River Valleys Nick Baker's Wild West

The river valleys and wooded coombs of the south-west.

This is just about my favourite landscape.

Not just beautiful,

but a precious home to some of our most threatened wildlife.

I'm Nick Baker,

and I'm going to be bringing you the very best that nature has to offer

from right here in the West Country.

I've lived and worked here as a naturalist for three decades,

and I'm convinced the wildlife here is as compelling and beautiful

as anywhere I've travelled.

On my journey across this wonderful landscape,

I'll be catching up with great wild spectacles...

..tracking some of our rarest insects...

and most stunning birds.

So join me as I explore my Wild West.

This is pretty much home to me,

rugged, beautiful Dartmoor in Devon.

But slicing through the familiar bleak moors

are these delightful wooded river valleys,

an intimate contrast to the windswept uplands.

But they're more than just beauty spots,

they've become home to a whole range of important birds and insects.

On a blisteringly hot summer's day,

I went to the Dart Valley Nature Reserve.

This is a place I've visited countless times.

I must know it better than just about anywhere else in Britain.

BIRDSONG

You can see just how clear the air is from...

Well, take this mossy wall.

Covered in lichens and mosses,

it seems to have plants like this pennywort

growing straight out of the stone.

Now, this place is all about edges,

where the river meets the ancient woodland,

and where of course the woodland then abuts

with the bracken and acidic grass, which in turn has boundaries

with the heathland and then the open moor.

And every time you get two habitats meeting like that

something special happens, some kind of magic occurs.

And that is where interesting things live.

BIRDSONG

And that variety of habitats

means plenty of places for animals to exploit.

This meadow grasshopper can hide itself in the dense bracken.

While in complete contrast, a yellowhammer perches on a hawthorn.

YELLOWHAMMER SINGS

That song is part of its courtship.

It needs to be prominent.

But I'm after a much more elusive animal

and this is one of its last redoubts.

It's a butterfly - the high brown fritillary.

This is one filmed here in July.

There are now only a handful of breeding sites left in Devon.

Over the years, it's seen its traditional home

of moor and woodland edge destroyed

and nationally, numbers are down by over 90% since the '70s.

In fact, the high brown has seen the most rapid decline of any

British butterfly. It's now only found in a few areas of the UK.

But here on the Dart it's doing OK.

Over the last three years, numbers seem to have been holding up,

even perhaps increasing.

We have to be cautious, though,

because these insects are very tricky to identify.

It's a striking insect.

Its distinctive underwings with those high brown halos

contrast with that lovely orange marked topside.

Despite the good news this year,

long-term the species is in desperate decline.

But it's not for want of trying to save it.

Devon Wildlife Trust are making huge efforts to recreate

the traditional mix of wood, bracken and coppice that the insect needs.

They're grazing ponies to keep the bracken and scrub down

and these cattle, as well as eating the grass,

trample back the bracken so that it doesn't take over.

You're much more likely to see these here,

this is the small pearl-bordered fritillary.

They're more common and they fly a bit earlier in June.

Or this, the dark green fritillary.

Easily confused with the much rarer high brown,

the green refers to a suffusion on the underside of its wings.

All these species are here because of the habitat management.

And it's the creation of these little paths and rides

throughout this otherwise almost impenetrable jungle

of bracken and gorse, that is the secret.

It allows the butterflies access to the flowers.

It creates a nice little micro-habitat.

If you come down here, you really get a sense of that.

It's a sheltered little world. It's a real hotspot.

There are flowers here so the butterflies can nectar

but, more importantly, and especially as far as the high brown fritillary is concerned,

you get this, a carpet of these lovely little heart-shaped leaves.

These are violets, dog-violets, growing out of this lovely

crispy litter of last year's bracken.

That's what they'll lay the eggs on

and the caterpillars will feed on the leaves later.

Then you stand up again

and on this lovely steep slope you can take in the rest

of the reserve and...

I can just about hear the River Dart itself.

If you're brave enough to cut your way through the jungle

of bracken yourself, there's plenty more to see on this reserve.

There's a handy lower path by the river

and if you take it you'll be richly rewarded.

This is a completely different habitat from the more open moor -

cooler and with a dense canopy of trees.

At the height of summer, all along the river bank,

it's humming with life.

INSECTS HUM

These hoverflies taking their last pollen and nectar from an umbelifer.

But being a fly around here is a bit of a risky proposition.

There are killers about.

Up in the trees, a spotted flycatcher.

Sadly a bird in steep decline.

But it's not just the specialists that insects have to be wary of.

HUM OF INSECTS

A commoner sight, it's the grey wagtail.

It's proving every bit as successful as its rarer fellow hunter.

It has a mouthful of flies

and is taking them back for its chicks in the nest.

It's taking some of the thousands of flies that swarm over the river.

The bird goes in a low, fast sweep,

taking in fly after fly as it skims over the water.

Quite a juggling act to get all that crammed in the beak

and then back to the nest.

What a great place this is.

It's not just about the subtle little insects.

The little flies, like the mayflies, they're associated with the water.

You can have your eyeballs literally rocked by some of our most

flamboyant insects and I'm talking about these guys here.

These are beautiful demoiselles and you can sit here and watch

almost every aspect of their life unfold right before your very eyes.

This is a male beautiful demoiselle

and it's looking for a mate.

On a rock in the stream,

the much more subtle female attracts him over.

Further up, this female has mated

and is laying her eggs in the water, up to 300 at a time.

They'll hatch in ten days or so.

She's vulnerable.

The male flies around warding off other males who may be

tempted to interrupt and perhaps mate themselves with this female.

But all good things must come to an end.

After a hard day out on the reserve, you've got to do this,

come down to the river and dabble your tootsies in the cooling water.

There's nothing quite like it.

Whilst you're here, reflect on what you've seen.

This place has to be one of my favourite places,

not just on Dartmoor, not just in the south-west, but in the world.

The fantastic diversity of habitat is reflected in the incredible

diversity of life, be it insects, birds or mammals that it supports.

Now all this abundance makes it even more tragic that one of our

rarest animals lives here but is sadly losing the battle to survive.

If this is to be one of the last stands for the high brown fritillary

then all I can say is, what a tragedy and catch it while you can.

The effort that has gone into saving them

and all the other plants and insects here is admirable.

Let's hope that we don't have to fight too many more losing battles.

It's the steep-sided, heavily wooded nature of these valleys which has

actually worked in their favour and protected them as valuable habitats.

You see, they're as difficult to farm as they are to simply

walk down, which means you have got these lovely

fragments of untouched woodland which are really good at supporting

all manner of wildlife, but especially the mosses and lichens.

These are Millook Woods, set in deepest Cornwall.

They may be one of the last few remnants of the so-called

wildwood that sprung up here after the last Ice Age.

Here there is a rich and unique ecosystem which has evolved

largely free from chemicals, pesticides and human interference.

So I'm standing in the ancient woodland proper.

It basically runs up and down both banks of this rather lovely

little stream. But because of the unique situation here,

the land either side of the woodland has been relatively undisturbed.

What's happening is the woodland is kind of moving outwards

and actually colonising the entire valley.

The woods lie right by the Atlantic on the North Cornwall coast.

Most of the land here is owned by the Woodland Trust

and it's all looked after by warden, Malcolm Allen.

So we say ancient woodland quite a lot,

but what exactly are we talking about?

An ancient woodland by and large is a woodland that's been

continuously wooded for at least 400 years.

What that means is that the communities of plants and animals

have had that undisturbed process and existence

and it makes it, it gives it a greater opportunity

for the species ranges to increase and to develop.

That's why ancient woodlands are so important.

And this place has lots of that, I assume?

This place is teeming with it, yes.

Everything about this wood is really special.

You really don't have to look that hard to see what he's talking about.

Thanks to the diversity of habitats here,

warblers like this blackcap and this whitethroat abound.

But the action's not just happening in the trees.

Down under the canopy, it's rush hour too.

You've got to watch your step,

there's dung beetles everywhere.

And if a dung beetle isn't your cup of tea,

check out the brambles that lie in the pathways here

and you might be lucky enough to see one of these fellows,

a longhorn beetle.

And it's the trees that really make a woodland.

Oh, look at this.

These ones are host to some very special hangers-on.

Fantastic like landscape or patchwork

of different things going on here.

A range of species, all of them

so nationally and internationally important,

it's almost like a miniaturised sort of tropical rainforest.

So your eyes have lit up.

This is one of the things we're talking about that ancient

woodland's been important for, isn't it?

Absolutely, you know, these sort of lower plants,

they don't colonise. They don't spread very quickly.

Birds have wings, insects have wings,

they can get up and fly distances.

This is a very slow process,

but the valley is like this.

That's that continuity.

You know, the clear air, the nice airflow,

the lack of disturbance, the lack of felling, and this is

the sort of thing that you get on so many trees around here.

So every one of these splodges of colour

kind of represents a completely different species? Yeah, it does.

With some species, you know...

We have got mosses and lichens. Mosses and lichens...

This is a very spectacular lichen, this one.

Yes, that's Lobaria pulmonaria... That's the lungwort?

That's right. That's because it looks a little bit,

with a little bit of imagination, like the linings of someone's lungs.

A notable species.

Then Degelia atlantica

here with this sort of fan-shaped

sort of shape to it.

Absolutely gorgeous.

If you're not into lichens - and how couldn't you be? -

but if you're not into this sort of thing, just standing back

and looking at every single branch here,

it really is a beautiful palette of silver and green, isn't it?

It really adds to the atmosphere. Yeah.

Millook is one of the best woodlands for lichen in the country.

But the arrival in the west of the tree disease, ash dieback,

could put all this under threat.

Ash dieback was first discovered in Britain four years ago

and it has the potential to wipe out the country's 80 million ash trees.

Nobody knows how to stop it.

The nearest woodland infected with the disease is in Somerset,

but that's close enough to make Malcolm worried.

If it lands in here,

and it starts killing off some of these ash trees that we have

got that are smothered in some of these valuable lichens,

then, you know, it's not just the loss of a high proportion

of our ash trees that we're facing,

but it's almost the collateral extinctions that may go with that.

There's not much that Malcolm can do

but hope that ash dieback doesn't land here.

And, for now at least, this woodland is in perfect health.

But Millook isn't all about trees.

If you venture in a little deeper, you happen upon a little oasis.

In the heart of the wood is this wildflower meadow.

These wonderfully wet pastures are full of plant life

and the grassland here is fantastic in its own right

but where the grassland meets the woodland you've got all these

wonderful little sheltered hot sunny spots as well, which makes it

perfect for insect life.

Perfect unless that is you happen to be tangled

up in the web of an orb spider.

Look at this.

I don't fancy his chances very much.

This grasshopper should really watch where it's going.

It's walking right into a nursery web spider.

Oh, kicked away.

Fortunately, she's on maternity leave

and she's using her fangs to hang on to that egg sac.

This place is famous for butterflies.

Here a comma is taking minerals from the mud.

I'm just having a little bit of a moment here.

I have a real fondness

for this little piebald black and white butterfly

that's flying around us here.

It is a marbled white.

They love these kind of unimproved pastures and this is exactly...

This is the height of summer for me.

This is what this butterfly says and they're beautiful

and, of course, they're not a white butterfly.

Even though they look white in colouration,

they're not closely related to that family of butterflies.

They're actually one of the brown butterflies.

Just a very beautiful one.

From the wildflower meadows to the woodland itself,

Millook is as rich and varied as the avid naturalist could hope for.

Hopefully it'll escape disease

and endure as a precious haven for wildlife.

And a very welcome escape from the modern world.

Now, of course, all these places rely on an awful lot of hard

conservation work, particularly keeping scrub and bracken down.

Now, most of this work is done during the winter time,

mainly to avoid disturbing sensitive wildlife species.

It doesn't look like much now but it's in springtime

when all this effort pays dividends.

Marsland Nature Reserve in North Devon.

Over 500 acres, the largest run by the Devon Wildlife Trust

and, I reckon, one of the best.

This bridge marks the border of Devon and Cornwall.

Stand in the middle and you're straddling both counties.

This place isn't just a geographical landmark.

Now, the management of this fantastic reserve is

largely for some of my favourite animals, the butterflies.

Now, they've taken a real hammering in recent decades,

modern agricultural practice

and habitat loss being the main culprits.

But here at least, most species seem to be bucking the trend.

This is one of the target species, the small pearl-bordered fritillary.

The pearl border refers to the markings on the wings.

A beautiful insect that's suffered a 20% decline in the last ten years.

This is the very similar pearl-bordered fritillary,

quite difficult to tell them apart.

It's seen an even more dramatic decline.

42% in a decade.

But here they both appear to be doing well.

This pearl-bordered is feeding on the bugle

they encourage to grow here and they are breeding.

These are pearl-bordered caterpillars

and they're feeding on their larval food plant, dog-violet.

For the species to survive, both bugle

and violets need to be plentiful.

These rare shots were taken by the local warden, Gary Pilkington.

They show a female small pearl-bordered being fought over

by a group of males.

Eventually, one wins out and mates.

Now go back 100 or so years and our woodlands would have been

continuously harvested for various woodland products.

The process of coppicing, cutting down trees

and then harvesting the regrowth was widespread.

Now what this does is it creates this wonderful

patchwork of various stages of plant regeneration

and that means you get everything from bare soil, flower rich

clearings, all the way through to the mature trees themselves.

That's exactly what many of our butterflies thrive on.

CHAINSAW WHIRS

With no commercial woodcutting any more,

in winter the trust clears the scrub and cuts down the trees.

They also keep the bracken at differing heights,

creating different levels of shade for flowers

like the vital bugle and violets.

The idea is to always have some part of the reserve in perfect

condition for breeding butterflies.

The pearl-bordered like a kind of more open environment.

Bare earth for the bracken litter and violet plants.

The small pearl-bordered are happier on the lusher green sward

in the valley.

It's a lot of work to keep both habitats in tiptop condition.

If you'd come here in the late '80s, you would've probably found

a handful of small pearl-bordered and pearl-bordered fritillaries.

This year, last year, years before,

we've been recording numbers in the high 200s of both species.

I guess the big question is, it's nice to see butterflies,

but why is it important to see these butterflies?

We need to stress it's not just about a couple of butterfly species.

They are very good indicators of the wider wildlife that

exist in this place. They are also very easy to count, as well.

They make for good monitors, if you like,

of the health check of this place.

Great to hear these beautiful insects are doing well.

It's not just the fritillaries.

The walk down to the coast takes you through a rich mixture of habitats.

This woodland edge is full of commoner butterfly species,

such as the ringlet. The reason for its name is kind of obvious.

It's a subtle velveteen beauty, easily overlooked.

The reserve is also renowned for bees, hoverflies.

This one seems to be hoovering up every last piece of pollen

on this hogweed plant.

This one, known by the Latin name, Rhingia campestris,

has an unusually long proboscis,

unfurling it to take nectar from the flag iris.

But you do have to be careful with your natural history.

This looks like a bee, but it won't sting.

It is in fact a fly, a bumblebee mimic.

And, of course, for comparison, the real thing.

WATER TRICKLES

On this reserve you're never far from the sight and sound of water.

That means it's a pretty good place to be if you're a dragonfly.

Something like 19 different species have been recorded here.

A little bit of time spent by a pond like this

and you should be amply rewarded.

This is an extraordinary sight, a southern hawker dragonfly,

freshly emerged from its nymphal case, or exuvia.

Beauty from a rather surprising beast.

Early in the spring, you might catch this - red damselflies mating.

And in June, a mature member of the species

basks in the sun at the edge of the pond.

The purity of the air and the water

doesn't just make it a haven for dragonflies.

The woods are covered with rare lichens, including this one,

the golden hair.

Devon is one of the few counties that still has a colony.

And there's proof of the purity of the water here with perhaps

the jewel in the water conservation crown - two otter cubs.

These rare images were captured by Gary the warden.

They almost seem to be grooming one another before one

gives its sibling a playful nip.

What a special place this is.

In the '50s, otters came close to extinction through

most of their range, thanks to the overuse of pesticide.

The West Country, however, has always been a stronghold.

These are the woods that basically follow the path of the stream,

all the way down to the shore here.

If you're a bird watcher like me, these places are brilliant,

on one hand because you know they're there

because you can hear them,

but they're a bit frustrating on another level

because you can't see the things.

Or if you do want to see them, you have to work the place really hard.

This wren, one of our smallest birds, might be a juvenile.

You can just make it out through the leaves but you have got to be quick.

A great spotted woodpecker dashes quickly up the trunk

before disappearing.

And a glimpse of a marsh tit.

Sadly, a bird under severe conservation threat.

Finally, after a two-mile walk, the path emerges from the wood.

HE CHUCKLES

If you follow the meanders of the stream downhill,

this is what you get at the end of it.

The whole landscape opens up into this incredible vista

and yet another habitat.

We've got maritime grassland and heathland here, which is

absolutely fantastic.

And for someone who is interested in birds,

with no trees to obscure the view, it's a little bit easier.

Overhead, the sound and sight of summer, a skylark.

Almost seeming to hover in the wind before plummeting to earth.

And this boldly coloured cock yellowhammer who's taking

advantage of the plentiful insect life with

a mouthful for the newly hatched chicks.

A grey heron is flying along the valley from land to sea

doing in a minute what would take a walker most of the morning.

We've almost seen a full set of habitats for wildlife today.

We started off in the woodland.

We worked our way through those beautiful managed glades

and the coppiced areas, along the bank of the stream.

We've got the pools for the dragonflies

and then we came out here with the maritime heath and then,

as if that isn't enough, we've also got the beach itself.

The intertidal zone.

Each one of those individual habitats supports its own

unique range of wildlife species.

Of course, let's not forget those small pearl-bordered fritillaries

that we filmed right at the top of the valley there.

They're also found right down to the tops of the cliffs.

This place is fantastic.

The sad fact is that many of the species I've seen on my tour

face some sort of threat.

Up on Dartmoor, those high brown fritillaries are just

the remaining few of an insect that used to be much more widespread.

They've enjoyed a few good summers with numbers picking up,

but the long-term trend isn't so good.

In Millook, that ancient woodland

and its rare lichens now face a modern threat - ash dieback.

But, good to say, it's not there yet.

But let's end on a more positive note.

Here at Marsland they are continuing to build on that success and look

after their precious colony of pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies.

Let's hope they and the other reserves I visited

manage to keep up their vital work.