the parasites of a get-rich-quick society", "agri-chemical fat cats", "parish pump politicians" and "petty bureaucrats", who all in their way - in his view - spoiled the purity of the countryside to which all decent Englishmen aspired.
Though he commanded only 90 acres in the grim, industrial Black Country, Drabble's influence was immense and his practical experience of commerce, conservation, agriculture, landscaping and the media made him unique.
To the British, Drabble was certainly more than a naturalist. He was a talisman of how weekending countrymen would like to see themselves. Drabble himself had became a permanent countryman at the age of 47, when he threw up a directorship of an engineering company to live by his writing and broadcasting and for his Goat Lodge nature reserve at the back of his Rugeley home.
He was born in the Staffordshire village of Bloxwich, where his father was a GP. As a child, Phil would go out exploring the butterflies, newts, goldfinches and linnets in the acres of wasteland. An old man told him how to make plants grow by watering them with a pregnant girl's urine. It was not a conventional education; he was miserable at school and escaped on lone nature treks, but had an understanding headmaster who treated his unusual behaviour with a serious respect. His mother died when he was nine, and he was bullied at school.
He went to Keble College, Oxford, to study medicine, but jibbed at cutting up human corpses. He instead transferred to a London polytechnic to study engineering. After graduation his father wangled him a job at a local engineering firm and then he moved to Salters, where he stayed for 23 years, ending up on the board and controlling 1,800 men.
While still at the factory, he wrote his first article for the Field. It was rejected by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, then editor, but he suggested Drabble try a subject he knew more about. Drabble wrote a piece on Staffordshire bull terriers, which the Field published in 1941. He continued to write for the magazine until 1989, and when Vesey-Fitzgerald moved to the publisher Robert Hale, Drabble was asked to write a county guide, Staffordshire (1948), followed by Black Country (1952). He wrote more than 20 books.
It was Vesey-Fitzgerald who suggested broadcasting. In 1947 Drabble made his first radio programme about the Black Country's Bull Rings for BBC Midland region and contributed to the rural programme Countrylover before presenting its successors, Countryside and In the Country, for the next 13 years.
From 1952 he began to make television appearances, and by 1961 his writing and broadcasting were taking up so much time that he left Salters and the following year bought a cottage and 90 acres of land on the edge of the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley, which was home to herons, hawks, owls and deer.
Drabble's policy was to construct and maintain a protected environment so that his wildlife would thrive, breed and overflow into and stock the surrounding countryside. Together with his wife, Jess, he tried to make Goat Lodge self-financing. Six years after buying it, Drabble won a Countryside Commission award for projects which had "produced some physical improvement to the countryside of England or increased the awareness and understanding of the countryside".
Then in 1976 came One Man and His Dog, which brought him national fame. He continued to present the show until he was nearly 80, when in 1993 he handed over to Robin Page. That same year he was awarded an OBE.
He wrote about the philosophy behind his nature reserve in the books My Beloved Wilderness (1971), Design for a Wilderness (1973), and My Wilderness in Bloom (1986). Then "the men in Mercs" arrived. CenterParcs planned to set up a £75m leisure complex adjacent to his peaceful reserve. Well-wishers told him he had no chance of winning against £75m - the district council backed the scheme although the parish council was against. Drabble suspected backhanders. He was now in his mid-70s. Jess worried, but Drabble reacted as he would have done as a young man.
Drabble dismissed "consultancy" offers presumed to be from rival developers - one worth £100,000 - and stuck to his guns. The Forestry Commission was stiffened in its reluctance to sell its lease of the land that would have been used for the leisure centre. CenterParcs wisely backed off. In 1993, a year after getting the Forestry Authority's centres of excellence award, he formed a trust to control his undisturbed reserve, supervising a management committee composed of powerful conservationist organisations. He had effectively won indefinitely the battle for the birds against the massed balance sheets. Bernard Shaw (who Drabble once spotted at the Authors' Club) might well have described Drabble as "not a reasonable man - a fanatic with a sense of humour."
Drabble continued as a terse and opinionated author and journalist well into his 70s. In 1985 he wrote What Price the Countryside, in which he argued that the Ministry of Agriculture had caused more havoc to wildlife and the countryside than any other government department, egged on by wealthy farmers and other large financial interests.
Despite this, a respectable number of MPs attended a House of Commons reception on the publication of his 1991 autobiography A Voice in the Wilderness, proving that although a maverick, the self-deprecating but tenacious professional countryman, who was proud that he had never lived more than 20 miles from his place of birth, did not lack friends. Jess predeceased him.
· Phil Drabble, naturalist, polemicist and broadcaster, born May 14 1914, died July 29 2007