Wilderness Britain The Nature of Britain

There are around 60 million of us living on these islands.

Towns and cities throughout the land

are crammed to overflowing with people.

Motorways and roads crisscross the countryside

and our urban sprawl is creeping into the green belt.

Sometimes, it feels as though this country is absolutely jam-packed.

Here in London, for instance, there are 23,000 of us per square mile,

all living cheek by jowl with our neighbours.

It's one of most crowded places on the planet.

Nevertheless, if you add all

our urban and rural communities together, both large and small,

you'd find that they would occupy

only about two thirds of the country.

Which means that a third of the UK is wilderness,

governed not by people, but by Mother Nature.

There are places that we'd find uncomfortable to live in,

places of extremes, where anything or anybody is in danger

of being frozen, drowned, parched or blown away.

We may not have the Florida swamps or the Gobi desert,

but we do have pockets of real wilderness.

At their heart are wildlife communities that prosper,

not despite the difficult conditions, but because of them.

And how they've turned this challenge to their advantage,

how they live at the very edge,

is the story of Wilderness Britain.

I'm 4,000 feet above sea level, flying over the Cairngorms,

the highest and most extensive mountain range in Britain.

The average temperature on the top is around freezing,

snow falls 100 days a year and the snow beds can remain on the ground

right the way through the summer. It's bitterly cold, incredibly windy

and one of the harshest places in our land,

but to some wildlife, it's home.

I'm not just here for a joy ride. I've come up in a glider to find out

how one of the most iconic animals of the British wilderness

manages to make a living in one of the harshest parts of our country.

This is the domain of the golden eagle. It stays here all year,

because there's a well-stocked freezer down below.

Life here is a constant battle against the cold,

a fight that some animals lose.

We think of eagles as majestic hunters,

but in winter they often stoop to scavenge for a living,

but even dead animals still have to be found.

Like my glider, the eagle relies on updrafts

to carry it high enough to scan the ground below.

From up here I can see for miles, but the eyesight of the golden eagle

is 10 times better than mine and it uses its incredible eyesight

to spot easy pickings.

In a way, the eagle uses the freezing weather to its advantage,

because the cold kills the frail and infirm,

ensuring that the eagle itself can make it through

some of the harshest weather experienced by any animal

in the British Isles.

It's the bleakness of this place that keeps people away

and in the winter, even wildlife is relatively thin on the ground,

but there's a creature living here that defies the odds.

I'm pond dipping!

Now, I know it sounds bizarre,

and although this pond's been frozen on and off

for the last couple of months,

it still contains some rather surprising forms of life.

What's more, I'm collecting something you'd expect to see

at a very different time of year.

Tadpoles!

But what are they doing here in the middle of winter?

Well, to find the answer to that, we have to discover

what went on here last spring.

In early spring, our highland pools are often fringed with snow

and covered by ice, but it doesn't deter the frogs around here.

They're common frogs, the sort you find in your garden,

but these are undoubtedly the Sherpa Tensings of the species.

They're busy, even when the temperature is below zero.

They mate in the snow and the females lay their eggs

in ice-cold ponds. Then they leave them to grow on their own.

But their development into froglets is far from ordinary.

In my garden in the south of England,

the frogspawn appears in the pond towards the end of February.

The tadpoles follow and the young frogs emerge from the pond

in around July, but up here, it's so cold, they don't have a chance

to complete that lifecycle in a single season.

So, although these little fellas hatched last spring,

they won't turn into frogs until this coming summer,

which means they'll have taken a record one-and-a-half years

to develop. I think perhaps it's time to put 'em back into this pond

and let them get on with growing.

You know, it's tough being a Cairngorm tadpole.

Well, it's tough being a Cairngorm anything.

Up here on Scotland's high tops, it's so cold

and there's so much snow for so long, that few trees can grow.

It's like living in the Arctic, which, in a way, it is.

When the ice retreated, over 10,000 years ago,

little remnants of Ice Age were left behind, like the Cairngorm plateau.

Yet, surprisingly, the animals that live here

are at home in these unforgiving Arctic conditions.

The only way I can survive out here

is by being dressed in about as many layers as an Egyptian mummy.

This really must be our harshest environment,

and yet there's one creature that manages to live here

all the year round.

The ptarmigan is the ultimate British tough guy,

one of the few animals in the UK that spends its life in the freezer.

It survives here on meagre pickings,

the spiny leaves of heather and other mountain plants.

This high-fibre diet should be difficult to digest,

but not to these hardy mountaineers.

Ptarmigan grind up their food with grit

and digest it using their own kind of "friendly" bacteria in the gut.

And this is the key to the ptarmigan's ability to live here.

The way in which it digests its food has one very useful side effect.

It generates heat.

The ptarmigan has, quite literally, its own central heating system,

and out here, that must be inordinately useful.

It's all very well producing heat,

but retaining it presents another problem.

How is it possible in such cold weather?

To find out, we need to look through a heat-sensitive camera

which detects the warmth given off by every living thing, including me.

Now, in spite of the fact that I've got loads of layers on,

I'm losing an incredible amount of heat,

particularly from the hotter parts of my body

and the exposed area of my face, but look what happens

when we turn the heat-sensitive camera onto the ptarmigan.

Their thick plumage insulates so well

that the birds lose very little heat.

All we can see is some glowing around the areas without feathers,

like the bill and the eyes.

Ptarmigan must be the ultimate in energy efficiency!

So, as well as managing to generate heat,

the ptarmigan can also hang onto it. Phew!

Compared to them, the toughest human is feeble and frail!

Britain's ptarmigans are found mainly in the Scottish Highlands,

but even here, the unrelenting Arctic winter

eventually gives way to spring.

It reaches the Highlands much later than the rest of the country,

so when it does, there's a frantic race for animals to breed

before the snow returns again.

The empty winter landscape gives way to a place of plenty.

One creature's population reaches astronomical proportions

and it all starts down in the glens.

These are animals the locals live in fear of.

They approach silently and they hunt in packs.

Once they've attacked, they return relentlessly

in the pursuit of blood. Escape is impossible.

They are...

Oh! The Highland biting midges.

This is midge heaven, or for the people who live here, midge hell!

There are 5,000,000 midges for every person living in Scotland

and although I'm many million times the size of a midge,

they are definitely, I can't begin to tell you, getting the upper hand.

I'm out of here!

The midge larvae spend the winter in boggy soil,

but in May, the winged adults emerge.

Male midges live off nectar and cause us very little trouble,

but the females supplement their diet

with something a little more substantial...blood.

Midges don't actually suck blood,

they dig a little hole in your skin and then lap it up,

and while they're doing that, they release pheromones,

which attract all the other midges in the area.

"Hey, there's good stuff here," and in they come.

It's not long before you're absolutely bitten to death...

That'll do!

Midges might be a nuisance for us, but their main victims are red deer.

Every morning, the midges drive them uphill.

The higher the deer climb, the more likely they are to find relief.

Midges can't fly when the wind blows at more than seven miles an hour,

and that occurs, more often than not, on the higher slopes.

So the deer are safe from irritating bites.

But up here, even more insects are emerging, all at the same time.

They're crane flies.

The summer's so short, they all appear together

and the result is the biggest orgy in the British wildlife calendar.

It's also an orgy of a different kind - an orgy of food.

And this bird, the dotterel, has flown 1,800 miles from North Africa

to take full advantage of it.

The dotterel is also here to breed,

but the huge number of insects to eat

has led to a surprising role reversal.

This may look like a devoted mum, but it's actually a devoted dad.

There's so much food up here at this time of year

that it doesn't need two parents to incubate the eggs

and rear the young.

It's unusual, but in the case of the dotterel,

it's the chap who does all the work. Good for you!

The abandoned male cares for the eggs for about a month.

He's so dedicated, that he sits tight,

even with a giant like me around!

While he's sitting here doing all the work,

it leaves the female to go off and do other things,

which usually involves taking another lover. Hard luck!

With such a feast, the female can lay more than one clutch of eggs,

so when she's sure her first partner's settled,

she goes in search of another.

The chicks feed for themselves from the moment they hatch out.

But the wind whistling through the mountains

can be a challenge for such a tiny ball of fluff.

Dad remains nearby. He's a refuge from the worst of the weather,

but like the crane flies on which they feed,

the dotterel chicks must grow fast.

They have a gruelling maiden voyage to North Africa ahead

and any chicks left behind when the first chill of winter arrives

will never leave this place alive.

That's the reality of life on the edge.

In the bitter cold of a Highland winter,

it's easy to see how life can be tough.

But here in the south of England,

the welcoming nature of this landscape

conceals a wilderness area every bit as harsh.

There's no need to worry about the cold here.

I'm on an area of lowland heath in Dorset,

where the average temperature is a sizzling 15 degrees higher

than the top of the Cairngorms.

Here, it's sunburn that's a worry, not frostbite.

And while the Cairngorm tadpoles lived in the icy cold,

there's an amphibian here that's taken advantage

of the opposite conditions - hot and dry.

It's the natterjack toad.

We usually associate amphibians with wet places,

but this is one character who can take the heat.

On mild March evenings, males and females get together

and lay their double-stranded rows of eggs.

The eggs develop in a warm bath,

so while the Cairngorm tadpoles took a long time to mature

because of the cold,

the heathland natterjacks grow up in super-quick time.

But there is a snag.

When we have hot, dry summers and rain is scarce,

the warm shallow ponds can disappear before the tadpoles are ready.

Any tadpoles that remain are stranded

and then, slowly baked alive.

These little patches of heathland

are scattered throughout the southern counties,

especially in Dorset and Hampshire.

They can be baking hot and cinder dry,

and there's little cover from the beating sun.

It's probably the closest we get to a desert.

The reason these areas are so dry isn't just due to the low rainfall.

It's because rainfall doesn't hang around much,

and that's all because of this. Sand.

Sand particles are much larger than those of most soils

and that means water shoots straight through them,

leaving the surface bone dry.

Surface temperatures on the sand can reach 40 degrees Celsius.

It's enough to have most animals legging it for the shade,

but there's one that lives here BECAUSE of that baking sand.

This is the sand lizard, probably our most spectacular reptile.

It's usually found around the Mediterranean,

so a colony on the Dorset heaths is really at the edge of its range.

Spring is the time the more flamboyant males

seek out the less colourful females,

but their liaison is far from romantic.

After their brief encounter, the female must leave her eggs

to our unpredictable climate. This is why sand is so important.

By laying them in hot, dry sand, the female makes sure

they get enough warmth to develop properly.

Beads of sweat on the tiny eggs indicate

that things are about to happen,

and one by one, the new generation begins to emerge.

The female laid her eggs as far away from the male as she could get.

He'll eat anything small enough that moves, including baby lizards.

While food may be plentiful, water isn't.

The sand lizard copes by licking the morning dew from leaves.

And all of life on these heathlands

faces the challenge of where to find water,

but when the heaths are blooming pink and purple,

there's actually a lot of it about, if you know where to look.

Flying insects find it in flowers,

which offer a seemingly endless supply of sugary nectar,

but there's a price to be paid.

While they're making the most of the flowers,

there's something waiting there that'll make the most of them.

A crab spider. Heathlands are crammed with spiders,

and they get their water from the insects they catch.

The moisture is used, among other things,

to produce the spider's strong but flexible silk.

In late summer, huge numbers of spiderlings use silken threads

to take to the air, and when they land,

the ground is covered in strands of gossamer,

something one Roman historian described as,

"The year it rained wool."

Some things are rather sneaky about how they get hold of their water,

and one way to beat the odds in this tough environment is to steal it.

This might look like a triffid, but actually it's dodder,

a plant parasite.

It winds itself around the gorse plant,

tapping into water and food supplies with suckers

that penetrate the stem.

The result is a tangled mass of pink spaghetti

on gorse bushes across the heath.

But dodder apart, the plants that dominate these heathlands

are beautifully adapted to conditions here.

Both heather and gorse have needle-shaped leaves

to reduce water loss,

and while heather hugs the ground, gorse provides a spiky song post

for heathland birds like the Dartford warbler.

The gorse blossoms most strongly in spring,

but it'll have flowers all the year round.

They do say that, "when gorse is in bloom, kissing's in season,"

which means you can pucker up at just about any time of year.

But the key to gorse's success lies in what happens

when its flowers fade.

Now, if you stand by a gorse bush on a warm June day

and listen very carefully, you may hear something surprising.

POPPING NOISES

As the gorse pod matures, it twists and bursts open,

sending seeds flying through the air.

But on the heath the seeds can dry out,

so the gorse has a rather nifty way of getting them

to somewhere cool and moist.

If you pick off a pod, and break it into your hand,

you'll discover that the seeds themselves have, on their sides,

a little blob of yellow.

Now, that serves a very special purpose. I'll show you what.

The yellow blob is a tiny store of fat,

and it's there to pay for a highly efficient courier service.

It's a delicacy for foraging ants, but they don't get their payment

until they deliver their part of the bargain.

Foraging ants tend to be the geriatrics of the colony,

so their old, worn-out jaws can't separate the fat from the seed.

Instead, they carry it back to their nest.

In here, the younger workers can easily remove the tasty treat

using their sharper jaws.

So, the seed is delivered to its destination.

Ants, though, are tidy, and any litter in the nest

is cleared away in no time, but the seed delivery

stays right where it is.

The fat store was a kind of handle, so once it's been removed,

the ants have no way of carrying the seed away.

Protected in the cool, moist nest, the seed germinates...

and starts to grow into a brand-new gorse bush,

all courtesy of the local ants.

While water is in short supply on the southern heaths...

..it's far from scarce at the northernmost tip of Scotland.

Here, it rains on average for 160 days each year.

That's almost every other day, and five times more

than the driest parts of our country.

It's the soggiest place in Britain, a place where trees can't grow

in the rain-soaked ground,

but where conditions are right for one plant to keep out most others.

Few plants can survive in waterlogged soil,

but there's one plant that absolutely thrives in it.

It's all around me and even underneath me feet. Sphagnum moss.

Now, if you were a soldier, wounded in the trenches in WWI,

your only hope might have been a handful of dried moss.

It might not look much, but it's incredible stuff,

and the reason is because of its water absorbency.

This can take on 20 times its own weight of water,

that's twice as much as cotton wool.

The very properties that made it a good field dressing

during that war are also responsible

for creating this scenery all around me.

This distinctive landscape of ponds and swampland

is the largest blanket bog in Europe, possibly the world.

1,500 square miles of Scotland that we call the Flow Country.

With so much water around, this ought to be a botanist's paradise,

but it isn't. It's a vast wilderness where few plant species grow

and it's all down to one of those properties of sphagnum moss.

This is litmus paper.

It turns red when it comes into contact with anything acid.

There you are - look at that.

Sphagnum turns everything acid,

so it's antiseptic as well as being absorbent - an ideal bandage -

but it makes the water here as acid as vinegar.

And that means it's turned all this countryside here

into boggy, acid conditions that nothing else can grow in.

Talk about selfish!

It also means that these tree stumps don't rot.

They've been here for 4,000 years.

Few bacteria and fungi live in the waterlogged soil,

so wood and any other plant materials are not broken down.

The area is really poor in plant food.

Any plant that does live in nature's equivalent of a toxic dump

must get what it needs from another source.

The sundew gets its name from the little droplets on the leaves.

They may look like dew...

but they're actually as sticky as glue.

Look at that - land here, and there's no escape.

The struggling insect stimulates the sundew's digestive juices,

which dissolve the victim alive,

and its nutrients are absorbed through the leaves.

So the plants that do well here have found a way

of gaining nutrition from insects. It's normally the other way about.

Neat revenge, I call that!

And the lack of nutrients has another surprising effect.

But to find out what, I have to try my hand at a bit of fishing.

There's a fish!

Not very big, is it?

Better, but still a bit of a tiddler.

The fish here are much smaller than usual - Flow Country fish

are half the size of those found in other parts of Scotland.

Woah! Lively. But none of them's going to win prizes,

so they're safe from anglers.

But they're perfect bite-sized nuggets

for one of Britain's rarest breeding birds.

The elegantly-dressed black-throated diver.

The diver can't swallow large fish, so the undersized trout

provide a good supply of the right-sized food.

It means the birds can breed here, one of the few places in Britain

where they do so, although they're not thick on the ground.

This circle dance is one way in which they sort out

who gets to live where, each pair of birds dancing

for the right to occupy the best pond.

So, sphagnum moss's stranglehold on the vegetation of the Flow Country

has created an isolated sanctuary

for the beautiful black-throated diver.

At the other end of our islands,

there's a wilderness created not by a single plant, but a single animal.

Us.

This is a mysterious place, or so the Druids thought.

This tangled web of trees

is said to be the most haunted place in these parts.

BIRD CALLS

Local folk won't venture here after sunset.

They reckon it's home to a pack of fearsome hounds,

the "Wist Hounds", that stalk the unwary traveller.

Well, that's as may be...

the reality is that this is Wistman's Wood,

a wood of dwarf oak trees right in the centre of Devon.

It's what our upland areas might have looked like,

thousands of years ago.

But today, most of those trees have gone.

The culprits were the builders of this settlement at Grimspound -

Bronze Age farmers.

They burned and cleared the forest for crops and livestock,

creating a wholly man-made wildlife habitat that's unique to Britain.

You know, we've seen remnants of the icy Arctic in the Cairngorms,

parched, desert-like conditions on our heathlands

and swamps in the north of Scotland,

but this habitat is one we made earlier.

I feel as though I can see the whole world from here.

This is Dartmoor and moorlands like these

make up the largest areas of wilderness in Britain.

But the fantastic view is part of the problem

when it comes to making a home here.

There are no trees, so the challenge to wildlife

is not just the cold, the heat and the rain,

but the fact that there's no protection from any of it.

And without trees, any songbird living on moorland -

like that skylark up there - must find an alternative means

of advertising itself to potential partners

and keeping out rivals.

The skylark doesn't have a song post. Instead, it sings on the wing,

on and on, seemingly without drawing breath.

The Lark Ascending. Vaughan Williams came close,

but even he can't quite match the real thing.

But drawing attention to yourself like that has one major drawback.

The merlin is partial to skylarks, but in order to catch one,

it must get above its quarry. The two birds spiral upwards,

the lark trying to keep above its pursuer and singing all the while,

even though it could be seconds from death.

It seems to be telling the merlin, "I'm so fit, you can't catch me!"

So, the skylark lives to sing another day.

But all is not well in the state of our moorlands.

Something's taking over, an invader not from abroad, but from within.

Bracken.

This fern is getting out of control and spreading rapidly over the moor.

Most ferns rely on fine spores to reproduce, they're very delicate

and need high humidity, but bracken relies on these.

Rhizomes - underground stems.

and because they're in this soft, damp earth,

they're protected from exposure to sun and wind.

And one result of this invasion is to create another kind of desert.

Nothing grows under the canopy of bracken,

but it's not just due to the shade cast by the fronds,

it's also because of something rather more sinister.

Bracken produces a poison that'll prevent most other plants

from growing nearby...all plants bar one. The wild violet.

The violet's rather good at dealing with poisons, so it's able to grow

in the contaminated ground around the bracken.

In fact, the violet's actually a woodland plant.

The bracken fronds form a substitute canopy

that protect it from the worst of the weather.

And by sheltering the violets,

the bracken nurtures something rather special.

The caterpillars of the high brown fritillary butterfly.

They live and feed on violets.

So, this poisonous invader is also a saviour

of one of our rarest and most beautiful butterflies.

Pockets of moorland are dotted about all over Britain,

but for our next moorland specialist we need to travel northwards again.

We've come the entire length of the country,

to the islands of Orkney, off the northern tip of Scotland.

The moorland here is home to another creature you'd expect to see

in a wood, and more usually, at night.

It's an owl, but this one lives on the moors and hunts by day.

The short-eared owl.

And when it's time to court a mate,

this owl has found an extraordinary way of attracting attention.

CLAPPING WINGS

When he claps his wings, he plummets to the ground like a stone,

recovering just in time to prevent him plunging into the moor.

The nest is also un-owl-like - it's on the ground.

The mother owl relies on camouflage to hide her from predators.

Her mottled plumage blending in beautifully

with the plants around her.

Only her bright yellow eyes might give her away,

so she keeps them half-shut while sitting on the nest.

Even so, she's certainly more at risk than an owl in a tree,

but there's a good reason to live and nest in such a dangerous place.

In summer, the moors are full of mice and voles,

so the male bird is able to return to the nest time and again

with an almost continuous supply of food.

The owl chicks grow at a tremendous rate.

They'll leave the nest just four weeks after hatching.

For short-eared owls at least, moorland is a great place to be.

Back on the mainland, large swathes of our moorland are maintained

by controlled burning, leaving a patchwork of burned heather

over miles of upland Britain.

This very much man-made habitat is dependent on one special creature.

In Scotland alone, it's responsible for the employment

of over 1,000 people, and brings in to the Scottish economy

£17 million a year, but it's a bit tricky to find,

so I'm going to need some help.

Quince, come on! Here, come on!

Good boy. There's a good boy. Oh, yes, good boy.

Get on!

Steady, Quince. Quince, come on!

Good boy, steady, steady.

Steady...good boy!

There it is...

a red grouse chick, and as you can see from its plumage,

perfectly camouflaged on this moorland.

I wouldn't have stood a chance of finding it on my own,

not without you. Well done, Quince. Well done. Yes, good boy!

We'll let it get back to mum now.

OK, leave it alone.

Come on, come on, good boy!

But there's an upside and a downside to having a £17 million price tag

on your head. The upside is that there are teams of people

keeping the moors the way grouse like it.

And what they like most is heather.

They're one of the few creatures

that thrive almost exclusively on heather.

They eat the leaves in winter, new shoots in spring,

flowers in summer and the seeds during the autumn.

Burning gets rid of the tough old heather the birds don't like

and encourages new growth, it's all perfect.

And the downside?

Well, the birds are at their most valuable...

GUNSHOTS

..when they're being shot at.

From the Glorious Twelfth of August onwards,

some people will pay thousands of pounds a day to shoot these birds,

and smart London restaurants will compete with one another

to see who could be the first to have grouse on the menu.

Which may seem tough on the poor old grouse, but it's sobering, perhaps,

to realise that the grouse moors of Britain account for three-quarters

of all the heather moorland in the world,

and they're home to many more upland animals than grouse.

One of the beneficiaries is the mountain hare.

The grouse moors in Scotland are alive with hares,

and generally, they blend in superbly with their background

with brown fur in summer - just the thing to hide among the heather -

and white fur in winter to match the snow. But there are times

when the mountain hare is caught out -

wearing the wrong coloured coat.

Enter the golden eagle.

It may have had to rely on scavenging to survive,

back in the winter, but when it spots the tell-tale signs

of prey on the move, it turns into our supreme predator.

Well, even supreme predators have their off-days.

So, Wilderness Britain may have been created by ice and snow,

by heat and drought, by flooding and even by the actions of people.

But, however it came into being,

and however extreme these places might be,

their raw beauty has provided inspiration

for generations of poets, writers and artists,

and it's not hard to see why.

It may be the one third of our country that we don't live in,

but we still need it.

Our mountains, moors and heaths are where we go

for rest, recovery and renewal.

And the wildlife?

Well, overcoming and actually thriving on the challenges

of living in these remote places,

living life right on the very edge of what's possible,

takes a special kind of resilience. Which is why, for me,

these wilderness areas are among our finest national treasures.

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