Mammals Born to Be Wild

Some animals are notoriously difficult to see.

Can you see it? You don't know what you're looking at, do you?!

Many only come out at night...

No, we can't come in here now.

Others hide in holes or up trees...

It's a bit deeper there, Gordon. Gordon!

And some just like to keep their heads down...

I'm checking whether this is one woozle or two weasels or whatever Christopher Robin said.

But this doesn't deter the devoted and plucky folk who make up Britain's secret wild army.

Four animals, four amateur naturalists, four inspiring stories.

BIRDSONG # Dee, de-de, dee, dee... #

Gordon, what have we got singing over there at the moment? Willow warbler, or a black cap?

It takes more than a spot of rain to put these three intrepid gentlemen off their regular wildlife mission.

We were waiting for that.

Think there was a stitchwort there, and a campion...

In the depths of a Devonshire wood are 50 nest boxes,

all carefully mapped and meticulously numbered, and all of them need inspecting.

This is more like jungle exploration!

Leading this dedicated band is retired biology teacher Tom Maddock.

Where is it?

Oh, there we are.

Right.

This is going on this stone, then I can open the box.

I always think this is like Christmas, cos you never quite know what you're gonna find.

And, in fact, what we've got is a brood of blue tits.

That was box number one and 49 to go!

Something's been in there, a slug...?

Finding a nest of blue tits might be treasure enough for some,

but Tom and his team are after something much more unusual.

I can see, um, shreds of plant material, so I'm gonna take this one down.

Ten or 15, Gordon?

Oh! Ha-ha! Now...

Wonderful, isn't it? Look at that. Isn't that brilliant?

What we have here is a torpid dormouse. There we are.

This is the reason for our quest.

It's a delightful find, but it's not just for personal pleasure.

Tom and his friends are part of the National Dormouse Monitoring scheme,

volunteers who are qualified to handle and study this rare and endearing mammal.

No other rodent spends half its life sleeping.

These will sleep for six months of the year, and they will normally

start to wake up about midday, they're late risers.

He doesn't want to show me his special parts. Hee-hee!

He's very coy, this one.

I would say...that we have...

We have a male here.

You can see a tiny penis.

So what I'm gonna do next is weigh the animal...

This one's 19.8.

19.8.

A good weight.

Tom's love of wildlife is part of a great British tradition.

For centuries, like-minded amateur naturalists have watched and recorded everything that moves

and grows, making Britain the best-studied place on Earth.

Like many others, Tom was first inspired when he was just a boy,

and it's all down to this man, HG Hurrell.

Oh, Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful, for Christ's sake. Amen.

Hurrell's family is a family of naturalists.

His younger son, Kenneth, his daughter Elaine, who runs a section of the Bristol Naturalists Society.

Their mutual love of wildlife forms a deep family bond of understanding.

Hurrell was himself an amateur naturalist.

His knowledge and interest was infectious.

HG came to school once and showed films at school.

I was trapped by that, really.

And he was to me something of an idol.

And I thought, "This is what natural history's all about."

HG died in 1981, but his daughter Elaine, now in her 70s, is still a good friend, and mentor, to Tom.

Hello, Elaine.

Hello, Tom. Come inside.

Right, we've managed to complete the whole check. There's our first dormouse,

-in number nine, nicely torpid, so that made for ease of handling.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah, so that was good.

-Yeah.

So that was that one.

It means a lot to Elaine that Tom is carrying on the dormouse work

she and her father started back in the 1950s.

We've got three in here.

I suppose my father was very interested in recording anyway in all kinds of observations.

His diary was kept for something like 60 years.

You know, it's extremely interesting now to read them, of course,

because he said, "I saw a beautiful mouse tonight, absolutely perfect,

"lovely tail, and I had a really good view of it."

And that's what we were doing, was watching for dormice behaving naturally in the wild.

Through their dedicated dormice watching, the amateur naturalists made a significant discovery.

"Late October, I happened to walk under a large hazel bush

"about 100 yards from our house,

"and found that other creatures besides squirrels had shown interest in the nuts.

"I picked up over 30 shells from which the kernels had been extracted through a hole at one side.

"This could not possibly be the work of squirrels.

"It appeared even at a glance to be the work of mice."

They were very good carpenters, dormice, I always remember that.

And they have a tiny chiselling effect on the edge of the hole.

The discovery of these distinctive calling cards

mean that you no longer have to see dormice to know they're there.

So Elaine was asked by the Mammal Society to do a survey.

For the first time, it was possible to produce a dormouse map of Britain.

The survey was, when you look back on it, was great fun.

It was hard work as well, but...

Jumping in the bramble bushes to look for nuts!

Today Tom is building on that knowledge.

Ah, you can see its front feet quite well...

Ah, it's on the move, I'm gonna have a job to sex this one, I think.

The total weight now is 55.3...

So that's a gram or so more than that female.

All this weighing, sexing and measuring goes to the People's Trust For Endangered Animals.

Sadly, dormice are on their list.

It's an amazing creature that has been in this country for

thousands of years, and up till, well, perhaps maybe...only about

50 years ago, we started to get to grips

with how this animal behaved, and what it was doing,

and because we now have more data about dormice

than maybe any other small mammal in this country,

any effects of global warming might first

appear in a creature like this, which has a completely different strategy from all the others.

It's vital that amateurs like these keep an eye on animals like dormice,

and it's lucky their sleeping habits allow us to see them easily.

But hidden in a wooded valley in Gloucestershire, other mammals

have chosen a less accessible, but much grander place for a bedroom.

Woodchester estate was bought by William Leigh in 1845.

He commissioned architects to build a forbidding gothic mansion, but the house was never finished.

It was mysteriously abandoned 23 years later.

Visitors have reported sightings of a headless horseman, and even a floating coffin!

No wonder it has the reputation of being one of the most haunted houses in Britain!

And up in the ancient rafters are some residents who certainly add

a frisson to the place - but to see them, you have to wait until after dark.

SQUEAKING

The horseshoe bats are famous for their noses.

It just blasts its echo-location sounds through its nostrils

into what is like a parabolic reflector, it's like a torch beam.

Then they get these beautifully focused beams of ultrasound,

which make them incredibly good at distinguishing fine detail.

They can discriminate between different types of insects

while there are flying, in ways that are very difficult to understand.

Despite being the largest and longest-living bat in Britain,

its numbers have plummeted by 90% over the last 100 years,

making it one of our rarest species.

But this is the first file I had to do my project.

We did basic descriptions of the habitat...

Roger Ransome was the ultimate schoolboy naturalist.

I started working on bats in 1956 as part of a school project.

I felt that this was a really good area to get into

because there was very little known about the natural history of bats.

It was known that bats live a long time.

They actually can live up to 40 years.

I got the art prize for Cheltenham Grammar School in the first year.

We had heard that there were lots of bats coming out of Woodchester mansion.

And we made an attempt to get in while we were at school.

The man who had the lease on the mansion wasn't too keen on sixth-formers wandering around,

and it wasn't until 1959 that I persuaded him that, really, I was an upright and honest person...

Roger's schoolboy persistence has continued for 51 years.

His study of the bats in Woodchester has been going on longer

than any study of any mammal in the whole world!

When I started, I was doing all the basic biometric measurements that I still do today.

We're now through something like 10 generations, it's just keeping it

going consistently for that period of time which makes it become valuable.

The computer says 107 bats went out.

Nowadays, the computer is the saving grace.

I could not process data without it.

That's where Michael, my grandson, comes in, cos he's my IT adviser.

Are yours coming out, Gemma?

We've only got three out so far.

Every week, Roger and his army of volunteers use a mass of technology to monitor the bats.

Ted and Gemma are...have swung the cameras around, so that they are counting the bats flying out to feed.

If the bats go out when it's very, very bright, we know they're diet-stressed.

If they go out when it's very dark, we know they've got plenty to eat, and they're fine.

This one...

Well, this is to look for

behaviour patterns between animals that we know are related to each other.

And the associations seem to be mainly between the females.

This is a female-dominated society,

er, and what we have is a series of matrilines,

lines of bats that go back to a single female.

And all together, we've got something like 15-17 matrilines in the colony, so it's a large number.

The more I find out, the more there is to find out.

The complexity of this animal is just utterly amazing.

It's been around 40 million years, and, er, we're pretty recent arrivals on the scene.

They have an incredibly complex social organisation,

vocal communications, which we're only just beginning to understand.

Right, so, I'm going through this hole...

But it's not all hi-tech, and you do need to stay in shape.

Once the bats have left the roost, Roger can get in.

Well, how else can you collect your weekly bat droppings?

This yellow sheet is beneath the attic space that we were looking at.

I'm gonna take them back to my house,

dry them all out, and then we'll treat them in solutions,

and we're left with the skeletons of the insects, which we can recognise under the microscope.

And all jolly good fun.

We do it week in, week out, and we see how the diet changes.

That's quite a lot, really, for one week.

They're feeding well at the moment.

The other thing we have to do is to check the state of our cameras.

Roger has contributed to 34 scientific papers.

And in 2002, he co-wrote the European Action Plan,

which gives better protection to greater horseshoe bats.

They do say scientists have their most productive work by the time they are 30 or 40.

I think that depends on the type of work you're doing.

To make generalisations about what's going on, you do need long periods of time.

When you've got a bat that lives 30 years,

then really you should do 60 years to be sure that the first 30 years is the same as the second 30!

But will Roger ever feel like he's done enough?

First of all, I thought when you got to 40, you were past doing these sorts of things,

then I thought, "Well, perhaps when you get to 50, you're past it."

And at the moment my wife thinks that it's high time that I hung up my boots.

To be fair to her, it will have to come one day.

Determination is the watchword for mammal lovers.

Their dedication spans decades.

These long-term studies often provide the information others need

when planning our modern world.

Thank goodness amateur naturalists have the stamina and commitment

to keep going.

I want to be someone who knows as much as possible

about European brown hares.

And I'd much rather be here even though it's raining

than sitting in an office.

I'm not just standing here getting wet.

I'm pursuing something I really want to do.

This pretty suburban garden in Hertfordshire

just 15 miles from London is surprisingly close

to where Gill Turner likes to spend most of her time.

It's 5.30 in the morning

and Gill is already on her way.

She is one of only a handful of amateur naturalists in the UK

studying the secretive brown hare.

I prefer to come out in the early morning

because the light's better then

and there's more chance of seeing them still grazing from the night before.

I've been aware of the hares in my area for many years.

I started to wonder what they were up to basically

and try and understand why their numbers were dwindling.

It was the Romans who introduced hares to this country

about 2,000 years ago.

They were once widespread throughout Britain

but have now disappeared from many places.

When you see something

running at...that looks like a very large rabbit

running at 45mph across in front of you,

you can't help but think Britain's fastest mammal,

you know, that's incredible.

For 15 years, Gill has immersed herself in the life of hares,

honing her field skills, so she can get as close as possible.

We're just coming up to the meadow where I know the hares are

so if possible could we be quiet and creep over there without making too much noise?

(Thank you.)

Keep this way.

Can you see down there?

Can you see that brown...?

There's two hares down there...

together.

Did you see that at all? Oh, dear.

Sometimes it takes the eye of a true amateur to spot what's hiding in the field.

Can you see them?

I can see two hares.

They're both grazing.

I think they're siblings, part of a group of three.

I suppose there's a possibility that...

..as they get older they'll attract...

..bucks.

Shall we try and get a bit closer? OK.

Probably in this length of grass,

the first the first thing you'll see are the ears.

When I'm photographing them, and if they come really close to me,

I have a job to keep my camera steady because it's so exciting.

Each time I think, "Oh, I've obviously got a brilliant photograph this time."

SHE LAUGHS

CAMERA CLICKS

Gill's photos help her to understand behaviour

and identify who's who.

If it's a buck and a doe,

it's possible that they'll completely ignore me

because they're fully occupied in what they're doing.

And with youngsters,

they're so oblivious,

especially if they haven't had any contact with humans anyway

but they're easy to photograph.

I think they're animals that not many people know much about.

And there's so much more to a hare than just looking like a big rabbit,

you know.

Their life is complex, it really is.

These beautiful and entrancing animals have declined dramatically over the last 100 years,

so more information is needed to help them survive the modern world.

Gill's observations go to her local records office

and it's vital studies like these continue through generations.

My mentor was Tony Holly.

He lived in Somerset and he was well-known in his field.

I wrote to him

and he called me

almost straight away.

And I was overwhelmed, actually, it was wonderful

that somebody as important as him should take an interest in somebody

who hadn't got any scientific background.

It was great. He really encouraged me.

When he died, I felt very much alone in my work

because I'd had somebody to report to.

Sometimes when I'm on my own and I'm wet and I'm cold...

..and I haven't seen a hare,

I think to myself, "Why am I doing this? Does anybody really care?"

And I've got friends who think I'm mad, but I like to think that I've got enough field experience

and I've spent enough time watching the hares without interfering with them,

that I have gained some knowledge

and possibly seen things that other people don't see.

Hares, like most mammals, find themselves at the rough end of human development.

Intensive agriculture, housing, industrialisation

and roads all take their toll.

One mammal in particular was pushed right to the brink of extinction.

Rare, elusive...

nocturnal...

No wonder James Williams in Somerset has to make do with decidedly unglamorous evidence.

We're going to go to the otter loo,

or what I call the otter loo,

which is a pile of stones in the stream,

which I check every day.

They leave a nice juicy heap of pooh, if I'm lucky, a nice spraint.

That means that I can tell the frequency with which this stream is used by otters

which gives some indication of the level of population.

It's very difficult to see an otter.

I've never seen one here.

If I wanted to see an otter at the otter loo, I'd have to sit on the bridge for half the night.

So this is the otter loo.

This is the side stream of the River Tone.

Oh, my goodness!

They must have known you were coming because that set of footmarks there,

that's otter padding going upstream.

I washed that sand yesterday

and there wasn't any otter padding at bedtime last night,

so I'm very pleased.

On my little stream. Excellent.

At the moment I'm quite excited because I think I've got a bitch and cub

and so I'm checking to see whether this is one woozle or two weasels,

or whatever Christopher Robin said.

But I think an otter would go one, two and be off

and the fact that we've got more, I'm hoping that that is the cub

and that's the mother there.

And this spraint...

That's a very typical otter spraint,

a sort of black shapeless, crinkly object...

..which it gives me great pleasure to see.

Otters signal to other otters by leaving their pooh on a rock

as a smelly warning that this bit of river is already occupied.

Trespassers are not welcome.

Why otters and not any other species?

Because all other species are inferior.

Rabbits are worse at being rabbits

and, er...

any fool can be a guinea pig or a fox.

But it takes an expert to be an otter.

They really are in control of themselves, in control of their environment,

they're just a very exceptional grade of animal.

HUNTING HORN IS BLOWN

James's admiration came out of a long but unusual relationship

with otters.

We were totally involved in otter hunting.

Father was master of the otter hounds

and so was I eventually.

In those days, there was no form of conservation

other than the hunts, really,

who paid money to the farmers where otters were found

who gave Christmas presents to gamekeepers to not trap the otters to destruction,

so the hunters were the conservationists of the day.

When the decline came and pesticides started to harm the otters,

it was the hunts that drew attention to this

and the hunts that provided most of the data which enabled people to get to grips with it.

I do think since the 1940s

I have accumulated

a body of experience and knowledge

which ought to be recorded

and passed on

because the rivers are not in a totally healthy state now.

They're cleaner to the eye,

they don't smell as much and if we want to have some wildlife

we need a new generation of people to come along.

James's passion for otters led him to run the Somerset Otter Group,

an 80-strong band of amateur naturalists

who routinely check a particular stretch of river.

By putting all the data together,

he gets a unique insight into the local otters.

We gradually build up a picture of evidence,

a bit like lots of little creatures build up the Great Barrier Reef.

Little bits, little bits, little bits all add together.

It may not seem as if you're making a lot of difference

but I have had one or two things which I think were of importance.

We picked up a dead otter and sent it away for analysis

and it turned out to hold a world record

of dieldrin at a time about six, seven years after dieldrin had been banned

and it was traced back with the help of some experts

to a government cloth factory

where they were using dieldrin.

We found that. The public do help.

The fishermen do help.

Farmers help.

Birdwatchers are a very great source of information.

We put it all together and gradually we're getting most of the jigsaw.

In some ways, it's a thankless passion,

not least because James never sees an otter on his land.

Does it take dedication?

I suppose it does take dedication to study a species that you never see.

This nomadic creature comes mysteriously through my garden at night.

It doesn't give twopence about us.

It's just going through the river as it has done for hundreds of years.

Our presence is nothing to the otter,

but the otter's presence is everything to me.

Otters, like all our animals, need people who care deeply about them.

Our British wildlife needs a healthy environment

and it doesn't take much to upset the balance.

Otters live right on the cusp of what it is possible for them to live.

If the otters go, it means the streams are in a mess.

It means the fish are in a mess. It means the dragonflies are in a mess.

It means that kingfisher that just came past us won't come past.

If the otters can't hack it, nobody can hack it.

We've got to have clean rivers.

The hallmark of the amateur British mammal lover

is dedication -

and thank goodness.

Without them, many of our mammals might quietly disappear

without most of us noticing.

To know more about the skills needed to be a mammal watcher,

log on to our website...

Next time, on Born To Be Wild,

passions run high for the small and understated.

They're about two millimetres across.

HE LAUGHS

The rare and elusive...

There's not enough...

The less than glamorous but fascinating...

Eugh!

And the minibeasts that keep our rivers alive.

-That's it.

-What's he doing in there?!

Join our amateur naturalists as they watch over The bugs Of Britain.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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