South East Urban Jungle

Hello and welcome to the Urban Jungle.

Some people think that in order to see fantastic wildlife,

you have to go deep into the countryside.

Well, some people are wrong.

You don't have to leave town.

I'm Richard Taylor-Jones,

and I love nothing more than filming wildlife.

And that means we'll be discovering all sorts of remarkable things

in the urban jungle, such as...

Dover - a river runs through it.

What I really want to do

is get some underwater shots of fish,

so a small underwater camera and a bit of luck,

and hopefully we'll get it.

The alternative nightlife of Brighton and Eastbourne.

It's midnight and we're hunting for hedgehogs.

And the spectacular sight of a falcon flight school

at Bluewater Shopping Centre.

I have filmed peregrines all over the UK,

but I have never witnessed that - never.

But first, a little gem -

a rare habitat called a chalk stream.

Who'd have thought you'd find such a thing

flowing straight through the heart of Dover?

There was always going to be a town at Dover.

There had to be, it being the closest place to the continent.

It grew up around the mouth of the river Dour,

the river that gave Dover its name.

Yes, there is in fact a river running straight the heart of Dover,

although you'd hardly know it today.

But it's not any old river.

It may be right next to the roar of the traffic,

but this is a rare habitat.

Technically, it's known as a chalk stream.

The source of the Dour is a more leafy area

on the northwest outskirts of town.

Rainwater has filtered through chalk,

which means it's incredibly pure.

Look how clear that is.

Wow - gin clear, as they would say.

And no silt in it. This is what's so important for the wildlife.

Not only is it pure,

it's also at a constant temperature of about 11 degrees all year round.

These things both contribute to making it a rare habitat.

So let's go down the whole length of this river

and see just what wildlife we can find.

A couple of miles downstream,

the river has birds that we see all the time - moorhens.

The reason they are common may be explained

by the way they rear their young - and it's fascinating to watch.

We've got the parents,

with their lovely brown backs, black fronts and red bill.

Then we've got the teenagers,

who will be this year's first brood, rather dull brown birds,

and then the cute little black fluffy ones,

which are the most recent chicks.

The great thing about these birds

is they actually act communally, as a family.

Look at that - straight in for some bread

a passer-by has just dropped in.

It's got the bread, but it's not eating it itself.

Instead, it's taking it back to the young chick

and passing it over - look at that.

This is not a parent. The parents are the big, black glossy birds.

This brown bird is a member of the first brood

that would have hatched earlier in the year.

Instead of just looking after itself and disappearing off,

it's actually helping its parents out

with the second brood of chicks.

Look, there you go again - passing the bread over

to the young, fluffy black chick

that is probably only just a few days old.

This sort of cooperative behaviour

is, perhaps, a very good reason why moorhens are so successful.

Chalk streams are internationally rare

and we take it for granted

that we've got this very internationally rare habitat

right on our doorstep.

And the rare habitat means

that this river is the best place in the South East for brown trout.

I can see them perfectly well, looking down into the clear water.

But what I really want to do is get some underwater shots of them.

So a small underwater camera,

a pole and some waders - and a bit of luck -

and hopefully, we'll get it.

Brown trout are ambush predators.

What they like to do is settle down facing upstream

and wait for the river to bring food to them.

This method of hunting is very efficient for the trout,

as it doesn't have to waste energy

swimming up and down the fast-flowing current

looking for food.

I find it quite exciting that there is an iconic British species

living right here in the heart of Dover.

When you're out looking for wildlife,

it's really important to look at the small stuff

as well as the big stuff.

These are called caddis flies.

They spend most of their lives underwater as larvae

and turn into adult winged flies during the summer.

Sometimes, it all suddenly happens at once

and this is called a hatch.

Tens of thousands of flies take to the air

with the sole purpose of mating as quickly as possible.

They fly up and down to attract a mate.

Then the female, with fertilised eggs

will fly down to the river surface to lay them.

Once this is done, the flies die.

The flies, in their adult phase,

may only be alive for just a few hours.

Bearing in mind the Dour goes right through the centre of Dover,

it does need a little help to stay in tip-top condition.

Blimey, look at that! That's not a coy carp, is it?

And it's not just a traffic cone

that this volunteer has found in the river.

This is an electronic tag here. Well, I never...

Yeah. So someone who has committed a crime

has committed another one by chucking it in the river.

It looks a bit old, though,

so I don't think it's worth sending out the search parties just yet.

I think this one's long gone, hasn't he?

At several points along its course,

the river just disappears under the ground

and here, for 100m, it's beneath a supermarket car park.

Further downstream...

I wasn't expecting brown bears.

..I'm thinking there's a chance

of catching another special little creature,

as long as it doesn't prove to be too slippery.

This is fantastic.

We've got a yellow eel,

and that's before they go silvery and go out to sea.

They go back to the Sargasso Sea, all the way over towards America,

where they go to breed.

I'm very excited about finding a yellow eel.

They're in serious decline,

probably because of the barriers we put in rivers,

like locks and weirs, which disrupt their life cycle.

Let's pop him back in.

And now we're getting close

to the end of our journey down the River Dour.

And it's just another 200m, curving round to the right,

and it comes down to the sea.

The river finally emerges in Dover Harbour,

in a place called De Bradelei Wharf.

It comes out of a culvert which is under the surface.

And so I'm going in for a closer look.

It seems such a sorry end for the river,

to arrive at the sea by way of a submerged pipe,

but as rivers go, it doesn't make it any less impressive.

So that's our journey down the River Dour

from the source to the sea.

If you happen to be passing through Dover,

you wouldn't know the river was there, but there it is.

The Dour - one of the most unlikely rare habitats in the country.

Coming up, we go shopping for wildlife

at Bluewater Retail Park.

Grass snake - let's see if we can grab him.

Lovely! Look at that.

Isn't he marvellous? He is a beauty.

An absolutely lovely, lovely animal.

Now, there's a lot more wildlife in our towns and cities

than you might imagine,

and the reason you don't see some of it

is because whilst you're fast asleep,

the animals are wide awake.

Natalie Graham goes in search of the nightlife of Brighton.

MUSIC: "I Love It" by Icona Pop

There's no shortage of nightlife in Brighton.

When one type of nightlife ends, another begins.

Deep into the early hours,

the city comes alive with the creatures of the night.

Many of them are under the watchful eye of Dawn Scott.

Dawn is from the University of Brighton.

She researches the way that wildlife and humans interact

in towns and cities.

With urban areas growing, especially in the South East,

we're taking up more and more habitat,

and what we want to know is which animals can cope with that habitat

and how they change their behaviour and ecology.

Foxes, hedgehogs, badgers...

Anything living in this environment, how it's doing - that's what I'm interested in.

It's midnight and we're hunting for hedgehogs.

Dawn reckons our best chance tonight is in Preston Park.

And sure enough, one of Dawn's assistants

lays her thick-gloved hands on a prime candidate.

They weigh the hedgehog and it turns out to be a big 'un.

Wow!

1,012.4.

They normally name their hedgehogs to help keep track,

so what are they going to call this one?

Big Boy, I reckon.

Hedgehogs are in serious decline in this country.

People often hand sick or injured ones into animal sanctuaries.

Dawn's trying to find out what's the best thing to do

when they get better.

Is it best to keep them in these rehabilitation centres?

Or, actually, if they're a good weight and they're healthy,

to release them into the wild?

So the plan is to tag some wild hedgehogs

and some rehabilitated ones

so she can follow and compare them over the winter.

Their next job is to attach a radio transmitter to Big Boy.

This is done by the simple method

of trimming down a few spines and gluing it on.

As the spines grow, they eventually fall out

and the transmitter will fall off of its own accord.

So all we need to do now is leave him for a few days,

then come back, track him down

and find out how far he's gone.

It's a different night in a different part of Brighton.

Dawn also studies foxes.

Because foxes are bigger, they can wear GPS collars

which are heavier than the hedgehogs' radio transmitters.

She's fitted eight foxes with collars to investigate their movements.

One of the foxes is called Cedric.

This is his home range,

so we know all the streets he is active around.

All these blue dots are where we've got GPS fixes on him.

We're just about here, so there's a place up here

where we're going to keep an eye out for whether he comes out.

There's a place here which is where his main den site is,

it's just round the corner.

However, Dawn has had a report that Cedric has a limp,

so she wants to take a look and check him out.

The problem is the GPS doesn't work in real-time like a smartphone.

There's a delay in the data,

so it can't tell you where Cedric is right now.

Yeah, I think in the next hour or so he'll definitely be out and about,

so we're going to try and catch him.

Right, see you later.

Night falls and we get our first sighting of a fox, but is it Cedric?

What we've just seen is, I think it's a cub,

so we think it's probably one of his cubs,

cos he definitely visits here quite frequently.

But then, a sighting behind some gates.

So you think this is him, Dawn? I think he's got a collar.

Erm, it's difficult to see with the gates,

but just as he turned his head it looked like it might have.

Well, it's not him, and we give up for the night,

but we're not giving up altogether.

It's day two of the hunt for Cedric.

I've just seen something crossing that road.

Act normal...

Where's he gone?

There he is. Top of the road. Running up.

Yeah, got him.

We think we've got Cedric on camera.

To make sure, we play it back to Dawn in our technical van.

Ah. Now, there's definitely a limp there. Can you see that limp?

Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. Is it him? That's him, yeah.

Look, collar. See the collar?

Oh, yes! That's fantastic.

That's a really good shot. He has got a limp there.

Look, you can see on the front, yeah. Oh, wow. We've found him.

He's definitely got a slight injury.

Dawn now knows that Cedric has got a limp,

so she'll arrange to catch him

and have the collar taken off to lighten his load.

If necessary, he'll be taken to a vet,

but Dawn thinks the limp doesn't look too serious.

Over in Eastbourne lives the Brown family.

They volunteered their garden for more research into nocturnal animals.

One of Dawn's research students, Ella,

is putting video cameras in position.

As you can see, I've already put a couple down.

We're going to have five cameras here.

It's going to be motion-sensitive,

so it won't be on all the time, it will only take video

when something has triggered it, when something's gone past it.

Motion-sensitive, so they're not allowed to bounce on the trampoline.

No. Oh!

Are we ready to have a look?

After four nights of filming,

Ella shows the Browns what the cameras have picked up.

Everyone can see what that is. It's a fox!

How many? Three!

Last but not least, not a video, but a photo.

Who can spot it first?

ALL: Hedgehog!

Can you see him? You got a hedgehog.

Dawn wants to know more about the hedgehog,

so now she's decided to go down the low-tech route.

She can't afford to put motion-sensitive cameras

in a large number of gardens, but she can use this.

This is Correx, or corrugated plastic,

and what I'm painting on the masking tape is this lovely recipe

of cooking oil and black poster paint. OK.

So hopefully, the hedgehog will come along this way, it will stand

in this ink and get it all over its feet.

And when it's eaten, hopefully it'll walk out

and it should leave a little trail of footprints.

Hedgehog footprints are very easy to distinguish from other animals,

they're quite unique, so we can see if there's a hedgehog been here.

If you live in Brighton, you can help.

Dawn would like to place more of these hedgehog-detecting tunnels

in Brighton Gardens over the summer.

Details of how you can volunteer are on the Summer of Wildlife website,

and we'll repeat the address at the end of the programme.

Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, back in Brighton, Big Boy,

the radio-tagged hedgehog, has been on the loose for five days.

So where is he now?

Well, with the use of a radio receiver,

we're going to try and track him down.

We're going to turn it on now, see if we can hear him.

If we get a beep, then he's in this area,

and then we need to follow it and hone down to get him. OK.

He was over the fence, wasn't he?

Could he have gone quite a long way?

Good on him. He's covered in...

Hello, Big Boy.

So, it works!

Dawn can keep track of Big Boy by radio.

She'll be paying him regular visits

in the coming months as part of her research.

And we'll see you again in another couple of days. Hopefully.

So the night life goes on, but as day breaks, everything changes

and the humans once again take over the world.

All the other night life disappears

and you'd never know it was there.

Natalie Graham there on a night out with hedgehogs.

Now, as we're seeing, wildlife can be found

in the most unusual of places.

You don't have to go to nature reserves to find it.

In fact, sometimes all you have to do is shop around.

Some people come here for the zip wire.

Some people come here for the crazy golf.

And mostly they're here for the shopping.

Which is fair enough, really.

After all, Bluewater Shopping Centre near Greenhithe in Kent

has 330 shops in three malls, and parking for 13,000 vehicles.

But it would be nice if some of those people got out of their cars

and turned away from the shops

and came over here to the other side of the car park.

Because then, they would see delights such as herons,

grass snakes,

and peregrine falcons.

Our guide today is the man who looks after Bluewater's wildlife,

Phil Bolton.

Bluewater was built in an old quarry,

so it's now surrounded by artificial lakes and chalk cliffs,

which have attracted peregrine falcons.

So, Phil, why have you brought me to this spot?

This is their home range.

This is where this particular family reside.

It's sheltered, and it's so sheltered that the male

and the female can rear their young

in relative safety and relative security.

And what sort of behaviour are we seeing going on

in this particular part of the cliff face?

Well, flight school. We're going to see flight school.

We're going to see the female training that young bird

with all the skills that it needs.

Oh, I can hear one! Oh, wonderful.

Oh, there we go. Up here. Lovely! That is probably the juvenile.

That is so quick! Did you see the speed of that!

Peregrines are the fastest creatures on earth.

A hunting swoop can reach 200mph.

What we're seeing is what Phil calls flight school.

The mother is teaching the young bird the tricks of the trade.

How to twist and turn, how to dive and attack.

I think that looked like flight school.

That was fantastic, wasn't it?

I have filmed peregrines all over the UK,

but I have never witnessed that. Never.

Now, just over here we have what they romantically call Lake Four.

Doesn't sound that exciting, I admit,

but for me it means one thing - dragonflies.

There's a small platform on the edge of the lake,

which Phil says is a favourite place for dragonflies.

I'm going to try and get a super-slow motion shot,

and so it's just a matter of setting up and waiting.

Are you sure this is his favourite spot? I haven't seen him yet.

He's just been missing for a little while. He'll come back again later.

And sure enough...

This is a black-tailed skimmer.

All four of its wings beat independently

to create incredible manoeuvrability in the air.

Dragonflies have compound eyes.

There is no lens, just thousands of tiny photoreceptors.

This is just the sort of thing that the shoppers could be looking at.

Do you mind if I quickly ask you what you're doing here today?

Shopping. Shopping.

Browsing, doing a bit of shopping.

Have you ever come here to look at the wildlife? No.

Didn't even know there was any.

You don't want to go hunting for grass snakes or peregrine falcons?

No. If there was a way that someone could show you

the wildlife of Bluewater, you'd be interested? Definitely.

Can I just find out why you're here today? Just shopping.

You're not here for the wildlife at all? No.

The grass snakes, the dragon flies? No, no. No.

No.

Oh, well, some people just don't know what they're missing.

For instance, I mentioned grass snakes.

Phil has set up heat traps in the grounds of the shopping centre

to attract reptiles.

They're not actually traps, just sheets of corrugated iron.

They warm up in the sun and the reptiles like to crawl underneath.

So, are we in luck?

Nothing.

Nothing again.

Ah, grass snake! Let's see if we can grab him.

Lovely, look at that.

Third time lucky.

Well done, yeah. That's a youngster. Isn't it just?

When this grass snake grows into an adult, it will be about

a metre long.

But now it's making a bit of a mess on me.

This is a defence mechanism you're seeing.

He's going to cover you in slime and that's quite repulsive to smell.

I have to say, there is quite a stink coming from him.

He's just pooed on my hands cos he wants to get away.

He wants to get away. Not to worry, it's a normal mechanism

of this particular snake.

And actually, even though we found him under a mat here,

he's actually an accomplished swimmer and misnamed as a grass snake.

Should be a water snake. He can swim extremely well.

You do see them in the water all the time, don't you?

They are incredibly fast.

Isn't he marvellous? He is a beauty. Absolutely lovely animal.

Meanwhile, lurking in another corner of the shopping centre...

..a heron.

He's become semi-tame,

and thinks nothing of mingling with the shoppers.

He eats food people throw to him, but it would be better if he didn't.

What would be nice for me is to think that he'll still hang around

here so that people can get a great view of him,

but that he starts to rely on the natural food

rather than the other stuff that's being thrown to him. That's right.

If we can get to that particular position

where he is less dependent on the food being given to him,

and more dependent on food that is available to him here in the lake,

we'll be happier.

Of course, he's perfectly capable of finding his own food.

He's got something. Has he? Fish.

Oh, he's lost it. Got it now.

I've seen some pretty strange wildlife in strange places

during my years filming.

But this takes the biscuit, it really does.

And it just goes to show that even in a huge shopping centre,

there will always be a chance to see some fantastic wildlife.

Now, if you want to get involved with urban wildlife,

here's a couple of things you can do.

Volunteer for a river clean, keeping trash away from fish in Dover.

Or, if you live in Brighton,

offer up your garden for a hedgehog tunnel.

For information on these and lots of other ideas, go to...

Thanks for watching.

And I hope you enjoy your very own Summer of Wildlife.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd