Coastal Britain's Big Wildlife Revival

Britain's wildlife needs your help.

Many of our favourite wild creatures are under threat.

From persecution.

From pollution.

And alien predators.

Others are losing their homes.

Suffering from injury or disease.

Or just struggling to survive in the modern world.

Some could be extinct within our lifetime if we don't act now.

There's nothing in the sky or even in the trees there, is there?

But you can help bring them back from the brink.

Together we can fight their enemies.

Restore the places where they live.

And stop their decline in its tracks.

Release.

Whoa! Whoa!

So join our campaign.

To save our wonderful wildlife.

For us all to enjoy.

Oh, look!

Ah. Hello to you!

I mean, how can you not just fall in love with that?

The British coast.

For many of us, it evokes memories of summer holidays on beautiful

beaches, exploring rock pools and splashing in the sea.

That's just one tiny aspect of this amazing habitat.

The beaches, the sea cliffs, the headlands

and the islands that make up our coastline.

Mainland Britain has over 11,000 miles of spectacular coastline

and 6,000 different islands.

No-one in Britain is ever more than 70 miles from the coast

and our nation's history,

culture and traditions have been shaped by our close ties to the sea.

Some of Britain's most incredible wildlife lives along our coast.

From huge grey seals to tiny sea horses

and the ocean's giants,

and sea bird colonies that rank amongst

the biggest and most impressive in the world.

Yet for animals living along our shores, things are never easy.

From the daily rise and fall of the tides

to the battering by the wind and waves,

it's a tough place to survive.

But now the animals that make their home here are facing

even greater threats in the form of oil spills,

over-fishing and climate change and if we don't do something to

save them, some of them could disappear altogether.

But we are determined to fight back.

Our team meets some of the animals that need our help.

Bill Oddie discovers the threats facing our favourite sea bird.

Ladies and gentleman, meet the puffin.

Miranda Krestovnikoff has an amazing encounter with dolphins.

Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! I'm not going to stop smiling all day.

And Iolo Williams fights to save our biggest bird of prey.

These birds still face dangers today and it makes my blood boil.

I know everybody says they love coming to the sea, but for me,

what it does it is make me sit and gaze

and I wonder if it's because the sea is so huge

and so untameable that essentially it just puts me in my place.

It's hard to imagine how our actions can make

any impact on something this vast.

For many of us, ocean wildlife is all the way out there.

It's out of sight and out of mind and that means that any

problems or any threats that they face, we simply cannot see.

Beneath the waves, our seas are suffering.

We've taken out too many fish,

destroyed huge areas of the sea bed and put in too many toxic chemicals.

Those are just some of the problems affecting

the wildlife along our coast, as Miranda Krestovnikoff

discovered as she went in search of our best-loved sea mammal.

There are some animals which just, to put it quite simply,

they just make you smile and I defy anyone to have an encounter

with the animal I've come here to see without being moved in some way.

And to meet them

I haven't had to take a flight to Florida or the Bahamas.

I've just come here to Wales

to this beautiful bay that's home to dolphins.

The bottlenose dolphin,

one of the largest species of dolphin in the world.

It's struggling to survive the effects of chemical pollution,

disturbance from boats and climate change.

The bottlenose dolphin is one of more than 20 species of whales

and dolphins regularly seen in our waters.

It can travel at up to 30km an hour, lives mostly close inshore

and can grow up to four metres long.

Whenever I've encountered dolphins, I've always been struck at how

curious and intelligent they are.

They seem to want to seek us out, whether we're on a boat,

whether we're diving under water.

They seem to want to interact with us and maybe that's why people,

including myself, are so passionate about dolphins.

Studying dolphins is difficult

and we need to make sure our entry into their underwater world doesn't

affect the precious few populations we still have around our coasts.

One way we can learn more about them is, sadly, once they've died.

Rod Penrose is the strandings officer for this region

and it's his job to assess what has killed the dolphins,

whales and porpoises that occasionally wash up on our beaches.

These are animals that live way out at sea so it's very

hard to find out information about them in the first place.

They're extremely valuable.

I mean, it's the only way we can tell what's going on with

the population out there, really, so we recover as many as

we possibly can and we carry out a full postmortem.

And what are the major causes of strandings, then?

Pollution has been a problem.

I mean, it's...monitoring for PCBs and heavy metals.

PCBs have declined over the years because they've been banned but

unfortunately, they are still in landfill sites

and they're leaching out.

It really upsets me

that even though these industrial chemicals are no longer used,

there are still traces of them in our seas and they're still

making their way up the food chain via the fish that the dolphins eat.

So Rod's research is vital

to help us understand how to keep them from harm.

We know we have a resident population out there.

We know we can see them and want to study them

but to get the actual carcases is actually quite a rarity.

And that's why it's critical that if anybody finds a dolphin

or a bit of a dolphin lying on a beach,

-that they get in touch with you.

-Yep.

I can't stress enough, yes - we rely entirely on the public

and we would like the public to report everything on the beach.

Even a part of. It's still important.

And people power is making a big difference here.

Cardigan Bay in west Wales is a protected area, thanks to the

high number of dolphins here.

Volunteers for the local marine wildlife trust,

like Phoebe and Sarah, keep a careful watch over them.

I guess a lot of people come here

and have no idea there are dolphins out in the bay.

For sure. It's a big part of conservation.

Making people, local people

and people from away, aware of what we have got on our doorstep.

Sometimes we get asked what time they get fed.

-No way.

-Which is quite interesting.

When you're looking out

and you're doing your survey, what information are you gathering?

Well, day to day, we're here nine to five, doing two-hour shifts.

We're basically taking the weather conditions,

the wind direction and any species we see.

So we take data of dolphins, grey seals and porpoises,

harbour porpoises.

And the main thing we're focusing on is the boat encounters with

any species we see.

Is it mainly boat traffic or are there other risks as well?

Boat disturbance is a threat. Possible bycatch.

I mean, that's not a big issue in this area

but use of netting for fishing is a potential issue.

And obviously pollution is always one of those threats.

They're like the apex predators.

If they disappeared, then there's certainly something going on

lower down in the food chain.

So it's really important that we are here monitoring them.

The land-based surveys help to build up a picture of the dolphin

activity in the area but there's only one way

to study their behaviour close up and that's out to sea.

And I've been lucky enough to be invited to join

the Sea Watch Foundation on one of their research trips.

Ah. Oh, look!

Oh! I'm almost crying.

I'm just surrounded by dolphins.

Ah, I'm not going to stop smiling all day!

Hello. Good morning.

Daphna Feingold is in charge of monitoring the dolphins

here in Cardigan Bay.

The mother is Spot with her calf.

This calf was born last year.

This one in the front, this big male, this is Bond.

-James Bond?

-James Bond. He has a licence to thrill.

-He's big.

-He's very big.

-He's really mean, yeah.

The dolphins in Cardigan Bay are probably

one of the biggest in the world.

-They can get up to about

-four metres. Wow.

And how on earth do you go about estimating

how many dolphins there are?

I mean, when they go beneath the surface,

you don't know what they're doing.

Well, we have two main monitoring techniques.

The first is line transect.

Daphna and her colleagues travel the same route each time they do

a survey, recording every dolphin they see, to try

and work out how many dolphins live here.

-The second way is through photo ID.

-Yeah.

I'm taking photos of their fins

and as you can see, Bond has nicks on the trailing edge of his fin and

through those nicks, we can identify him and we have a catalogue.

We can then estimate the number of dolphins there are in the area.

Woo-hoo-hoo-ha!

And there's another way to find out more

about these fascinating creatures,

using a special underwater microphone called a hydrophone.

You can hear little clicks.

The fraction of the behaviour that we see over the water is so small

than what they're actually doing under water.

Because they might be mating now.

The mother might be teaching her calf to hunt,

-which we can't see any of it, you know.

-And we don't see any of it.

-Whereas you can hear it now.

-Yeah.

Dolphins find their prey

and navigate through the oceans using echolocating clicking sounds

that travel five times faster under water than they do in the air

and, as very sociable animals, they also communicate

through high-pitched whistles.

And they live in this incredibly acoustic world, communicating

with acoustics, but surely there's a negative effect as well with

the noise of boats.

Well, worldwide, I would say the background noise in the seas

has risen and we do see that the whistle characteristics change

when there is a high activity of boat traffic.

It's like us, you know,

when you're standing on a highway and you're talking to your friend,

you'd need to raise your voice and it's the same with dolphins, really.

So, yeah, it's getting all these regulations in place.

We need to keep an eye on these dolphins.

We need to try and understand them as best we can

and we need to really make sure that they're not harmed

or affected by any human activity and I don't want to sound

cliched in any way but there's something about being with

these creatures that really makes you feel glad to be alive and that

is a feeling that I want people to feel for many generations to come.

I'm in for a bit of a treat

because I'm heading to what's been called one of the greatest

wildlife spectacles in the northern hemisphere.

The Farne Islands.

These islands, just a couple of miles off the coast

of Northumberland, are home to an amazing array of wildlife,

including an incredible number of sea birds and seals.

We have some of the best sea bird colonies in the world

in this country and this is a cracking example of what we get.

This whole cliff face is packed with sea birds,

all the way from the rocks

at the very bottom, right the way up to this grassy cliff at the top.

And it's a racket. What have we got?

We've got shags here, feeding a chick. There's guillemots there.

There's a razorbill.

One of my favourites, the markings of a razorbill.

It's absolutely gorgeous.

There's fulmars and kittiwakes and it's noisy and smelly!

It's really hard to describe the smell.

It's kind of urine mixed in with fish.

But the surprising thing of all is that at the end of summer,

come the autumn, the whole cliff face will fall silent

and these birds will head out for a life at sea.

These tiny lumps of rock attract birds from across the world

and the greatest global traveller of them all,

the arctic tern, sets up home in a rather unusual place...

right next to the research centre.

You have to run this gauntlet with me. These arctic terns...

Here's one right here. Hello. ..are less than welcoming, shall we say.

Oh, I tell you what.

The anticipation of being pecked is worse than

being pecked itself.

And the reason that they're this unwelcoming is that if you look down here...

They've nested right next to the path. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Not happy.

I'm getting pecked in the head. Ooh. Oh, my goodness.

That's terrifying and it's the price you pay for being here.

They may not seem too pleased to see me

but they actually choose to nest right next to the path

as the human traffic keeps away the gulls that attack their tiny chicks.

Once the young have fledged, these birds will set off

to Antarctica on a 20,000-mile round trip.

In their lifetime, they can clock up

well over half a million miles on the wing.

They look like quite graceful birds

but the more they come to you,

the more you realise how spiky they are.

Spiky bill. Even their tail streamers look spiky.

Ooh!

Oh, my goodness, they're really unhappy.

Wah! Got me.

Ow! This is not fun. Not fun.

I'm going to take refuge in here.

It's actually drawn blood from my head!

The terns' exposed nests on the ground are very vulnerable

and that is one of the reasons

the Farne Islands are such a good breeding site.

There are no mammal predators such as foxes or rats on the islands

so the young have a far greater chance of survival.

Living alongside these highly protective parents

is National Trust Conservationist Ciaran Hatsell.

Coming here and seeing all these sea birds,

you'd think they're doing absolutely fine,

but there are still threats to them, aren't there?

There certainly are. We don't always get weather like this.

One of the main things that does threaten the sea birds

-is harsh weather.

-Right.

So during the summer we can get some big storms

and they're obviously quite precarious nesters.

Some of the birds actually lay their eggs on the bare rock

and the big storms can wash them down.

So the eggs will go just in bad weather?

The eggs will go and a lot of birds will actually put all that

energy and all that effort into one egg per season, so that season

is pretty much a wipe-out if it happens at this time of year.

What about the arctic terns? How do you get used to it?

My head is still stinging from doing the run.

-Basically, you're putting up with it every day.

-Yeah.

But I know for people coming on, it could seem quite daunting.

These birds are pecking at you.

It looks like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Although, if they nest in the Arctic,

they do exactly the same thing and attack adult polar bears.

So they punch well above their weight.

They're not scared of anything or anyone but if you wear

a hat with some bubble wrap underneath, that does the trick.

-Is that the trick?

-A bit of padding is fine.

No-one told me about the bubble wrap before I got here.

-That would have been useful to know.

-That's a good plan, yeah.

What can we do to help sea birds?

Something as simple as coming and visiting a place like this

and not just the Farnes but all the sea bird reserves around Britain.

So all the money that we earn here and on other reserves as well,

it all comes to the conservation work that we do here which is vital.

Why do you spend months of the year out here?

No running water, only just recently had electricity.

You know, it's not plush accommodation, is it?

Why do you do this?

For me, the sea birds, you get to work so closely with them.

Just from our house, we can watch a bird

turn from an egg into a chick into a flying bird that's going to migrate

thousands of miles and it's a really special place to live, you know.

You see that on your doorstep - it's pretty stunning.

It's all about the sea birds for us.

For me, that's just so special.

Here on the Farnes, we can get incredibly close to these birds.

Yet once they leave our shores, their lives remain a mystery.

But perhaps not for much longer.

Bill Oddie travelled to the Welsh island of Skomer,

where new technology is starting to reveal the secrets

of the nation's favourite sea bird.

It's no secret, really, is it?

I am a bit of a bird-watcher.

In fact, I'm a lot of a bird-watcher.

I've been doing it all my life

and, um, the question I'm often asked is, what is my favourite bird?

It's got another name. Sometimes it's called a sea parrot.

Ladies and gentleman, and definitely children, meet the puffin.

It's very upsetting to think

of this lovely little bird as being threatened, but it is.

Over-fishing, climate change, oil and chemical spills.

It's susceptible to all the perils of an ocean-going lifestyle.

Like most sea birds, puffins breed in colonies on remote islands

and one of the best known is just off the coast of south west Wales.

Skomer.

I like little boats but I tell you what,

I like getting off them even more.

Thank you very much.

It's nice, isn't it?

This place was cut off from the Pembrokeshire mainland

after the last ice age.

It's a national nature reserve and it's bulging with wildlife.

Rocky outcrops and grassy hillsides are dotted with rabbit burrows

and these are perfect places for the puffins to nest in.

Saves a lot of digging, too.

You know, they say you never forget your first puffins and it's true.

I certainly remember mine. It was, er, 1955. I was 14.

I was on the Farne Islands in Northumberland.

We were actually catching them with a bunch of scientists

and putting rings on them to see where they went.

Well, it was that first encounter, where I actually held a puffin

in my hands, that I think gave me an affinity for them, if you like.

I'm now hoping to get up close to them again

and I'm also hoping that you may become as fond of them as I am.

BILL WHEEZES Ooh. I'm turning into a PUFFIN. Get it?

The life timetable of a puffin is pretty extraordinary.

They lay one egg, just one.

Eventually, the little chick will hatch.

It stays in that burrow

for getting on for a couple of months, virtually.

Now here's the extraordinary bit.

When the baby is big enough to leave the burrow,

that baby crawls out of the burrow,

goes to the top of the cliff and throws itself off

and that is the last time that Mum and Dad will see that baby.

It can be out there for something like four or five years

before it comes back when it's old enough to get a mate of its own

and youngsters of its own.

With such a precarious lifestyle,

puffins certainly need all the protection they can get.

Which is exactly what former Skomer warden Mike Alexander has been

doing for ten years.

If in the '80s we were counting 8,500 birds, now they're

-counting 11,500 birds.

-So they've gone up.

And that's the difference. They've gone up substantially.

Quite a few of the colonies up north in particular are decreasing.

Yeah. The northern colonies are decreasing

and we suspect generally that it's because of a shortage of food.

Puffin chicks starve to death in the burrows

because the adults haven't been able to bring enough food back.

Here they rely on sand eels

and, critically, we have been able to manage not just the island.

This, around Skomer, is a marine reserve

and that is critically important.

So that's good news.

In this area, puffins have plenty of food to raise their young,

but elsewhere, if fish stocks are low, puffins are resorting to

feeding their chicks pipe fish,

a bony relative of the sea horse, which can choke them.

Look, there's little rafts of them all round the bay.

They've been out at sea, we know that much,

but we don't know any more than that.

Did they go a long way today and how about in the whole year?

Where do they get to, for example, during the winter?

This is scientist Tim Guilford and he and his team have been

using the latest hi-tech gizmos

to track the puffins' movements.

Now, Tim, back in the old days

we used to put one of these things -

you recognise that, I'm sure -

a little ring, onto the leg of any bird.

This, I have no doubt, has been replaced by something magical.

This is what it is. There you go.

This is a geolocation device to track birds precisely

so we can then plot that on a computer screen like this

and we can see where the bird has gone.

In this case out towards Greenland

and back through the North Atlantic and then down towards Portugal

and the Bay of Biscay in the late winter and then back up to Britain.

So that really did a big circuit, that one, and then back home.

That's right, and we've now tracked this bird for three years in a row

and we see that this bird does the same thing each year.

-It always does the same, does it?

-Yeah.

All this information is absolutely wonderful

but is this helping to explain why we're losing a certain

percentage of the population in the north of the British Isles?

Well, I think knowing now as we do that the Pembrokeshire puffins

go to very different areas in the winter to the areas that

birds from the Isle of May go to is beginning to tell us

something about the causes and that difference must be related

to the difference in conditions of these two areas of the ocean.

And what's your theory?

Well, the two most likely causes are the decline in the sand eel

because of over-fishing and a decline in sand eels

because of a decline in their food,

which ultimately comes down the food chain to the plankton,

because of rising sea surface temperatures...

-Right.

-..in the North Sea.

Now, I don't know that either of those two are true.

-No, I appreciate that.

-But those are my best guesses.

This is just the start of understanding why

puffins from the north of the UK are declining so rapidly.

The biggest threat that puffins face is a lack of food

and the food are sand eels,

that little silvery fish that amazingly they can get about

a dozen into their beak at the same time,

but the evidence is that around the northern coast, in particular,

sand eels are now becoming scarce.

So if there's no food for the birds to eat,

eventually, the birds will have a problem.

What we need is more research into what is happening to our seas,

otherwise the worst could happen.

Let me make a point. Think back.

There was once a big sea bird -

it looked a bit like a puffin - called a great auk

and there were thousands of them

until the middle of the 19th century.

There was another bird which also happened to live on islands.

The dodo. We've all heard of that.

The great auk. Dodo. Completely extinct.

It could happen so let's make sure it doesn't.

Do you agree? Yes. He agrees.

The drop in puffin numbers that Bill was talking about

is a problem hitting us here too.

These wildlife rangers busy at work on a cliff top

are led by David Steel.

On the Farnes, every five years they conduct a puffin census to see

how their numbers are doing.

Now, the last one in 2008 found that their numbers

were down by more than a third,

from 56,000 to 36,000. How are you doing, David?

-Hello, there.

-I've got to tread lightly round here, haven't I?

-There's burrows everywhere.

-It's a bit of a minefield.

-It is, isn't it?

-Come closer.

-I'll need some assistance here.

-Good. I'm excited.

-Indeed.

I'm about to ring this bird, this adult down here.

I'm also going to see what's down there because a lot of the birds

are still on eggs and hopefully we'll have one or two chicks.

-It will be fascinating to find out what's going on.

-OK.

So here we go.

They're long, aren't they, these burrows?

They go down normally about an arm's length, so about three foot,

so some can actually go much further.

So let's see how far this one goes.

I'm just going to have a check here. Here we go.

Sometimes they can bite you as well.

As you can see, I'm going to get my hand very much well and truly dirty.

-We do have a puffin.

-Yeah.

-That's the good news. We have a puffin.

Are you getting bitten?

No. She's quite gentle. Ooh. Look at this. This is a surprise.

I wasn't expecting this today.

-Let's have a look.

-And here we go. This...

-Oh, a chick!

-This is a puffin chick.

I'm just going to let you put it in your hand.

-Can I?

-Absolutely. You've got a good hold there.

-Oh, my goodness.

You're not allowed to say cute when you're a naturalist, are you?

-No, no.

-But how could you not?!

Exactly. It's amazingly cute. Look at that.

It's probably about... In fact, it's not even two days old.

-It's probably just a day old.

-How can you tell?

You can actually see it's...

-This white spot there. You see that little white spot?

-Yeah, yeah.

That's called an egg tooth

and it actually uses it to chisel out of its egg.

-So this puffin chick is probably about a day old.

-Oh, wow.

'David has been checking up on these little balls of fluff for years.

'He knows handling them doesn't do them any harm.'

I'll get the adult out now,

-which is usually a little bit more interesting.

-All right.

They can be a little bit more feisty.

So we'll give it a go and see what she does.

Is she fighting you? Ah, what a beaut!

Here we are. Ah, stunning.

Gorgeous colouring. Wow.

I know what she's just done to my ringing equipment.

Oh, that's lovely, and I'll be using that in a second, won't I?

-You will indeed.

-Fabulous(!)

-The pleasures of ringing birds.

I could do with a ring, please, if that's all right?

Fantastic. Can I just read the ring number out?

-Yeah, go for it, yep.

-So it's EY13253.

'Ringing the adults helps track the puffins' declining numbers.'

So here we go and that's it. He's got its little ring on there

and it's spinning round quite nicely.

-Plenty of room.

-So that's him ringed so that's great news.

So that's one job.

So we're just going to take his wing length.

He's about the size of a bag of sugar with two wings and a beak.

-153.

-153. There we go.

That's the job done and that's him ringed.

Lovely, and why is it important that you do this census at all?

Well, it's really important.

Just in my time I've seen a 33% decrease in numbers

on the Farnes, so it's a good barometer,

not only for puffins, but for sea birds in general.

If these guys are doing well, then everything else is doing well.

Flip side, if they're not, then we've got issues

and we've got to find out what's going on with them.

There's the adult back. Now for the little fella. Is he all right?

-Give us a look.

-I reckon.

-Oh, he's looking very good. Ah, bless him.

-I feel sad to let him go.

-I know. Come on, little ball of fluff.

-Isn't that gorgeous?

-Good luck, little fella. Good luck in life.

-He might need it.

-Absolutely.

Let's hope we see him back in future years.

The thought of not having them in this country is quite a sad one.

That might be my only close-up experience.

Indeed. So I'm just going to just reunite him with mother.

There you go. Fantastic.

-Very good.

-And that's one happy family.

And one very sore thumb.

And one very sore and mucky thumb indeed!

-It's off to the cleaners next.

-Good work.

Puffins dig these deep underground burrows

both to find safety from predators and also to escape the strong winds

that blow here even in summer. Away from the elements

they have a nice warm, dry nest for their young.

Finding shelter along our exposed coastline

is a challenge for any animal,

but can we lend a hand in a coastal garden?

Mike Dilger has been finding out.

Comparatively few of us in the UK live within sight of the sea,

but there is a problem for coastal gardeners

that many of us can relate to as well,

and that is keeping out the driving wind.

With the possible exception of a gull riding the breeze,

few animals seek out a blustery spot.

So a good wildlife garden must provide one very important factor -

shelter.

This can be done even in a really exposed spot

such as here at the most southerly point in Dorset.

The Isle of Portland juts out into the English Channel,

and with few trees to slow down the on-shore wind,

the breeze fairly whistles off the coast,

and so for any animal looking to escape these brutal winds

there is a garden just down here that represents the perfect shelter.

The team at Portland Bill Bird Observatory have been

transforming their strip of coastline over the last 50 years.

Warden Martin Cade is in charge

of what is now a perfect garden for birds.

So, Martin, since the lighthouse became a bird observatory,

how have the grounds changed?

Oh, absolutely immensely.

The field we can see in front of us

used to be a bare open farmer's field surrounded by a dry-stone wall.

Really nothing for little insectivorous birds at all.

So everything we see here,

all the bushes, are all 50 years' worth of sort of planting by us.

I'm curious to see how successful they've been

at cutting out that biting wind.

I've got a lovely view of the English Channel here.

I'm just outside the garden

and I can feel the breeze hitting me on the face.

I've got a special piece of equipment here

called an anemometer that measures wind speed.

If I lift it up there... 24kmph...

Oh, peaking at 30kmph speed.

I'm going to now walk inside the garden and feel the difference,

down these footpaths, and you can see the edge of the garden here

with the elder and this lovely evergreen shrub

which actually is called Japanese spindle euonymus,

and this basically has leaves on all year round,

and if we pop down here you'll find it's much more sheltered.

When I lift the equipment up again, look at the difference.

1.3, 1.2. It's so much calmer in here.

This Japanese spindle can also cope with salt spray

coming in from the sea that will kill many plants.

If you're by the coast you'll need to choose salt-resistant plants

like this one as your first line of defence.

Of course, you don't have to use Japanese spindle in your garden.

You can use all manner of evergreen or deciduous shrubs like holly

or ivy or evergreen oak, hawthorn or blackthorn,

and they all do the same thing -

create a much calmer, warmer, sheltered environment inside.

As soon as the wind speed is reduced

and the salty spray has been filtered out,

more delicate plants can take hold,

such as this gorgeous cluster of primroses

and this lovely periwinkle.

Now, these produce a fantastic source of nectar

and pollen for all manner of insects.

And this is the trick to creating a successful wildlife garden.

Once you've got shelter, plant nectar-rich flowers

to feed the insects, and they in turn will bring in the birds.

The garden at Portland is a perfect example.

This proves a real honey pot.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We're the sort of landfall.

We're the oasis. All the summer migrants that are coming in

to spread all over Britain and northwest Europe

sort of pass through us.

So how many species of bird will you actually see in the garden?

We maybe get 200 species a year.

Sort of 300 ever in this sort of garden.

I once worked out that more birds have been seen in this little spot

than any other single place in the UK.

The bird observatory keeps careful records

of all the species arriving in the garden.

The birds land in the fine mist nets

and then are brought in for a check-up.

It's a blackcap.

It's a nice male, as well, and this bird will need lots of insects

to refuel itself after its journey.

That's right. It's pitched in overnight.

It's got the bushes to feed up in.

It needs lots of little bugs to feed on to keep it going

and then it'll be on its way.

'I've invited some of the local kids for a rare chance

'to get close to the incredible birds flying over their homes

'and stopping in the observatory garden.'

-And release.

-Whoa! That was crazy!

Now, this is Britain's smallest bird.

A nice male goldcrest.

It's absolutely minute.

Fantastic!

This bird weighs the same as that. Isn't that astonishing?

Any idea where this bird might have come from?

-Er, a tree.

-Yeah, they live in trees.

-Any idea what country it might have come from?

-France.

France. Absolutely. This bird has probably come from France

where it spent the winter

and Martin tells me it's going all the way up to Scandinavia,

possibly even as high as Finland. So, who would like to release it?

-Oh!

-Oh, I think your hand came up first.

Right, goodbye, goldcrest. Best of luck

on your journey to Finland.

Wahey! There he goes.

-Wow! Look at that.

-Wow!

-How cool is that?

-It looks like a video game character.

Have a look at the colour in that wing.

-Wow!

-Isn't that beautiful?

-He's well cool.

This bird is a goldfinch.

-It's really nice.

-Isn't it a gorgeous bird?

Are you going to release it?

-OK.

-I'm just going to let it settle down in your hand.

Whoa!

Wasn't that brilliant?!

Did you hear it calling as it flew off?

Where did it go?

It went flying off.

Brilliant. Hopefully we've got some new bird-watchers in the making.

You know, shelter can have an enormous impact on wildlife

and if you've got one of those gardens

where the wind howls through,

why not plant yourself a hedge or put a few evergreen shrubs in?

You'll be amazed at how the wildlife will be enticed in

and once it's in, why not encourage them to stay?

Put up a bird box or two.

Create a huge big flower border packed full of nectar.

That way you'll turn a cold exposed garden into a warm wildlife refuge.

For more inspiration on how to turn your garden

into a haven for wildlife, Mike has advice on our website

and find out what events are taking place where you live

in the BBC's Summer of Wildlife.

Still to come,

Iolo Williams joins the team looking out for our biggest bird of prey.

Here he comes. Look at that! Look at that! Oh, wow.

And I have an underwater encounter

with a species making a great recovery from persecution.

-That was amazing!

-I'm glad you enjoyed it.

There is a complex web of life in the ocean,

starting with microscopic life forms

and building up to the giants of the sea.

We might think that warm tropical seas are best for wildlife,

but there is a huge diversity of creatures

around our own coasts as well.

You might be surprised by what you can find beneath the surface

even here in the North Sea.

This is a hermit crab which is using a dog whelk shell for its home.

Very fabulous, and it's one of many organisms in a single rock pool.

We've got loads of limpets here

which everyone will recognise

and they're fascinating

because when the tide goes out they return to the same spot,

the home scar, as it's called.

This is a butterfish which provides food for the sea birds here.

Now, this one has been caught in this rock pool during this tide,

but they can live down to 50 metres so they do get affected by trawling.

Some kinds of commercial fishing such as bottom-trawling and dredging

can cause massive damage to the sea bed,

destroying delicate habitats.

If this took place above ground instead of beneath the waves,

we would all be outraged.

The good news is that there are now plans

to create a network of under-sea nature reserves,

known as marine conservation zones, around our coasts,

places protected from the most destructive fishing methods,

allowing time for damaged areas to recover.

This really cannot happen soon enough.

And there is something we can all do to help our seas,

and that's to take care of what we throw away.

We've been using the seas as a global litter bin for centuries,

presuming everything will break down and disappear.

But with our modern materials, that just doesn't happen.

This is what's known as a mermaid's tear.

It's one of the building blocks from the plastics industry

and one of the most common pollutants in the ocean.

It never biodegrades and so it gets eaten by marine wildlife

and ends up in the food chain.

The sands on the Northumberland coast

are some of most pristine I've ever seen.

But even here a shocking amount of litter quickly accumulates.

One of the volunteers keeping the beach clean

is Gabe Davies from Surfers Against Sewage.

This is what's been found in the last few hours on Northumbrian beaches

that the volunteers here have just picked up.

What's the weirdest thing you've found here?

Literally anything you can imagine gets washed up.

This crazy donkey here.

We like him, but he's going to float round in the sea for years.

Stuff like that comes high on the list -

a container saying "corrosive liquid", washed up on the beach.

That was found by some school kids earlier today.

That's like industrial waste.

Yeah, pretty much. Fishing nets. The dog mess bags.

You name it, it gets washed up.

It's in the environment and it takes years and years to get rid of.

A couple of key things that are super easy to spot,

these are cotton bud sticks.

An indicator of raw sewage.

Basically, that's been flushed down the toilet.

Someone in their house, probably a million miles away,

flushed a cotton bud down the toilet

and it's going to float round in the sea for years and years and years.

Cigarette butts, again, may not have been dropped by someone on the beach.

It might have washed down a river.

They last 12 years in the environment and pollute three litres of water.

The plastic is the main worry for me

because that stays in the environment for hundreds of years.

Absolute nightmare.

Birds and sea mammals are going to ingest that plastic

as it disintegrates, and obviously that goes in the food chain

and that's going to affect us all.

This must personally drive you crazy.

-What is your message to people?

-Yeah, I mean, I do.

I get livid when I see the state of beaches.

I mean, there's really quite simple things

like, watch what you flush down the toilet.

You don't want that cotton bud floating around the ocean.

Don't leave it on the beach.

Real simple messages that everyone can take home.

Most of this is totally preventable.

This plastic becomes more and more concentrated

as it travels up the food chain,

from plankton to fish to sea birds

and our largest ocean predators.

One coastal creature at the very top of the food chain

is the spectacular sea eagle.

This giant bird of prey has been making a modest return

from total elimination a century ago.

But they're still under threat from persecution by us,

as bird man Iolo Williams discovered when he visited the Isle of Mull.

I'm on my way to see the biggest bird of prey in Britain.

Now, these birds have a wingspan of 2.5 metres.

No wonder they call them the flying barn doors

and although numbers are on the increase,

they're still under threat today.

The sea eagle. There are only about 60 breeding pairs

of these mighty raptors in Britain, all in the wilds of Scotland.

I can't begin to tell you just how excited I am about this.

Way back in 1991 when I was working for the RSPB,

I took two weeks' leave to come up to help warden these birds.

They were exceedingly rare at that time,

maybe two, three, four pairs.

I come back here 22 years later and it's the same two birds,

the same pair here. I think that's amazing.

These incredible creatures mate for life and can live beyond 30 years.

With no natural predators, they should have been safe,

but over centuries, farmers, landowners and gamekeepers

shot and poisoned them for eating livestock,

driving them to extinction.

The very last breeding pair was killed on the Isle of Skye in 1916.

Thanks to ground-breaking conservation work in the late '60s,

sea eagles from Norway were re-introduced into Britain.

And it's taken almost 40 years of dedication to give them

a secure foothold here on the Hebridean island of Mull.

I've come back here to help the RSPB once again

as they check on a chick born earlier this year.

And all that climbing is well worthwhile.

This is a nest of a sea eagle and it's an enormous nest.

It's taller than I am

and in it is one very, very healthy-looking chick.

If we can ring it before it leaves the nest, we may be able to learn

more vital information about these magnificent birds.

One of the adult birds has landed in a tree

just maybe 100m away and the adult birds are quite concerned

because we're here

and that's why we're going to do this job as fast as we possibly can.

Justin and Roger from the RSPB

are very experienced at getting close to the birds.

Chicks have been ringed here for the past 22 years.

And there we are. Down safely.

6kg on the dot. OK?

Wow! Look at the size of that.

'At six weeks old and only halfway to leaving the nest,

'this chick is unaware of any threat

'and is not distressed at being handled.'

You are a little beauty.

G1/12.

I used to ring hen harriers and goshawks and peregrines,

but this looks ten times more complex than that.

It is. It's the biggest size of rings we put on British birds, anyway.

The hope is if someone sees this bird, takes a picture

and sends it in, the RSPB can work out how the birds are moving

around Scotland and ultimately where they're settling down to breed.

If you've handled goshawks and kites, you know what you're up to.

We put the chick back as soon as we can,

much to the relief of its anxious mum and dad.

It's thanks to the dedication and work of people like Dave Sexton

that these fabulous birds are thriving here.

Well, Dave, looking at the Mull coastline here

it's easy to see why it's so good for sea eagles.

It's classic sea eagle country,

but you've also got all the inland, upland habitats

and freshwater lochs where they'll go hunting as well.

But we're talking about a top predator.

Does everybody welcome it back?

It's a challenge living back with these big predators.

Sea eagles nesting in forestry - that is an impact.

Foresters have to work around them.

Farmers have concerns about livestock.

The age-old question of eagles and lambs rages on.

We know they eat them, but do they kill them?

And there are projects like the Sea Eagle Management Scheme

which is a positive scheme that rewards farmers

and landowners for having these birds.

-Are they out of danger?

-They're safe here.

Once they leave Mull and head for the mainland

there are some of those old threats -

issues like poisoning, which is the biggest threat of all, really -

to these birds. We hope we can one day wipe that out altogether.

Mull is a safe haven, but a small one,

so in order to safeguard the eagle's future,

the RSPB has released birds on the east coast of Scotland

to help grow the population.

Rhian Evans is in charge of monitoring

and tracking the birds' movements on the mainland.

The reintroduced birds that you're in charge of

are on the east coast

and you've come over onto the west coast.

These birds have travelled a long way.

They have, and they're so nomadic when they're immature.

They travel the length of Scotland looking for suitable habitats.

But because they move so far, that must put them

in so much more danger than if they stayed in those areas

where they were released in the first place.

Yeah, unfortunately, they do hit bad spots, and they are

exposed to poisoning, shooting, rail collisions,

power line collisions and disturbance,

so there's all sorts of risks that face them.

We've only got to lose a handful of adult birds

and that's a major blow for you.

They take so long to mature as well,

and because they don't breed until they're five years old,

it's important that we don't lose those adult breeding birds

to make sure the population survives.

Persecution and poisoning is not just damaging to the eagles.

It also affects the local economy.

But the people of Mull are determined to make the most

of the eagle's presence.

This is one of a whole range of cruises that take tourists out

to see these magnificent birds, and on the Isle of Mull alone,

eagle tourism is worth between £3-5 million every year.

Here he comes. Here comes the eagle now.

He's coming straight in towards me. Come on. Come on.

Here he comes. Look at that. Look at that! Oh, wow!

Wow! I could hear that.

I could almost feel that as he went overhead

and he just plucked the fish off the top of the water.

Absolutely incredible.

I worked for the RSPB for 15 years

and I dealt with incidents of illegal poisoning,

illegal shooting and trapping

and it makes my blood boil to think that

these birds still face those dangers today.

We've lost this magnificent bird of prey once from our skies

and it would be an absolute tragedy if it happened again.

Our coastal species face both old and new threats

in their battle to survive,

but amongst all the doom and gloom of declining numbers

there are some animals making a spectacular comeback from the brink.

Britain's wild creatures don't get much more successful

than the one I'm about to see.

The waters around the Farne Islands are a great place to see grey seals.

These bulky marine mammals were once ruthlessly hunted

for their skins and meat, while fisherman killed them because

they competed for fish stocks.

In the early 20th century, there were fewer than 1,000 in the UK.

Ben Burville is a local seal expert.

-How are you doing there, Ben?

-Hi, Ellie. Come and have a seat.

Thank you. So seals are doing all right around here, then?

They are in this particular area of the North Sea.

They're growing about 6% year on year.

Around the UK, the seal numbers, the grey seal numbers, are still increasing slightly in most areas.

Grey seals became the first species anywhere in the world

to be protected by modern legislation

almost a century ago in 1914.

This banned hunting during their breeding season

and the population gradually recovered.

Now we have close to half the world's population of grey seals here in the UK.

So the fact that we look after them is important for the global ecosystem, really?

It is, really. They are the third rarest seal in the world,

and it's important to remember that,

despite the fact that the numbers are growing slowly,

they're really just returning to what they should be

for the environment around the UK.

You see them all the time because you're out here all the time.

Have we got a good chance?

-There's a relatively good chance. There's a few pups in the water.

-Yep.

There's a good chance of you being able to see them underwater.

So it's a case of waiting for a while and building up their confidence?

Definitely. They're inquisitive animals and they just take a bit of time to get adjusted.

OK. Well, I'm excited about getting in there.

-Let's get our stuff together.

-OK, let's go.

-All right.

The seal's demise was totally at our hands.

We persecuted these creatures for years

and I wouldn't be surprised, given the way we've treated them,

if they now chose to stay away from people.

Ben's advice is to be patient

and hopefully curiosity will bring them in.

And, sure enough, they decide to come and say hello.

Wow! That was amazing.

They are incredible creatures,

able to stay underwater on a single breath of air

for up to 20 minutes and dive down to 300 metres.

Absolutely incredible!

You've had some really, really close experiences.

I know you're a man of science, but how does that make you feel?

It makes you feel amazing, to be honest.

It's a really wonderful, it's a magical time, really,

when a wild animal chooses to interact with you.

You've got to ask yourself why they're doing that

and there's a variety of reasons.

They're very inquisitive animals,

but there's something fantastic

when you grab hold of a seal's hand, its front flipper,

and you squeeze it and it squeezes back, that's pretty magical.

That's the only word for it, really.

This water is not warm, but they have a natural wet suit -

a thick layer of blubber.

It's so effective that even small seal pups

can hunt in icy cold waters.

-Ben, that was amazing!

-I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I reckon we probably had five around us at any one time.

This is a good spot because there's so many pups,

and they're inquisitive.

That was awesome. Absolutely awesome.

Everybody always says they're like dogs.

That's a bit of a thing when you're in the water with them,

but there's something almost a bit alien.

You're dressed in an alien outfit. You're in an alien environment

and you have that magical close-up and friendly encounter

with an alien. It's like we're in their world

and yet they still offer a friendly encounter and they don't have to.

I think the magic, really, is that you're interacting

-with what is a wild animal.

-Yeah!

It's not a pet. It's not a domesticated dog.

This is a wild animal that fends for itself in pretty harsh conditions

and it's choosing to interact with you.

Yeah. It's incredible. I recommend it to anyone. It's fabulous.

Thanks to long-term conservation efforts,

the grey seal is now our most common sea mammal

and can be seen all around our coasts.

What's amazing about this place is that the wildlife

is really easy to see and it's just a short boat ride from the mainland,

and just being here reminds me

of what a wealth of marine and coastal wildlife

we have right here in Britain.

Britain's coasts and seas and the spectacular wildlife that lives here

are at the very heart of our natural heritage.

We need to ensure they're also part of our future.

These places are perhaps the hardest habitats of all to protect

because so much of what happens to them

depends on what goes on beyond our shores,

but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to cherish

and to save them before it's too late.

Next time on Britain's Big Wildlife Revival,

I discover the secret inhabitants of our cities.

I still find it hard to get used to seeing them here.

Mike Dilger reveals how to create your very own urban wildlife oasis.

I love getting my hands dirty.

And our team of experts champion three city-dwelling species

battling to survive.

This is a magical, magical experience.

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