Bugs Born to Be Wild

All over Britain are people who love the little things in life.

They're about two millimetres across.

They don't mind where they find them.

Because it's very molten, they often swim in it.

They'll face any danger.

It's a bit like the great Grimspound Mire.

And they'll happily get soaking wet.

Come here, you lazy sods.

They do it for love not money, finding beauty in the things many of us think of as pests.

Four creatures, four amateur naturalists, four inspiring stories.

98% of all the animals on earth are invertebrates.

Many people just want to squish, swat or spray them,

but in the depths of Suffolk there's one man who just loves them,

he invites them wholeheartedly into his life.

We're going out of the garden area proper and into the fields.

It gets quite overgrown.

I've planted this up for insects, butterflies, and bees.

We dug out some of the drainage ditch. We get dragonflies and damselflies breeding in it.

There's lots of rot holes which are good for some of the rarer flies.

We also get some slightly unusual ladybirds on the trunk.

This is Phil Wilkins.

Three years ago, he brought his family to live here, but the house wasn't the main attraction.

We'd always wanted somewhere where there was land so that I could turn it into a nature reserve.

Most people probably would look at the house first, but we looked at the land.

For Phil this was a dream come true.

The house came with three unspoilt acres, just ripe for turning into insect heaven!

Does this look a good one? Lift it over.

That's a mini dung beetle.

I've had an interest in insects

since I was quite young, about seven or eight.

'I think it's probably the diversity of them'

and the ease of studying them.

Even just looking in the dung you can find a vast array of things quite easily.

I've found a beetle in the cow pooh.

'After a while, you start appreciating how

'really quite beautiful they can be.' This one, look...

So to get more six-legged creatures, he got some four-legged ones!

If we hadn't managed the grassland at all, it would have just scrubbed over.

The cows are really just for maintaining a grassland.

They are our lawn mowers really.

I've got it on my finger.

A ladybird larva.

A lot of commercially bred cattle are given worming agents,

which are still active in the dung, whereas these cows

don't have any worming agents, so we have a lot of beetles and a lot of flies within the dung.

Even his wife, not a natural entomologist, seems to have caught the bug.

When I first met Amanda, she thought it was a bit strange that I was quite so interested in insects.

Over time, I think I have gradually won her over.

Now, if she finds something she thinks is slight unusual,

she jots down how many legs it had, how many wings and the exact colours.

Certainly non-entomologists are notoriously

useless at telling you what an insect looked like.

They'll tell you that they found this great, big, green beetle and expect you to know what it is.

Often a feature which tells you what it is, they won't have even noticed.

Bug lovers need an eye for detail and Phil devotes hours to

meticulously painting the intricate features of hundreds of insects.

Some species are very easy to tell just in the hand, but other species it may just be the direction

of the hair or the length of part of the cuticle.

The beauty of painting the insects is that you have to concentrate on

the different proportions and get them exactly right.

Certainly my identification skills have improved immensely since I started painting the insects.

This extraordinary talent also has therapeutic value.

When you do paint - I mean, I quite often have music on -

you just completely immerse yourself in the painting

and just get away from everything else that is happening.

Phil works in a local hospice as a consultant in palliative care.

Hello, how are you feeling today then?

Not too bad today.

'The medical training is...

'There are various things you learn in your medical training. You have to have a very analytical mind,

'which is helpful for analysing what the insects are doing.'

How to classify the insects, you have to have

quite a broad approach to things and not be closed minded as to what things could be.

Also trying to be quite ordered in your thinking.

People who don't work within palliative medicine often think it's depressing,

but actually you feel that it is one of the few areas in which we achieve quite a lot for people.

You can actually make a dramatic difference to people's lives so it is quite life-affirming.

You sweep through the taller vegetation and the aim

is to dislodge the insects and the invertebrates off the vegetation into the net.

You have to do it very quickly, because otherwise a lot of the flying insects will disappear.

The moth records all go to the county moth recorder.

The butterfly records go to the county butterfly recorder.

All of my hoverfly records have gone off to the national scheme.

I'm trying to put together my dragonfly records for the national scheme for that.

With some of the smaller groups, there aren't so many schemes for recording those,

but hopefully, if schemes start been set up, I can start sending some of the records off to them.

This is Cantharis Rustica, a soldier beetle.

They are called soldier beetles because of their bright coloration.

The blue ones are sometimes called sailor beetles.

We're used to looking at exotic creatures from other countries and just because they're much bigger than

the things we've got here, people think they are something special.

Whereas here, our main diversity and attractiveness are the smaller invertebrate species.

Even the children have started appreciating how attractive

they can be, and getting quite a lot of pleasure out of it all.

These ones grow up into a wasp-like insect.

All this insect activity provides hours of fun, but Phil's passion has a serious role too.

We certainly are seeing more and more species that weren't here when we first moved here.

This can act as a reservoir.

Establishing quite a good population here, to then move to other neighbouring vicinities,

so we're hoping we are having an impact on the general population of invertebrates round here.

People like Phil are vital because bugs support all life.

They're food for other creatures, they pollinate plants,

they break down the dead and deal with the dung.

Without a rich diversity of insects, nothing could survive.

Including us.

But the value of some creepy crawlies is harder to appreciate, because you just can't see them!

They're about two millimetres across.

But small or not so small, finding them is a matter of skill and having the right kitchen equipment.

David Long is a retired civil servant and is fascinated by

the understated and tiny world in the undergrowth.

We're heading to Siccaridge Wood, which is one of my favourite places.

We've got little bits of shell and the odd insect larva.

But it's mainly

vegetable matter in here.

Exciting is perhaps too strong a word.

I get excited when I find something really good or somebody else finds it for me.

I just enjoy it, it's relaxing.

Hidden in walls, in muddy swamps, in the nettle patch, David scrapes,

splashes and scrabbles his way to the lair of the British snail.

We've got an amber snail on a nettle leaf up here,

probably the ordinary amber snail called Succinea putris.

But some snails are infinitesimally small!

I think you do need an eye for detail, yes.

You need to like being out, or you need to be prepared to

progress through a site at a pretty slow speed.

And to spend time looking for what you're hoping to find.

On here we've got Merdigera obscura, this is on the edge of the stone.

It's called Merdigera because it collects mud to disguise itself as nothing on Earth.

The Cotswolds are good for molluscs

because there are lots of large old woods.

They have deep valleys and they are nearly all built on limestone,

which molluscs love because they need it for their shells and to form

an outer skin to their eggs.

Many amateur naturalists dream of the day when they can make

a great discovery,

and for David this happened on a wall in the Cotswolds.

It was the 31st of May 1985.

My wife, Pat and I, had taken my mother, who was then 81, for a walk.

I happened to have a collecting sieve in my hand as I always did in those days.

I saw this wall on the left which looked interesting. It had stone crops and other things on it.

I take my glasses off because

I've got eyes that

can pick up small objects.

So I shook some of the material into the sieve

and noticed that there was a snail in there that I didn't understand.

Fortunately David is a member of the Conchological Society or "Conch Soc"

as it's affectionately known.

This is one of Britain's oldest societies. It was founded in 1876.

It records all molluscs, snails included, so David sent his debris off to them to be identified.

So I sent a letter off with the specimens.

I got a reply back first class post, which was unheard of.

I was a bit awestruck I think!

It turned out that David had re-found a snail

thought to have disappeared from Britain over 100 years ago.

Its name is much longer than its shell, Lauria Sempronii, and it's all of two millimetres long.

Which shows, in the world of small things, big things happen!

It must be one of the rarest snails in Britain because there are very few sites for it.

Given that Lauria Sempronii is only found on two walls in the whole of

the UK, it's not surprising David never found it again.

Until the day we filmed him.

I've just had a poke about, can you come along here?

What have you found?

Well, if you look...

I've lost it again already...

Just by this pinpoint.

There is a little tiny snail and that, I reckon,

is a Lauria Sempronii.

So good, thank you for making me do this!

OK.

It's nice to know it's still around

because I feel a bit sentimentally attached to this bit of wall,

having sort of looked at it over the years.

David has been seriously studying snails for over 40 years.

He has painstakingly divided Gloucestershire

into one kilometre squares, recording all its slimy, tiny inhabitants.

I was recording species I found, where I found them, how many I saw.

David and other snail lovers send their data to

the Conchological Society, who use it to produce snail maps of Britain.

It's important to know this because it helps you to see whether perhaps the climate is changing

or the environment is changing in some way.

David's stomping ground is picturesque Gloucestershire,

a very pleasant place to indulge in a passion.

But one amateur naturalist takes his life into his hands every time he goes out.

The only thing that stands between Tim Beynon and 14 metres

of cold, dark water is a thin layer of soggy peat.

This is Chartley Moss in Staffordshire, a floating bog.

With a bit of luck this is thicker than my usual walking stick, but...

And that is down through into the basin underneath.

You can see it is a dangerous place.

It's a bit like the great Grimspound Mire...

..in the Hound Of The Baskervilles.

Tim Beynon risks being swallowed in a bog for the passion in his life - dragonflies.

He has studied them since he was a child and it's easy to see why he is fascinated.

They're unlike practically every other insect.

The wings move independently.

Each one is powered by its own muscles.

They're not synchronised or anything.

Which means they can hover, they can fly backwards.

They're incredibly manoeuvrable.

And just about every species photographed in level flight

shows that it's got its front pair of legs tucked behind its eyes.

Quite extraordinary.

And this is why Tim makes his weekly pilgrimage to this forbidding landscape.

It has hardly been touched for hundreds of years and it's now a haven for dragonflies.

We're coming out onto the west basin.

Walking, as it were, on the edge of the basin of water

that's underneath, which is why we're reasonably safe at the moment.

Everything that you can see on the right is floating,

including the trees and the heather and everything else.

This is Shooter's Pool.

It's effectively 14 metres deep right down to the bottom of the basin,

but the dragonflies live on the surface edges.

This is where you can see one of Britain's rarest dragonflies, the White-faced Darter.

And it's Tim's all-consuming passion.

If the sun were to burn through, and it's trying, we would see lots

of dragonflies within five minutes of a good spell of sunshine.

But there's not enough sun.

I have never, ever come here in the season and not found one.

And sure enough, with the slightest glimmer of sunshine, the dragonflies appear out of nowhere.

Two White-faced Darters just flew across the pool.

There's one coming up the edge, here.

There's one just going across the surface, low.

Just hovering, coming past us.

Now, we might catch one. I told you they come out in the sun.

I can see it in the net!

You can see why it's called the White-faced Darter, because of its nose.

It's a male, because you can see some red blobs

on the lower part of the abdomen.

But the obvious thing is that white face.

No other British dragonfly has such a white face.

Now, with a bit of luck, it might sit there.

I got particularly interested in this little beast 13 years ago when I came

here to do some felling for what was then English Nature. And saw the first one.

And it's very rare.

I think they're such gorgeous little men.

Tim was so captivated by them, he started a census.

It ran for 10 years.

During the summer he visited twice a week, noting when they emerged

from the water, the stages of growth and their behaviour.

15:45, so they're going on through the day a bit. The main finding was that there were a lot more

White-faced Darter than people had thought, and it was doing very well.

Two stage two.

The best year we had here, when I was actually censusing, over 2,000 emerged from this pool.

Today, Tim still keeps a watchful eye.

Here, she's going to do it again.

These lay eggs by dipping them off the tip of their abdomen into the water.

And she's down in the reeds, here,

dipping away.

There she is. She'll do it again with a bit of luck.

She exudes a little bunch of eggs at her tail end

and then washes them off into the water.

You're lucky to see that.

Females come to water for two reasons only -

one, to meet a male and mate, and two, to lay eggs.

They're like frogs and toads.

You come to what her to look at them because they have to come to water to reproduce.

That's pretty good to see that today.

Over the last 13 years, Tim has amassed a huge quantity of information.

I'm a record nut. I file everything.

And, if you don't keep records, they get lost.

DICTAPHONE: 'Emerging at 16:30.

With the information, I wrote it up for my own interest and then bored a lot of people

with scientific papers on the White-faced Darter at Chartley Moss.

I think I might have advanced knowledge on the White-faced Darter a little bit,

which is nice!

Stage four, body not quite full-sized yet...

Tim, David and Phil get a great deal of personal satisfaction from their love of the invertebrate world.

Theirs is a lifelong passion.

Others come to it much later.

For Dai Roberts, a love of fishing spawned a fascination for bugs.

Well, I'm a self-employed builder.

When I'm not trying to earn a crust, I'm down here or in the pub.

The Rhymney River in South Wales has been a haven for fishermen

for centuries, despite its colourful past.

You hear the river used to run black,

but the state of the rivers now is probably worse than when the collieries

and what have you were running,

due to modern industrial effluent which is entering the river course.

Although the river may look pristine, its beauty is skin deep.

About six or seven years ago, some of the angling people that I knew asked if I would start a club competition.

And we caught no fish.

We didn't see any fish, which is extremely unusual,

because previously, it had been a very good year.

So we did what most anglers do.

We started looking under stones.

And what we found under the stones was basically the bottom of stones.

There were no invertebrates.

Dai alerted the Environment Agency and their tests showed that the river was polluted.

But Dai is not a man to hang up his rod.

He decided to take action.

I found out that some people were using freshwater shrimps as

an indicator species for pollution - the sort of canary in the cage.

The agreement was that we would monitor

the Gammarus, and that the Agency would then react

when we had a mortality amongst the Gammarus.

Come here, you lazy sod!

One of my assistants will carry on from here.

Freshwater shrimps are very common, but also vulnerable to pollution.

Just small amounts will kill them.

So by checking captive ones every day,

Dai and his friends can immediately see if there's a problem.

It looks like they're all alive.

This week, we've got a clean river. We've not lost any Gammarus.

But this isn't always the case.

In December 2006, the team realised something was seriously wrong.

We'd lost, I think it was 50%, Alan.

Yes, we lost nine I think, that week.

We lost nearly 50% in a couple of days.

Obviously then the Agency were contacted and when the results came

back we found that an industrial insecticide, Permethrin, had got into the river.

It's licensed for use in nit shampoo,

domestic insecticides and also as a timber treatment.

It takes something like a teaspoon of Permethrin

in an Olympic-sized swimming pool to kill all the invertebrates.

Firm evidence in the form of dead shrimps meant the Environment Agency could start an investigation.

Meanwhile, people across the country were also raising the alarm about the state of their rivers.

A national scheme was emerging.

Anglers everywhere could monitor their patch and send the findings to the Agency.

The Environment Agency had two things.

One, that they did not want anecdotal evidence. They would like figures.

And secondly that anglers are thickos.

Which is reasonable. We are not entomologists. We are amateurs.

So in order to get reliable data, Dai's team collect a monthly sample

and check for eight easily-identifiable groups of river bugs.

I'm kicking up the stones at the bottom.

Any invertebrates that I dislodge are carried into the net

and we will be able to count them.

If Dai falls in we don't give him the kiss of life.

And if one of us falls in, Dai doesn't give us the kiss of life. We're not kissing him!

Now, we empty the net and hopefully we will find a few invertebrates.

I will go up and do the second half of the site

and Alan and Rob can carry on counting and separating those.

It's a caddis?

Dai and his friends went on a day's training course run by

the Riverfly Partnership,

-where they learnt how to collect samples and hone their ID skills.

-It's all voluntary work.

And it is all angling clubs.

They are the people who understand the river.

They are the ones who are there on a daily basis, and therefore,

they have the opportunity to see any changes in the river.

Now that we're trained in the standard method,

the Environment Agency listen to what we say.

I was conned into it, told it was a free day out.

He didn't tell me about the monthly things, did he?

No, he said we would have a demonstration on how to count these

and, since then, we've been doing it on a monthly basis.

These new-found skills have an added benefit.

It makes them better fishermen!

People tend to over-dress their flies, and use them much larger than they are in real life.

They are, as you can see, very small in real life, and hard to see.

I've gone down three hook sizes since I started doing this.

It's more than that - it's about getting the river right.

We need to get our environment right.

There's a stonefly. Pick up the Gammarus as well.

If you remember

a few years back, you would have enough Gammarus to have a prawn sandwich.

That's true, but it's nice to see them back.

We haven't had them for a while.

In 2007, the national monitoring scheme was launched by The Riverfly Partnership.

Now anglers throughout the UK are monitoring the health of the rivers they fish.

It's so interesting and, as there are no fish to catch, this is the next thing to do.

Anglers have got a vested interest in the rivers.

I think, the more anglers who become involved in the initiative, and the more anglers who are on

the rivers monitoring it, it can only get better.

All our amateur naturalists are doing an essential job.

Because of people like them, Britain has the best-known wildlife of any country in the world.

If we are going to maintain a diverse and thriving natural environment,

we have to look after the building blocks that all life depends on -

our creepy crawlies.

Where would we be without them?

If you want to develop your bug-hunting skills,

then you can log onto our website...

Next time on Born To Be wild... Love at first sight.

-They're all beauties, but this one especially.

-A moonlit walk.

-A hot pursuit.

-There she is, there she is, but she's going, going, going...

Join our amateur naturalists as they keep a watch over Britain's reptiles and amphibians.

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