Living World

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

3/18. Lionel Kelleway ventures onto the beach at Haverigg, Cumbria, to get up close and personal with Natterjack Toads. Half of the UK population live here. The natterjack toad is not only the noisiest amphibian in Cumbria, but its rarest too. Alarmingly, populations of this charismatic pioneer species have declined by an estimated 70 to 80 per cent within the last 100 years. Each Spring their future is in the balance because they rely entirely on the short-lived rain-water pools for mating, spawning and tadpole nurseries. They can, and do, dry out with the first warm spell. It's a race against time. William Shaw, Cumbria Conservation Officer with the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC), is their guardian. William and his army of volunteers do their best to ensure the pools persist for long enough to allow as many toads as possible to reproduce. ARC Trust's three year project aims to reverse their decline in Cumbria. A case of helping to secure the stronghold.

On the night of the recording, Lionel joins Bill on the dunes at sunset. As the sun dips below the horizon, they catch the first calls on the breeze. The natterjacks are emerging from their burrows to sing their deafening lovesongs. Picking their way by torch-light, Lionel and Bill discover toads massing in the pools, on the sand and in the grass. Toad-on-the-sole is something to avoid; Bill confesses that this was his first mortifying experience with a Natterjack many years ago. The Natterjack toad is much smaller than the common toad with a bold yellow stripe down its back. They switch their torches off. Soon a ratchet sound starts up cranking up to the full-on mating call. Irresistible.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kellaway encounters the loudest amphibian in Europe, the natterjack toad.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

4/18. Lionel Kelleway accompanies naturalist, artist and author John Walters in a quest through the oak woodland of the Dart Valley to find early migrant birds. They've just flown in from Africa and waste no time before getting down to the business of Spring. The males arrive first and advertise their chosen nest sites to the females, each with a different song and display. To the accompaniment of its calls, John evokes the images of the Wood Warbler males flitting, butterfly-like over a likely nest area to entice a female. Then they tune in to Redstart males calling, fanning their red tails in display. Used only once a year, they dance in and out of their nest holes, flipping around and singing from within, just the white flash on their foreheads showing. Finally the male Pied Flycatcher puts in an appearance, flitting around its hollow tree trunk nest hole, showing off the white bars on its wings. It sings from its hole with the white spots above its bill conspicuous in the dark hole.

On this warm Spring morning, Lionel and John are clearly delighted by all three birds performances. A rarely heard wildlife audio spectacle, not to be missed.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kellaway witnesses the performance of early migrant birds on Dartmoor.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

12/18. Many people are unaware of the importance the British Isles plays in the survival of Ancient Trees. We all look at these venerable old trees in parkland but do we ever think that they should actually be viewed as the Old Masters of the British countryside?

In this week's Living World, Lionel Kelleway travels to the Croft Abbey estate in Herefordshire. Here, inside the hollow belly of a 700-year-old oak, Lionel meets Brian Muelaner, an Ancient Tree advisor with the National Trust, and professor of mycology Lynne Boddy. Apart from the inherent beauty an individual tree has in a parkland landscape, as a group, Ancient Trees are vital to the survival of many fungi in the landscape. And without fungi, the trees would be unable to survive at all. With a changing climate, can this symbiotic relationship have a future? Or are we seeing the last of these trees forever?

Croft Abbey estate is remarkable because of its continuity of ownership over many generations by the same family who, like us, valued their ancient trees for aesthetic, not commercial, value. Hidden away in a corner of the parkland is Britain's oldest sessile oak, gnarled and twisted by age, but at over 1000 years old it could live for many centuries to come. Nearby, an avenue of sweet chestnuts, planted from seeds washed up after the Spanish Armada failed in its mission, majestically recreate the Spanish fleet's formation at sea on the hill.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway travels to Herefordshire to marvel at Britain's ancient trees,.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The elusive reed warbler weaves its cup-like nest among the swaying stems of reeds which makes it hard to study. For The Living World Joanna Pinnock joins Dave Leech from the British Trust for Ornithology in his study area in an East Anglian reed-bed.

Dave Leech is researching why reed warblers are bucking the trend of decline in long-distance migrants by counting nests and ringing chicks. Unlike turtle doves, nightingales and other birds which winter in south of the Sahara and which are disappearing from any areas of the UK, reed warblers are increasing in numbers and in their range. Part of their success could be in their amazing productivity, with some pairs producing two broods a year. They can also nest over open water which makes the nests less vulnerable than those of ground-nesting birds, and could be benefitting from reed-bed creation by conservationists.

But as Joanna discovers, the warblers can't escape from one of their parasites. Reed warblers are a main host of the cuckoo, a bird which is declining even as the reed warbler is increasing. The discovery of a cuckoo's egg in an unsuspecting warbler's nest is no surprise to Dave Leech who has been observing cuckoos and their relationship with their hosts at this site and others. Here cuckoos parasitize around 5-8% of the reed warbler's nests and seem to be thriving, so in the face of huge decreases in the numbers of British cuckoos, could the reed warbler present them with a lifeline?

New Series. Joanna Pinnock explores the shady world of the reed warbler.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 1999, Lionel Kelleway is joined by snail expert Mary Seddon in the Wye Valley. Lionel and Mary search through an ancient woodland on the trail of possibly the least-loved of creatures especially to gardeners. Along the way Lionel discovers many of this fascinating group are active in December and often easier to find as they search the woodland floor.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by Mary Seddon in the Wye Valley looking for snails.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Solitary bees build their nests in some interesting places, but none more so than Osmia bicolor, a mason bee that's preferred real estate is the empty shells of snails. Emerging in spring a few weeks after the males, the mated female spends two days lining and provisioning the shell before laying her eggs and sealing the shell. But she's not finished yet. Perhaps to prevent hungry predators in search of its original slimy occupant from destroying her nest, the snail bee hides the shell under a wigwam of twigs and sticks. Join presenter Trai Anfield and naturalist John Walters as they look for this pioneering little bee on the chalk hillsides above Cerne Abbas.

Trai Anfield is in Dorset to find a bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this episode from 2014, Trai Anfield is in Dorset with naturalist John Walters.

Solitary bees build their nests in some interesting places, but none more so than Osmia bicolor, a mason bee that's preferred real estate is the empty shells of snails. Emerging in spring a few weeks after the males, the mated female spends two days lining and provisioning the shell before laying her eggs and sealing the shell. But she's not finished yet. Perhaps to prevent hungry predators in search of its original slimy occupant from destroying her nest, the snail bee hides the shell under a wigwam of twigs and sticks. Join presenter

Trai Anfield and naturalist John Walters as they look for this pioneering little bee on the chalk hillsides above Cerne Abbas.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Trai Anfield is in Dorset with naturalist John Walters. From 2014.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Each year the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels become the winter home for hundreds of thousands of starlings. Making their way from across the UK and Europe these birds have found a safe haven to roost with plenty of food nearby. The famous evening murmuration, fantastic formations of huge flocks of starlings coming in to roost, brings hundreds of visitors to the levels each winter. But far fewer people see the spectacle of the dawn eruption when the starlings take off en masse to start their day foraging in the surrounding fields. Simon Clarke of Natural England talks Trai Anfield through the spectacle on Shapwick Heath. When it is all over and three quarters of a million starlings have departed for the day, thoughts turn to the reedbed and the effect the presence of so many birds has on their winter roost site and the animals they share it with.
Produced by Ellie Sans.

Trai Anfield witnesses the dawn eruption of starlings from the Somerset Levels.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. This episode from 2014 sees Trai Anfield immerses herself in a starling spectacle many people have never seen. Each year the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels become the winter home for hundreds of thousands of starlings. Making their way from across the UK and Europe these birds have found a safe haven to roost with plenty of food nearby. Simon Clarke of Natural England talks Trai Anfield through the spectacle on Shapwick Heath. When it is all over and three quarters of a million starlings have departed for the day, thoughts turn to the reedbed and the effect the presence of so many birds has on their winter roost site and the animals they share it with.

Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from the Living World archives, this episode from 2014.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

With Christmas fast approaching, many of us will be decorating our homes with the botanical trinity of; the holly, the ivy and mistletoe, of course.

And it is mistletoe that Lionel Kelleway focuses on in this programme first broadcast in 2001. Joining Lionel at Laddin Farm in Herefordshire is Jonathan Briggs from the Mistletoe Survey of Great Britain. The farm with its old orchards sits comfortably in the heart of Britain's mistletoe growing region, an ideal place to begin a journey into this strange hemiparasite of the plant world.

A favourite of ancient religions, mistletoe has long been regarded as something of a beauty and a beast, although as Lionel discovers at this time of the year there is even a mistletoe market in Worcestershire.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway takes a festive look at mistletoe. Recorded in 2001.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In the decades since this episode was first broadcast, Shetland's wildlife has changed and adapted. Today there is a museum containing Bobby Tulloch's archive, The Old Haa Museum and Visitor Centre on the island of Yell. Wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman revisit this Living World and gently update the story for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World featuring Bobby Tulloch on Shetland. From 1974

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

On the eastern edge of Loch Lomond adders are preparing for another summer. Spring-time sun has coaxed them from their winter hibernacula and as the weather warms males have begun to look for potential mates. The adder is one of the most studied and yet misunderstood British animals. With distinct markings and predictable habits individual adders can be tracked for years by the people who know how, exposing their mysterious behaviours. Yet adders are still despised by some, unaware that their docile and cautious nature makes the risk of their painful, but very rarely dangerous, bite very small. Trai Anfield joins Chris McInerny on a showery, but warm early April morning to seek out these beautiful and captivating reptiles.
Produced by Ellie Sans.

Trai Anfield encounters adders basking on the edges of Loch Lomond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this programme from 2014, Trai Anfield joins Chris McInerny adder spotting on the eastern edges of Loch Lomond.

On the eastern edge of Loch Lomond adders are preparing for another summer. Spring-time sun has coaxed them from their winter hibernacula and as the weather warms males have begun to look for potential mates. The adder is one of the most studied and yet misunderstood British animals. With distinct markings and predictable habits individual adders can be tracked for years by the people who know how, exposing their mysterious behaviours. Yet adders are still despised by some, unaware that their docile and cautious nature makes the risk of their painful, but very rarely dangerous, bite very small. Trai Anfield joins Chris McInerny on a showery, but warm early April morning to seek out these beautiful and captivating reptiles.

Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Trai Anfield encounters adders basking on the edges of Loch Lomond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

It is their permanency in an ever changing countryside which encourages churchyards to become living reservoirs of a former land use or habitat. Between the gravestones, with sensitive care, these wildlife oasis can become an important refuge to many species. Often their very existence pre-dates the building of the church itself and in the guidance of experts we can find plant or animal evidence that takes us back to a time when the hallowed ground was simply the earth beneath our feet. And so it was for this Living World broadcast thirty years ago; wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman introduces and relives the rich plant-life Derek Jones found in this Sussex churchyard in 1988.

Derek is joined at the church door by David Streeter from Sussex University, which from there allows them to head off into this programme of discovery. Derek discovers that this particular church was built around 100 years ago, on what had once been a Sussex meadow. As the pair discover, despite one hundred years of burials and activity, the graveyard retains a wealth of wild flowers surrounded by landscape beyond the church walls which has changed forever. A botanical relic that transports them back to Victorian England for just a moment. Not only plants flourish here birds make it their territory, insects and lichens too.

In this episode, Lindsey Chapman will gently bring the story up to date since the three decades that have elapsed since that programme first aired, the British countryside has changed, but the churchyards remain.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Derek Jones explores a Sussex churchyard for signs of wildlife. From 1988.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this episode from 2011 Joanna Pinnock travels up to the Stiperstone Hills of Shropshire where she meets up with Sara Bellis and Carl Pickup from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust at a remarkable site, The Hollies.

Here high up on the windswept hills, Joanna encounters ancient holly trees, which could be as old as 400 years. Holly, naturally an understory tree of more developed woodland, is not suited to grow up here in the cold windy conditions. But how and why these trees came to be here is something of a mystery. It is thought these holly trees are a living link to a past age in this landscape, where lead mining was once common and over 2 centuries ago there were thousands of people eking a subsistence living up here. Possibly the hollies we seen now, gnarled and twisted though they are, are all that remains of a woodland which at one time covered all the hills around here. That woodland was subsequently cleared for whatever reason, leaving the holly trees as a valuable source of winter fodder. With the altitude and animal grazing on the hills these days, young holly cannot regenerate, so this landscape is one of preservation not conservation.

But the story ends with a surprise, the cuckoo trees up here. Sometimes known as bonded trees, here Joanna witnesses the growing of full height rowan trees, inside the trunks of older holly trees. How did the rowan trees get there, well, it all has something to do with winter thrushes, as is revealed in the programme.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Joanna Pinnock is in Shropshire looking at ancient holly in this episode from 2011.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway is guided by two National Trust experts around a 100-year-old orchard in search of creatures that can only be found among the old fruit trees. Species include beetles that look like fleas and moth caterpillars that can bore holes in a tree as wide as your finger. And look out for the queen hornet and beasts that live only in mistletoe on old apple trees.

Lionel Kelleway is guided by two National Trust experts around a 100-year-old orchard.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Here in the Lake District the Arctic charr is at the southern end of its range, being a species more likely to be found, as its name suggests, in the cold Arctic seas further north. It arrived here at the end of the last Ice Age as a pioneer species colonising lakes and rivers as the ice retreated. Although once abundant, today numbers are greatly reduced as witnessed by Lionel as he ventures onto the lake in a research vessel where only one Arctic charr is found on this trip. So what of the future, is the Arctic charr destined to become extinct in Britain? Or will the continuity of research on England's largest lake, will help scientists preserve this species for the future.

On England's largest lake, Lionel Kelleway encounters a very rare fish, the Arctic charr.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

After a long summer spent raising their young in the Arctic, barnacle geese need a safe place in warmer climes to fatten up before the breeding season begins again. Every winter the whole population of Svalbard barnacle geese make their way to one place in the UK; the Solway Firth on the west coast of Scotland. One of the best places to see them is the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust centre at Caerlaverock. Each day the barnacle geese gorge themselves in the fields around the centre. Just before dusk, quiet falls over the feeding birds, signalling it is time to return en masse to roost in the salt flats out of the way of opportunistic predators. Presenter Trai Anfield joins Brian Morrell to find out how their long journey has affected them and witness this incredible spectacle.

Produced by Ellie Sans.

Trai Anfield and Brian Morrell witness huge flocks of barnacle geese at WWT Caerlaverock.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

6/18. In this touching encounter, a young beaver swims within touching distance of Lionel Kelleway and his host Sir John Lister-Kaye. So what are they doing in a Scottish Loch? Hunted for their fur and meat over 400 years ago, the beaver was quickly made extinct. Now various pilot projects have been set up to explore the possibility of a return of beavers to Britain. Sir John Lister-Kaye brought beavers to his Field Centre at Aigas from Bavaria four years ago. They instantly settled into their new home by ignoring the lodge thoughtfully provided and building their own. They haven't looked back as shown by the kits they have had every year ever since. In this delightful programme Lionel and John spend an evening watching the beavers do what beavers do. Including spotting of one of the new baby kits, emerging from the lodge for the very first time. As if that isn't exciting enough, one of last year's kits swims to within 5 metres of the hide, oblivious to everything but the task in hand: folding up dinner-sized plates of waterlillies and shoving them into his jaws as quickly as possible - with the odd flower on the side. Clearly moved by such a close encounter, Lionel and John evoke the magic of the evening on the loch with their animated and engaging musings on the second largest rodent in the world.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kelleway has a very close encounter with a mammal extinct in Britain for 400 years.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

While this furry, buzzing, rather attractive fly is harmless to humans, its pretence of being a bee is to help its young get a good start in life by using others' nests. In Spring the female bee fly coats her eggs in dust to give them some added weight and then hovering near solitary bee nesting holes will flick her eggs at the entrance. As they develop, her larvae head inside the bee's nest and devour the emerging bee larvae. It's a fly-eat-bee world. (First broadcast in 2012).

Producer: Sheena Duncan

Editor: Julian Hector

Joanna Pinnock discovers the extraordinary masquerade of the large bee-fly.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

There's a pretender on the wing. Joanna Pinnock joins naturalist John Walters in Devon to find out more about a bee mimic, the Dark Edged bee fly. With its reddish hairy body and rapier-like proboscis it's said to look part bee, part mosquito and is often spotted in gardens in Spring hovering and darting above the ground. The long proboscis helps it take nectar from deep within flowers rather like a hummingbird.

While this furry, buzzing, rather attractive fly is harmless to humans, its pretence of being a bee is to help its young get a good start in life by using others' nests. In Spring the female bee fly coats her eggs in dust to give them some added weight and then hovering near solitary bee nesting holes will flick her eggs at the entrance. As they develop, her larvae head inside the bee's nest and devour the emerging bee larvae. It's a fly-eat-bee world. (First broadcast in 2012).

Producer: Sheena Duncan

Editor: Julian Hector

Joanna Pinnock discovers the extraordinary masquerade of the large bee-fly.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In January Sweden can be a cold and inhospitable place. Despite winter temperatures dropping to minus 15 southern Sweden is alive with birdlife which, like in Britain, heads south from the high arctic to the relatively warmer climate of Scandinavia. For this week's Living World, Chris Sperring travels to the Vastmanlan area of Sweden where the huge taiga forests begin, forests that stretch east all the way to Alaska. Travelling 40 km north of the town Vasteras he meets up with Torbjorn Hegedus a local ornithologist and Tom Arnbom from WWF Sweden to head out for the day and see what birds they come across in this snowy wooded landscape.

In the taiga birch woodland pygmy owl is a common species which Torbjorn attempts to lure down with a series of calls. This calling brings down crested tit, coal tit and a whole host of species, feeding in the woods. Penetrating deeper into the woods rewards the trio with a sighting of a hawk owl, a true specialist of the high arctic, but if that wasn't enough excitement for a day, pine grosbeaks come and mob the hawk owl. A wonderful example of the varied birdlife that can be seen in that area of Sweden which is at the same latitude as Shetland.

Chris Sperring is in the Swedish taiga looking for the hawk owl.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Beginning early in the morning, Lionel meets up with Will Cresswell a behavioural ecologist and discuss what is going on by this competitive singing between male blackbirds. In spring through to early summer, blackbirds can sing throughout the day and, which is not common in song birds, sing into the night. This energy sapping process is to proclaim their territorial rights to any other birds attempting to move in. Of course the song is only the beginning of the fascinating process of the breeding cycle and the creation of next generation of blackbirds. Along the way to unpick this story Lionel and Will look for evidence of nests to discuss breeding success, the risk the eggs and chicks face from predation, and why territories are important.

In this episode, Lindsey Chapman will bring this story up to date since this programme was first broadcast, offering some recent updates into one of our most familiar and recognisable birds.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway heads to Scotland to revel in blackbird song and its meanings. From 2002.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Sounding rather like air being blown over the top of an empty milk bottle, the male bitterns call once heard drifting over the landscape is not easily forgotten. The bittern is a shy secretive member of the heron family who is more often heard than seen. Once widespread over the British Isles, following human persecution and loss of its reedbed habitat it became extinct in Britain around 1885. A few decades later a small number of continental bitterns had returned to our shores but the fate of the bittern population was still precarious. In this programme from 2004 the best place in the UK to hear a bittern was in the extensive wetlands and reedbeds of East Anglia. Brett Westwood travelled to Minsmere in Suffolk in the company of Ian Hawkins and Ken Smith of the RSPB in search of a bittern booming.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood travels to Suffolk to hear a booming bittern. Recorded in 2004.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this first programme recorded in 1997, Lionel Kelleway is joined by Britain's leading woodland historian, Oliver Rackham, who died earlier this year. Lionel and Oliver visit Bradfield Woods in Suffolk which since 1252 has been under traditional woodland management. At the time of broadcast, Oliver had regularly visited this unique woodland for over 20 years. His understanding and knowledge guides Lionel to parts of the wood which link us to the primeval wild wood of Britain.

Chris Packham relives programmes from the Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Once introduced into New Zealand they began to spread at a rate of 30 feet each year to colonise vast stretches of the country and must come a close second to oaks for their importance.

Not only providing the most accessible 'food for free' for us, it must rank as one of the most important plants in Britain for wildlife, providing nesting sites for at least 26 species of bird and around 100 insect species that depend upon brambles.

Brambles are a major component in a good habitat mosaic, which is often the best invertebrate habitat and is relatively resistant to rabbits which make it good in creating shelter.

James Brickell is in mid-Wales with botanist Ray Woods on a personal exploration of the humble blackberry bush in an attempt to learn more about the importance of brambles in supporting a myriad of nature.

With over 300 species of bramble in the British Isles, some inhabiting small areas and highly adapted to soil type or aspect such as the sub-erecta group living at over 1000 feet above sea level. Ray explains the role of the blackberry in the wider landscape and how its complex ecology is a boon to the wildlife that inhabits, utilises and finds shelter from its structure.

Brambles are a very good nectar source, food plant mainly for many species; the fruits are a wonderful reservoir for raspberry beetles and feed wasps in late autumn!

Humans have been eating blackberry fruits, known as drupes, for millennia and historically man may be one of the main vectors of spreading the seeds across the British Isles. Recent research though has uncovered a possible link to bramble growth and climate change, which once again illustrates the complexity surrounding brambles.

Producer: Andrew Dawes

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2012.

~Living World is exploring the complex and fascinating world of blackberries in mid Wales.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Standing next to a tree which was likely a sapling when wolves roamed freely in Scotland is a humbling experience. And so it was that Lionel Kelleway began this Living world from 2002. Joining Lionel next to a venerable 'granny tree' is renowned naturalist Roy Dennis MBE who explains that today just 1% of the original 1.5 million hectares survives. Unraveling the complexities of what happened to this huge tract of the Caledonian Forest which the Romans called 'silva caledonia' is revealed as the duo trudge across the landscape looking for ecological clues and to revel in the abundant wildlife that still thrives here, from pine marten to Scottish crossbill.

But what of the future? To bring the story up to date since this programme was first broadcast in 2002, wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman refreshes the story for today's audience, including some ambitious plans to rewild the area once more.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World on the Caledonian Forest. From 2002.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario is home to the Eastern Wolf and a magnet for visitors to this wilderness national park. Canadian reporter Sian Griffiths meets David LeGros in the park and is taken on a wolf howl expedition to look for this shy and retreating animal. The park organises public wolf-howls to bring members of the public closer to and give richer encounters with this wonderful creature. The Living World has special access to the park and the rangers for this exclusive nature walk with a difference.

Sian Griffiths heads to the Algonquin Park in Canada to listen out for Eastern wolves.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The humble pigeon is an often overlooked bird. We pass by it often without a second glance as we rush along our busy city streets, but if we stop and wonder, how does the pigeon know where it is and how does it get from A to B?

This episode from 2008 finds Lionel Kelleway discovering the biology behind pigeon migration with Oxford University's Chris Armstrong. Starting their recording at the University's Wytham Field Station Lionel meets some of the pigeons used in the study which far from being small-brained birds show they have a wide array of navigational tools at their disposal...a magnetic sense...a sun compass...a keen sense of smell. By attaching miniature GPS loggers to pigeon's backs Chris hopes to find out how they navigate home, however as Lionel finds out for himself, many aspects of a birds amazing navigational ability is still to be unravelled.

So what has happened in the last 10 years since the programme aired? Lindsey Chapman brings the story up to date by offering some recent discoveries into this fascinating research into bird migration.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway discovering the biology behind pigeon migration. From 2008.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

What better way could there be to bring the wildlife to the attention of the next generation than to spend a leisurely hour or two down by the seaside, bucket and net in hand searching under rocks for a crab or two.

In this programme from 1999 Lionel Kelleway does just this and heads to Scotland to join naturalist Stephen Wiseman as they steal a few golden hours at low tide at the exposed rock pools of Culzean Country Park. It's a warm summer's day and Lionel finds himself wading into the shallow waters of a large rock pool while Stephen begins to search for crabs and reflect how rockpooling remains as popular as ever. An activity that is sure to reconnect people to their their natural environment.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway looks for crabs in a Scottish rockpool. Presented by Chris Packham.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Cave Spiders are one of the largest spiders found in the United Kingdom, with adults measuring up to 5cm legspan and 15mm body length. For arachnophobes they are probably the stuff of nightmares, but to spider lovers they are creatures of great beauty with shiny brown abdomens rather like polished conkers.

There are two species found in Britain, Meta bourneti and the slightly more common Meta menardi. Both species like dark places, but only Meta bourneti has been found in the damp cellars of Witley Court.

Cave spiders can be identified by their large teardrop-shaped white egg cases, about the size of a damson, which are suspended on a silk thread from the roof of their dwelling. When the spiderlings hatch (and there can be 100 spiderlings in a single case) they are attracted to light, unlike the adults which are strongly repelled by light. This helps the young find new areas to colonise. They release silken thread from their spinnerets and drift on these threads which are caught up and blown by the wind, so they can travel long distances. Once they land they produce a small orb web in which they catch insects. In mid-summer the spiderlings seek out dark caves or tunnels in which to spend the rest of their lives. Spiderlings have two moults before they reach the adults, and cave spiders feed on small insects and woodlice which they catch in their fine orb webs.

Lionel Kelleway explores some very dark cellars in search of some very big spiders.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

On suitably damp and overcast autumnal day Chris discovers there are remarkable differences in the ecology of the predatory centipede and the unrelated dead wood specialist the millipede. It turns out that centipedes and millipedes are as distantly related from its other as they are from spiders or flies. Learning that the easiest way to tell them apart is that centipedes are fast moving and have one pair of legs per body segment, Steve then reveals that Millipedes have two pair of legs on each body segment and are much slower when disturbed, often rolling up into coil or ball.

Distantly related land dwellers of lobsters and crayfish centipedes and millipedes have evolved to a life on the land, one of the oldest terrestrial fossil is a millipede, but they are more at home in moist leaf litter or behind rotting bark where they can hide away from predators during the day, coming out at night to feed. Autumn is a perfect time to look for these cylindrical species so beginning in a beech woodland the programme moves to an ancient wood near the banks of the River Thames where Steve reveals how well adapted these two species are to this moist habitat and how important they are in the life cycle and health of our woodland and garden ecology.

~Living World this week is in search of centipedes and millipedes in Oxfordshire.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This week on Living World, presenter Trai Anfield is on home ground and heading off to Coquet Island, just a mile off the Northumberland coast at Amble. Coquet Island is now the last breeding colony in Britain for the roseate tern, a charismatic seabird sharing the island with 40,000 other seabirds.

This is a rare privilege for Trai as during the roseate tern breeding season no landings are allowed on the island, nor are boats allowed close by. However guiding her through the natural history of this declining bird is RSPB's Paul Morrison, who manages the island, and BTO's Tom Cadwallander, the only person in the UK able to ring roseate terns. Even for this programme, Paul is not able to land on the island but he skilfully manoeuvres the boat just a few feet away from the nest boxes the RSPB install to assist the roseate terns to breed.

As Tom explains at the time of recording, there were only 71 breeding pairs of roseate terns on the island, making up about 99% of the UK population. The nearest large colony is in Ireland where around 1000 pairs breed at Rockabill. On Coquet Island the roseate terns share space with 3 other tern species, the sandwich, arctic and common.

Even though Trai cannot step onto the island, the spectacle of all these seabirds just feet from the shore is something she revels in while learning just a little more about this birds natural history.

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Coquet Island off the Northumberland coast is the last breeding site for roseate terns.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Surprisingly the British Isles are home to seven species of crayfish. Only one, the white clawed crayfish, is indigenous; once a common sight along British rivers, it is now endangered, due partly to the release of its North American cousin into British rivers 30 years ago. Lionel Kelleway travels to Somerset to investigate the plight of our largest freshwater crustacean and to see a project to try and save the crayfish in the wild.

Lionel Kelleway investigates the plight of our largest freshwater crustacean.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In Medieval England, so abundant was the native white clawed crayfish that following the end of Lent Fasting at Easter monks and nuns would feast on this delicacy. However as Lionel Kelleway discovers in this programme from 2000 with a rapidly declining population even the chances of even finding a crayfish takes time and skill. The decline in our native crayfish is a result of a plague brought in by an alien species, the North American Signal crayfish and from our rivers and streams suffering from damage or reduced water quality.

At the Bybrook river Lionel is joined by Martin Frayling from the Environment Agency on the edge of the Cotswolds. A river that is as perfect a place as any to begin their journey into the freshwater world of the white clawed crayfish.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is by a Cotswold river on the lookout for native crayfish.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Crossbills, so named due to the overlapping tips of their bills, are finches with large heads and bright colours: the males are red and the females are olive green. What makes them so unusual is that the tips of their beaks are crossed over; allowing them to rip into pine cones and extract the seeds. Different species of crossbills have different sized bills, which have evolved in association with the species of cones they eat. The Common Crossbill is found across the UK all year round and its numbers have been boosted by the planting of commercial conifers such as pine and larch. A real prize for birdwatchers is the larger and much rarer Parrot Crossbill, which has a very deep bill and can tackle the biggest and thickest cones. Parrot Crossbills breed in very small numbers in the UK, almost exclusively in native pinewoods in Scotland. In winter 2013/14 small flocks of parrot crossbills arrived in eastern England including Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire.

Presenter Trai Anfield and ornithologist Ian Newton, who has studied the movements of crossbills, take the rare opportunity to track down this flock, which probably irrupted from the breeding forests in Scandinavia. Population irruptions occur when the pine crop fails in their native countries and so the birds wander widely in search of a fresh supply. If food supplies in Sherwood Forest run out, the birds could disperse at any moment, so the search for these unusual and colourful species will be a gripping one for all involved, listeners included.

Produced by Jim Farthing.

Trai Anfield searches for crossbills near Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In early winter, Joanna Pinnock heads up to the Stiperstone Hills in Shropshire. Here she meets up with Sara Bellis and Carl Pickup from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust at a remarkable place, The Hollies. Here high up on the windswept hills, Joanna encounters ancient holly trees, which could be as old as 400 years. Holly, naturally an understory tree of more developed woodland, is not suited to grow up here in the cold windy conditions. But how and why these trees came to be here is something of a mystery.

These holly trees though are a living link to a past age in this landscape, where lead mining was once common and over 2 centuries ago there were thousands of people eking a subsistence living up here. Possibly the hollies we seen now, gnarled and twisted though they are, are all that remains of a woodland which at one time covered all the hills around here. That woodland was subsequently cleared for whatever reason, leaving the holly trees as a valuable source of winter fodder. With the altitude and animal grazing on the hills these days, young holly cannot regenerate, so this landscape is one of preservation not conservation.

But the story ends with a surprise, the cuckoo trees up here. Sometimes known as bonded trees, here Joanna witnesses the growing of full height rowan trees, inside the trunks of older holly trees. How did the rowan trees get there, well, it all has something to do with winter thrushes, as is revealed in the programme.

On a Shropshire hillside ancient holly trees reveal an astonishing relationship with rowan

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The eider duck, known locally as "Cuddy's" duck, is regarded as the first bird in the world to have been given conservation protection, when St Cuthbert offered the eider duck sanctuary on the Farne Islands in the seventh century. Today, they breed in vast numbers off the Northumbrian coast, and Brett Westwood travels to Amble harbour to see the duck's colourful breeding plumage, and listen to the famous "crooning" calls of the males in the company of the RSPB's Paul Morrison and biologist Hilary Broker-Carey

Since the programme was first broadcast the eider duck has been part of a discussion on Marine Conservation Zones. Wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman revisits this Living World from 2002 before bringing the story up to date for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World on eider ducks in Northumberland. From 2002

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway discovers the Culm Grassland water meadow in Devon, a rare habitat believed to be unique in Europe. With a unique mix of grass species and an unusually large number of flowering plants, it is believed to be the same today as when it first appeared at the end of the last Ice Age. Lionel unearths the complexities of restoring this wild ancient grassland.

Lionel Kelleway discovers the rare habitat of the Culm Grassland water meadow in Devon.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In winter, the UK's estuaries and wetlands play host to many species of 'dabbling,' or surface feeding, ducks. Chris Sperring visits the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire to find out more about them. In the company of Richard Hearn, Head of Species Monitoring for the Trust, he sees flocks of wigeon and hears their 'whistling' calls.

Although teal are resident in the British Isles, their numbers are swelled in winter by a migrant population that take advantage of milder weather and a plentiful food source found in wetlands. Chris also comes close to the most elegant of dabbling ducks, the pintail, and encounters the UK's most common species of duck, the mallard.

Chris Sperring visits Gloucestershire to find out why ducks 'dabble'.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

May 5th is International Dawn Chorus day and to celebrate this worldwide event presenter Trai Anfield heads to the Coombes Valley near Leek in Staffordshire to experience the emulsion of sound of a dawn chorus there.

Well before dawn, for this special Living World, Trai Anfield meets up with Jarrod Sneyd from the RSPB. Here standing in oak woodland their sense of anticipation rises as with the first shimmers of light breaking the eastern horizon, the first pipings of the thrush family begin to break the silence. Slowly and imperceptibly more birds and different species join the awakening woods, the warblers, flycatchers and redstarts are then followed by the seed eaters until, soon after sunrise, the wood is alive with nature's choral sound. Can there be any better way to celebrate the arrival of spring.

During the morning Trai discovers what birds are actually doing at dawn and why this is a special time of year. She also discovers that there is a dusk chorus, no less spectacular, but with increased ambient sounds in the evening, this is an event that is often overlooked. Sadly and all too soon, the dawn chorus in this little corner of England begins to wane and the countryside reverts to background ambient sound as those songsters head off to forage in the woods. Likewise Trai packs up her microphone and heads off for a breakfast with the memory of that sound still fresh in her memory.

Trai Anfield revels in a sound spectacle on International Dawn Chorus Day.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Steve shows Miranda dippers feeding at the edge of streams where they catch small bottom-feeding fish such as bullheads and insects like caddis-fly and mayfly larvae. Steve Ormerod demonstrates the richness of the mountain stream by kick-sampling for insects, disturbing stones from the stream-bed and catching the potential dipper prey in a net held just downstream.

Not all streams are suitable for dippers, some because they don't have the combination of features that dippers need, but also because pollution has reduced their prey. After exploring the oxygen-rich , upland streams , Steve takes Miranda to Aberfan, downstream in the heart of the once active Welsh coalfields. Here, as a result of improving water quality , dippers are returning to rivers that they deserted many decades before. As indicators of environmental quality, dippers are the canaries in the coal mine which tells us that in some areas at least, pollution is on the wane.

Producer: Brett Westwood

Editor: Julian Hector.

Miranda Krestovnikoff explores the watery wintery world of the dipper.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Spiders love the nooks and crannies in drystone walls. The Peak District has 100s of miles of them and many different species of spider, from web builders to fast hunters, live there. Wolf spiders race after their prey on long, powerful legs. Jumping spiders leap from a hiding place. The tiny money spiders build webs like hammocks for prey to fall into and lace weaving spiders construct mats of web with recoiling strands that drag the prey to the spider. The limestone walls of the White Peak are not only a beautiful feature of this part of the National Park, they were built with great skill and patience by generations of skilled workmen. Mary Colwell meets Sarah Henshall, lead ecologist with Buglife and Simon Nicholas, the local Ranger for the National Trust, to discover the 350 million year old limestone that forms the walls and search for the mini beasts that live in their depths.

Spiders love drystone walls, and the Peak District has 100s of miles of limestone walls.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The shifting shingle world of Dungeness is a remarkable place. There are four internationally important shingle peninsula's in the World. Two in Germany, one in America, (Cape Canaveral) and yes you've guessed it, Dungeness in Kent. The unique landscape of Dungerness has been studied since Medieval times giving scientists such as Erica Towner and David Harper from Sussex University a wealth of historical data to work from.

Which is why Peter France joined Erica and David on a timeline walk from the sea edge to dry land in this Living World. Along the way, Peter discovers shingle is a very underrated habitat and far from being like a desert the area is teeming with life. Dungerness has also the RSPB's oldest nature reserve created in 1932 from land bought in 1930 on Denge Beach. As part of their journey the trio look at the nuclear power stations on dungerness, which were built on good former shingle sites of Special Scientific Interest. That destroyed the shingle but on the positive side, the power stations provide cliff habitat for redstarts and rare lichens, and their warm discharge water provides feeding areas for birds. As can be imagined on a shingle headland, tree cover is limited, though visiting ancient holly bushes on Ministry of Defense land usually not open to the public provides a startling glimpse into the past.

Lindsey Chapman revisits this edited Living World from 1990 to gently bring the story of Dungerness and it's wildlife up to date with a unique wildlife project.

Presenter Andrew Dawes

Peter France joins Erica Towner and David Harper on Dungerness in Kent. From 1990

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This corner of north Gloucestershire is home to some of the very best wild daffodil spectacles in the British Isles, plants whose pale primrose flowers with egg-yolk trumpets spill over motorway verges, infiltrate hedgerows and crowd into copses for a few precious weeks in late March and early April.

The area is also famous for hosting a remarkable collection of poets just before the First World War, lured there by the idea of a rural idyll. Among them were Edward Thomas, who was killed in action, and the visiting American poet Robert Frost, whose verse, 'The Road Not Taken' includes the well-known line 'two roads diverged in a yellow wood'. Was this perhaps a reference to the tides of Dymock daffodils?

Paul finds out from his guides Roy Palmer, folklorist and chairman of the Dymock Poets Society, and botanist Ray Woods, who reveals the resilience and also the vulnerability of this surprising flower, which is showing promise as a relief for dementia.

Blending literature, history and wildlife, Living World takes the poets' path into the heart of wild daffodil country in this unique corner of England and revels in the coming of spring.

Producer: Brett Westwood

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2011.

Paul Evans revels in the blooming of spring daffodils at Dymock in Gloucestershire.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

To find out for himself, as Brett Westwood introduces in this Living World episode first broadcast in 2005, Peter France heads over to the Essex coastline in the company of ecologist Graeme Underwood from Essex University and Chris Tyas from the RSPB. Overlooking the wide marginal landscape wedged between the sea and the land they discuss mudflats and difference between marine and freshwater marshes. An ever changing landscape that requires specific management with all the challenges of creating the best habitat for all plants and animals here, including the thousands of dark bellied brent geese, in front of them.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Peter France is in Essex with Graeme Underwood and Chris Tyas. From 2005.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Much has changed since the programme was first broadcast, therefore in this revised episode, wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman revisits this Living World from 2001, bringing the story up to date for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World on wintering avocet on the river Exe. From 2001

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Both mysterious and fascinating fairy rings are steeped in mythology and. In this episode of the Living World Chris Sperring accompanies fungi expert Lynne Boddy from Cardiff University to the National Botanical Garden of Wales to bust the myths and explore the little known subterranean world of fairy rings. Each ring is formed of a single individual fungus and are at their most obvious when their mushrooms appear above ground on pasture and in woodland.
Chris discovers that while the short-lived fruiting bodies, which often appear in the autumn, may be the most noticeable indicator of the presence of fairy rings the real action is taking place all year round below ground. A network of fungal tubes called mycelia make up the bulk of each individual fungi. This network spreads out underground decomposing, parasitizing, or forming mutualistic relationships with trees and grasses depending on the species of fungi. And when two fairy rings meet a battle ensues that often results in mutual annihilation. In learning about fairy rings Chris also finds out just what an important role fungi play in the world's ecosystems.

Chris Sperring talks to fungi expert Lynne Boddy about the weird world of fairy rings.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

To begin their adventure, they must head towards the Pele tower, which means that David and Paul have to negotiate the dive bombing attacks of another breeding bird on the island, the Arctic tern. Avoiding razor sharp bills is not for the faint hearted, the terns though are just protecting their eggs and chicks which are all around Paul's feet as he walks.

Scrambling to the top of the Pele tower this allows not only a respite from the bombarding terns but a panoramic view of the island beyond the adult puffins relaxing on the edge of the tower. Paul encounters a wandering puffin in the courtyard allowing an opportunistic, if painful, close up encounter with this charismatic member of the auk family. But where do these birds breed? David leads us over to the grassy slopes near the sea cliffs where, with his arm all the way down a burrow, he searches for the single downy chick. Blinking in the summer sun, this chick has never seen daylight before. But in just a few short weeks on a dark night, it will leave the safety of its burrow for ever. With no assistance from its parents, it will scramble across the island and swim off into the great unknown of the North Sea for three solitary years, before returning once more to land to breed as an adult.

Just off the Northumberland coast, the Farne Islands are home to thousands of puffins.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

An exceptionally rare breeder to Britain, the arrival in early winter of one of the largest members of the thrush family, the fieldfare is for many a sign that the first snows may not be far away. In this programme from 2007 Lionel Kelleway finds himself in a frost laden Worcestershire orchard before dawn in the company of Steve Dodd and Dave Cocker as they await the arrival of early fieldfares to a mist net. Their aim is to capture as many birds as they can as part of a study to learn more of the habits and behaviours of these Scandinavian visitors.

Fieldfares, sometimes known by their evocative colloquial name of slate backed throssel, can be very nomadic in winter and there is a certain amount of anticipation in the air. The first chattering calls heard overhead soon relieve the tension. these fieldfares are being caught as part of a scientific study into fieldfare behaviour and needs, however as the programme discovers it is not just fieldfares that can be caught in a mist net, but something much larger.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in Worcestershire on the look out for fieldfares. Recorded in 2007.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

As the light intensifies, goose chatter begins, increasing in volume as more and more barnacle geese awake. As if choreographed by an unseen hand, a huge cloud of geese simultaneously rise from the salt marsh and fill the air as if a single organism, flying across the merse towards Lionel and Brian.

Being out there in the wide expanse of an estuary with thousands upon thousands of geese flying overhead in the half light of an early dawn, is a wildlife spectacle rarely encountered in Britain, but one which will stick in the memory for a very long time.

Before dawn, Lionel Kelleway awaits the arrival of barnacle geese on the Solway coast.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Freshwater pearl mussels have one of the heaviest shells of any mollusc. They're also extremely long lived, and the subject of this programme first broadcast in 2006. But as mollusc biologist Mary Seddon from the University of Cardiff explains to Lionel Kelleway their survival in British rivers is precarious due to the combined effects of river pollution, increased river sediment, and a decline in salmonid fish populations. They are joined on this Northern River by two other molluscan biologists Ian Killeen and Evelyn Moorkens.

The freshwater pearl mussel, despite its longevity, faces an uncertain future. But the good news is that work by many freshwater biologists across the country is trying to restore rivers to 'ecological health' and thus improve the fortunes of these once highly prized molluscs.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway looks for freshwater pearl mussels. Recorded in 2006.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This week on Living World, presenter Chris Sperring is in Buckinghamshire on the lookout for glow worms. Literature is full of references to these enigmatic little beetles who glow when its dark enough not to be able to differentiate colours. With Chris is Robin Scagell who has been studying glow worms for over 40 years and still gets a sense of excitement seeing one in some long grass by a lake near Little Marlow.

Related to fireflies which do not occur in the UK, the glow worm lifecycle is fascinating. After hatching from eggs the larva may take up to 3 years to develop into adults, during which time they will feed on snails and molluscs. When they emerge as adults, neither the winged male or the wingless female have any mouthparts and their sole purpose is now to mate and start the next generation off again as eggs.

As Chris learns on a wonderfully warm July night, it is the female in vegetation that glows, it is this glow that the flying male is looking for. Once mated the female then switches off her light and after laying eggs, dies. While recording the programme, Chris witnessed a male come to a female and mate with her. Something that is very rare to see in the wild.

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Chris Sperring meets Robin Scagell on a night-time safari for the enigmatic glow worm.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this episode from 2013, Chris Sperring is in Buckinghamshire with Robin Scagell on a glow worm safari.

Literature is full of references to these enigmatic little beetles who glow when its dark enough not to be able to differentiate colours. With Chris is Robin Scagell who has been studying glow worms for over 40 years and still gets a sense of excitement seeing one in some long grass by a lake near Little Marlow.

Related to fireflies which do not occur in the UK, the glow worm lifecycle is fascinating. After hatching from eggs the larva may take up to 3 years to develop into adults, during which time they will feed on snails and molluscs. When they emerge as adults, neither the winged male or the wingless female have any mouthparts and their sole purpose is now to mate and start the next generation off again as eggs.

As Chris learns on a wonderfully warm July night, it is the female in vegetation that glows, it is this glow that the flying male is looking for. Once mated the female then switches off her light and after laying eggs, dies. While recording the programme, Chris witnessed a male come to a female and mate with her. Something that is very rare to see in the wild.

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Chris Sperring is in Buckinghamshire with Robin Scagell on a glow worm safari. From 2013.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

On a cold day Chris and Pete first of all see a few hundred godwits in the distance but with a bit of fieldwork and time they manage to get close enough to count leg rings on these birds, birds that Pete Pots will have ringed in Iceland. As the afternoon progresses more and more godwits come onto the flooded meadows until as the last light fades well over 2000 black tailed godwits could be seen wheeling over the landscape. This part of southern England may hold a quarter of the Worlds population of the Icelandic black-tailed godwit over winter.

In a few short months these birds will head back to Iceland and Pete explains to Chris the work he does for Operation Godwit and how it is connecting both conservation and communities.

~Living World visits a flooded meadow in Hampshire where 2000 godwits spend the winter.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For this week's Living World Brett Westwood relives programmes from the Living World archives with an episode from 2013 which sees Chris Sperring visit a private estate in Hampshire where 2000 black tailed godwit visit their flooded water meadows along the River Avon in winter. Here Chris is guided by Pete Potts from Operation Godwit, on a very cold afternoon. Initially they view a few hundred godwits in the distance but with a bit of fieldwork and time they manage to get close enough to count leg rings on these birds, birds that Pete Potts will have ringed in Iceland. As the afternoon progresses more and more godwits come onto the flooded meadows until as the last light fades well over 2000 black tailed godwits could be seen wheeling over the landscape. In a few short months these birds will head back to Iceland and Pete explains to Chris the work he does for Operation Godwit and how it is connecting both conservation and communities.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Chris Sperring visits a meadow visited by 2,000 black-tailed godwits in winter. From 2013.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

One of Britain's scarcest birds is also one of its most beautiful. The flame-coloured golden pheasant is a riot of red, orange and bronze and is native to Chinese forests. The birds are popular around the world as ornamental species and over the years have been introduced on country estates. In a few places they have thrived and a few populations have now established themselves in the wild and are classed as British birds.

For Living World, Brett Westwood joins Paul Stancliffe of the British Trust for Ornithology in search of wild golden pheasants in the conifer woods of Norfolk. Here, in spite of their bright colours, they are very elusive and behave much as they do in their native China, skulking in dense undergrowth and glimpsed only as they dash across rides. The population here raises questions as a new atlas of British bird distribution is about to appear later this year. How viable is the population of "goldies" in the UK? As a non-native species should we consider them at all? As numbers in China are in decline, do our UK pheasants have an international importance? They're also inspirational birds which have adapted to our dense forests and are breath-taking to see in the wild. They appear on china, in art, and even in the stained glass window of a nearby church. They prefer to run rather than fly and call loudly at dusk in spring, so this visit is the best chance that Paul and Brett have to see one - a bird that's one of the toughest challenges that the countryside can offer.

Brett Westwood searches for gold in East Anglian woods - the elusive golden pheasant.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

As the weather starts to chill, Chris Sperring travels to the Somerset Levels to seek out a last glimpse of the great crested newt as it prepares for hibernation. It's at this time of year we discover why ponds that dry up are important for their breeding and how far they are prepared to travel to find a good place to haul up for winter.

Chris Sperring travels to the Somerset Levels in search of great crested newts.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Green Hairstreak butterfly is small, bright green and feisty. The males fight for females, spiralling in the air at break neck speed. This lovely butterfly was not recorded in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh, until 20 years ago but now populations are being discovered in more and more places. Sensitive management is helping bring back this bright jewel to the bilberry and heather clad hills. By excluding sheep and letting gorse and bilberry grow together the right conditions now exist. Green Hairstreak only appear on the wing in May and Victor Partridge takes Mary Colwell to see where he first spotted them in the Pentland Hills.

The green hairstreak butterfly is making a comeback in the Pentland Hills.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

A small group of female grey seals first chose the naturally managed sand spit Blakeney Point, on the North Norfolk coast as spot to haul out and give birth to their pups back in 2001. That year twenty-five pups were born and since then the new colony has grown year on year.
Now every year, as autumn turns to winter, a whole soap opera plays out on the beach. Throughout November and December, white furred pups are born, weaned, and abandoned within three weeks. Males fight; establishing loose territories among the females to secure the best chance to sire next year's pups. Females raise their pups while the males slug it out and as soon as their pups are big and fat enough to go it alone their mothers mate and head back into the sea.
Twelve years after the first pups were born at Blakeney the colony is thriving. By the end of December 2013, over fourteen hundred pups had been born with more on the way. Although delighted with the success of the new residents this burgeoning population has led to major challenges for the landowner, the National Trust to keep both the grey seals and the curious public safe from one another.
To add to the challenge early December saw the biggest tidal surge in 60 years hit the north Norfolk, inundating many of the nature reserves along the coastline, including Blakeney.
Presenter, Trai Anfield goes to Norfolk to see how well the Blakeney grey seals weathered the surge and to witness the drama.
Produced by Ellie Sans.

Trai Anfield visits the grey seals at Blakeney Point on the Norfolk coast.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Living World is a natural history strand that revels in rich encounter, immersion in the natural world and warm, enthusiastic story telling.

Skomer Island lies off the south east coast of Wales and is home to thousands of seabirds.

There are 25,000 guillemots packed together on the cliffs, no other bird breeds in such close proximity to its neighbours. Fights and squabbles constantly break out, but friendships and pair-bonding are very strong. They keep the same mate for life and produce one chick a year. The fledgling has to leap from the sheer cliff face into the sea below to find its dad, surrounded by thousands of others, and try to avoid being eaten by predatory gulls. Each year each guillemot pair comes back to exactly the same place on the cliff ledge and they defend it vigorously.

In the early decades of the 20th Century there were 100,000 guillemots on Skomer but numbers plummeted to just 2000 after the second world war, probably due to oil pollution in the sea. Now numbers are slowly recovering but the increase in storms may be a problem for them in the future. Professor Tim Birkhead from Sheffield University has led a 42 year study of the birds and reveals some of their secrets to Mary Colwell in this week's Living World.

Tim Birkhead looks at the guillemots of Skomer Island that have been studied for 42 years.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this episode from 1991 Michael Scott travels to Country Durham where in Hamsterley Forest he meets botanist David Bellamy and Head Ranger Brian Walker on a tour of the area.

A combination of careful management and a degree of good luck have turned Hamsterley Forest, Co Durham, into a haven for wildlife. Along with almost 100 different varieties of tree, ferns, and other fascinating plants, the wood pasture and meadows provide ideal habitats for birds like the crossbill, siskin, curlew and nightjar.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Michael Scott visits Hamsterley Forest with David Bellamy and Brian Walker. From 1991.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

7/18. It's usually very difficult to get close to or even see Harbour or Common seals, but there is one place in Scotland where they haul out and have their pups on a sandbank just 80 metres from the shore. Lionel Kelleway visits this magical spot in Loch Fleet to enjoy the rare wildlife spectacle of hundreds of mother seals perched in their characteristic banana pose, suckling and caring for their pups.

The person who knows most about the seals is PhD student Line Cordes who has been watching them intensively during the breeding season for the last four years. She has taken photographs of every seal in the area and from the patterns on their faces can now identify every seal on sight. From this study she is building a detailed picture of each seal's breeding behaviour and movements. This is giving a unique insight into the lives of Harbour Seals which have rarely been studied this intensively. She and Professor Paul Thompson, both from the School of Biological Sciences in Aberdeen, hope that their findings will help inform management strategies for the species.

Lionel Kelleway gets a lesson in Harbour seal identification and is clearly delighted with his close encounter.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kelleway enjoys the rare spectacle of harbour seals pupping in Loch Fleet Scotland.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Heath Fritillary butterfly was on the verge of extinction in Exmoor in 2001. Now, thanks to some targeted conservation work between the National Trust and Butterfly Conservation, this checkerboard-marked rare butterfly is increasing in numbers. Lionel Kelleway heads to a valley near Dunkery Beacon in the north of Exmoor National Park in search of one of Britain's rarest butterflies.

Lionel Kelleway visits a valley in Exmoor National Park in search of a rare butterfly.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Ghosts of the Moor are how the pale grey male hen harrier is sometimes referred to as it glides seemingly without effort across an upland landscape. To find out more and to revel in actually seeing a hen harrier on the wing, in this episode Brett Westwood & lolo Williams are on the Berwyn Moors in Wales in search of this enigmatic bird of prey. lolo has brought Brett to this particular spot as since seeing his first hen harrier here as a young boy, lolo has returned every year to study their ecology and biology. As the duo watch harriers on the moor, lolo expands his understanding of how harriers utilise this unique man made habitat, especially in early spring when the males perform their spectacular "sky dances" to attract the female. Not everyone is as pleased to have hen harriers on their moorland so discussion falls to how rare in England & Scotland they are due to loss of habitat to conifer plantations or sheep, as well as conflict on grouse moors.

Lindsey Chapman revisits this revised Living World from 2001 bringing the story up to date for today's listener.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood joins lolo Williams to explore hen harrier ecology. From 2001.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Until recently only two members of the heron family bred in the UK. Today in southern England four species now regularly breed. Could a fifth species of heron start breeding before too long? Lionel Kelleway travels to the RSPB's Ham Wall nature reserve in Somerset in an attempt to see all five species, including the bittern, a bird he has never seen in the wild in the UK.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the RSPB's Ham Wall nature reserve to look for heron.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this programme recorded in 2003, Lionel Kelleway heads to the banks of the river Medway in Kent in search of herons. At the time of recording this was the largest heronry in Britain standing between both wetland and woodland, prompting Lionel to ask, "what are herons, woodland birds, or wetland, or both?".

Lionel Kelleway heads to Kent in search of herons. Recorded in 2003.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Sperring and Michael Jordan of the Association of British Fungus Groups go in search of giant bracket fungus in Dommett Wood in Somerset.

Bracket fungus grow on a variety of native trees. The vegetative part of the fungus, known as mycelium, grows under the bark of fallen wood or living trees, and will eventually break down and rot the host tree. However, the part that can most easily be seen is the fruiting body of bracket fungus. These fruiting bodies, growing on tree trunks and fallen logs, allow the fungus to reproduce and exist to produce and liberate millions of microscopic spores.

Chris Sperring goes on the hunt for giant bracket fungus in Dommett Wood in Somerset.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The island of Islay is the most southerly island of the Southern Hebrides and as such has an important role to play in Scottish birdlife. Also known as the Queen of the Hebrides this small island is, in winter, host to thousands of winter migrant birds as they escape the harsh Arctic weather. Some birds use the island as a stop over point to rest and feed before heading away on migration, other species, such as barnacle geese stay the entire winter, leaving in the spring.

This weeks Living World, finds Michael Scott leaving the Scottish mainland to travel the two and a half hour journey by ferry to meet an old friend of his Malcolm Ogilvie. Malcolm has been studying the geese of the island for nearly 50 years and has been resident here for half that time. But Islay has so much more birdlife to offer than geese; indeed in the autumn and spring keen birdwatchers come to the island to attempt a remarkable feat, to see over 100 different species of birds on the island in a single day.

Michael and Malcolm visit over the winter and therefore aim for lower numbers of birds to be seen during this visit, by concentrating on one small but beautiful area of Islay, Loch Gruinart on the northern coast of the island. Beginning at the head of Gruinart, huge numbers of barnacle geese can be seen feeding on the flooded fields below, geese that move and erupt into restless flight in ever increasing numbers, a spectacle that is both beautiful and awesome to behold. At the head of the Loch is Ardnave Point where different species of birds can be seen both on a small isolated lochan and at the spectacular mouth of the Loch, framed by the islands of Jura and Mull beyond. However one of the real jewel species of these islands is a rare member of the crow family, the chough. Islay holds a sixth of the UK's chough population and Michael is keen to see these birds on this visit as he scans the horizon from a windswept dune system overlooking the sea. Is that their call being carried along by the buffeting wind on the ridge? Yes, here they come, these acrobatic specialists, right on cue.

The island of Islay hosts spectacular birdlife from geese to eagles to the rare chough.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Some corvid roosts are recorded in the Domesday Book and throughout history they have associated themselves with humans, and even have a sinister reputation as robbers of rare and precious gems. Corvids are known for their intelligence, in fact some scientists refer to members of the crow family, as the Feathered Apes. Science understands the biology of these birds, they pair for life, and a strong social cohesion exists, but as Dr Thornton expands, these familiar birds are deeply mysterious. There is a lot more to jackdaws than meets the eye. In fact the jackdaw eye is unusual in the animal kingdom in that it is similar to a human eye and will gaze at an object inquisitively. As the birds head out into the fields to feed, Joanna herself goes in search of them, asking why jackdaws are often in mixed flocks with rooks.

All too soon the light begins to fade, and so the pair head back to find pre roost birds in trees around the village. As night gathers, jackdaws in their thousands provide an aerial dance over the Cambridgeshire countryside, before in a role reversal of the morning, a given signal returns them to the roost once more.

Producer Andrew Dawes

~Living World heads to Cambridgeshire, to ask when jackdaws roost, what are they up to?

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For this week's Living World, Joanna Pinnock heads to a site in Cambridgeshire which is currently part of a long term study into jackdaw behaviour. Here she meets Dr Alex Thornton on a blustery morning before dawn. As first light begins to creep silently over the horizon the first chattering's of a jackdaw roost can be heard. With increasing light, this chatter becomes louder until at some given signal, the jackdaws simultaneously leave their night roost in a cacophony of sound. It is a winter spectacle often overlooked but rivalling any in the natural world. So what is actually going on here?

Some corvid roosts are recorded in the Domesday Book and throughout history they have associated themselves with humans, and even have a sinister reputation as robbers of rare and precious gems. Corvids are known for their intelligence, in fact some scientists refer to members of the crow family, as the Feathered Apes. Science understands the biology of these birds, they pair for life, and a strong social cohesion exists, but as Dr Thornton expands, these familiar birds are deeply mysterious. There is a lot more to jackdaws than meets the eye. In fact the jackdaw eye is unusual in the animal kingdom in that it is similar to a human eye and will gaze at an object inquisitively. As the birds head out into the fields to feed, Joanna herself goes in search of them, asking why jackdaws are often in mixed flocks with rooks.

All too soon the light begins to fade, and so the pair head back to find pre roost birds in trees around the village. As night gathers, jackdaws in their thousands provide an aerial dance over the Cambridgeshire countryside, before in a role reversal of the morning, a given signal returns them to the roost once more.

Producer Andrew Dawes

~Living World heads to Cambridgeshire, to ask when jackdaws roost, what are they up to?

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the Falkland Islands in pursuit of Johnny Rook, the cara cara. This bird of prey has the reputation of being 'exceedingly bold' and 'the most mischievous of all the feathered creation'. But there is far more to it than meets the eye. Lionel finds out about Johnny Rook's rise from near extinction and its unique role in the islands' ecology.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the Falkland Islands in pursuit of Johnny Rook, the cara cara.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the Ministry of Defence civilian science centre, has about a fifth of the UK population of Juniper at its Porton Down site near Salisbury. However, there's a problem. The bushes here are either middle aged or close to the end of their lives, at over a hundred. There are no youngsters as the seedlings get eaten by millions of rabbits which share the range. As a result, the Juniper here could be extinct in 50 years.

Lionel Kelleway ventures out onto Porton Down to find out more. He talks first to Lena Ward, who has studied them for 41 years, and then meets Carl Mayers, Dstl Project Leader.

Lena is clearly fascinated with Juniper and reveals that on Porton Down 19 species of invertebrates rely on it. She explains that as a plant which prefers impoverished soils, it could thrive here. But, because its seedlings are being mown down by rabbits and surrounded by other plants like Blackthorn, it's in trouble. Which is where Carl Mayers comes in.

Carl explains how Dstl is working with Plantlife to collect berries, check seed fertility and process seeds. The seeds are then sown on the Porton Down range and protected with special rabbit-proof cages to give them a head start. If successful, this technique could secure the future not only of the Juniper on Porton Down but elsewhere in Britain. I'll drink to that.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway

Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kellaway asks why the junipers on Porton Down are under attack.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Each year Britain's butterflies and moths attempt to make it through the cold, dark and often wet winter months. Some species will spend the winter as eggs, others as caterpillars or pupae but some get a head start on the spring flowers by spending the winter as adults. Being at their largest and most conspicuous in a time of hunger for many insectivorous predators, is a risky strategy for butterflies. Richard Fox of butterfly conservation explains how Lepidoptera pass the winter months and takes presenter Chris Sperring to a winter hideaway for a group of adult peacock butterflies, which have some surprising strategies to keep predators at bay.

Produced by Ellie Sans.

Chris Sperring goes to Dorset to see how one butterfly in particular survives the winter.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Sarah Pitt visits the Usk Valley in Wales on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, to talk to Henry Schofield from the Vincent Wildlife Trust. Henry is part of a team leading a number of initiatives to involve the wider community in protecting these bats by building a sustainable bat-friendly environment. In Spring lesser horseshoe bats move from their cooler hibernation sites into their warmer summer or maternity roosts. Visiting a roost offers the opportunity to examine these tiny, delicate bats with their butterfly like flight as they emerge at dusk to forage for insects or pick their prey off foliage.

Sarah Pitt visits the Usk Valley to see a population of lesser horseshoe bats.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 2006, Lionel Kelleway is joined by lichenologists Brian and Sandy Coppins. They travel to possibly the oldest woodland in the British Isles, at Ballachuan south of Oban in search of rare and spectacular lichens literally festooning this hazel woodland; including the rare and gloriously named 'rubber gloved fungus'.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by Brian and Sandy Coppins in Scotland.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Michael Scott travels to Ingleborough where he meets Tim Thom, an ecologist from the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Britain is home to almost all the limestone pavements on earth, which over time have become habitats for unique associations of botany. Exploring this fascinating landscape is something which Tim is passionate about. In just a few feet, remnant woodland plants such as dogs mercury, wild garlic and bluebells flourish in the humid grikes, alongside sculptural ferns. But alongside these grassland plants such as quaking grass, orchids and wild thyme flourish on the exposed clints while in ungrazed areas stunted trees make for an African Savannah scene.

Beautiful though this landscape is, it is not without its dangers. Rain can make the limestone as treacherous as walking on seaweed covered rocks, while deep fissures can trap the legs of unsuspecting walkers. Fortunately on a wonderful mid summer day, with blue skies and white billowing clouds flicking shadows across Ingleborough's slopes, Michael and Tim can relax and unfurl the story of this unique habitat through the plants they see.

Producer Mr Andrew Dawes

Presenter Michael Scott.

Almost all the world's limestone pavements and their unique botany are found in Britain.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For Living World, Miranda Krestovnikoff visits a Wiltshire village which is home to a thriving population of the owls. This is the study area of Emily Joachim, a Ph.D student at the University of Reading who for four years has been following the breeding success of little owls in nest-boxes around an equestrian centre. The boxes, some of which are converted army ammunition boxes, allow her access to the owl chicks and to monitor how the birds are faring from season to season. This is important because she and other ornithologists suspect that little owls are declining in parts of England and Wales, and the reasons for this are not clear. While Emily's study can't produce easy answers, it is showing what the owls eat, and how they cope with variations in climate.For example, one study pair raised a record five chicks even in this recent damp spring, showing that they are robust and capable of adapting to the worst English summer for some time.

Together Miranda and Emily have intriguing glimpses of the owls and hear their distinctive call as dusk falls. Emily also has good advice for anyone with little owls on their land and who wants to keep them there.

Miranda Krestovnikoff tracks down Britain's smallest resident owl in a Wiltshire village.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 1993, Lionel Kelleway is joined by Gary Clennan and pioneer of restoration ecology the late Tony Bradshaw, at a rubble strewn wasteland in Liverpool. As Shakespeare said "all the World is a stage, all the men and women merely players" which sets the scene for Lionel to discover the process of habitat restoration in an urban landscape. Along the way Lionel, Gary and Tony are in search of nature's actors, performing in a wildlife play about scavengers, opportunists and colonisers.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by Gary Clennan and Tony Bradshaw in Liverpool.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Produced by Ellie Sans.

Chris Sperring spends a winter's day with a long-tailed-tit family.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Tarn is home to the subject of this weeks' Living World. First documented over 50 years ago by the then warden of Malham Tarn, Paul Holmes, since then very little has been discovered about our rarest caddisfly, Agrypria crassicornis, which for this programme and with agreement from the scientific community, has now been given a common name of, The Malham Sedge.

Paul Evans travels to Malham and joins Ian Wallace for a different Living World. With the caddisfly's nearest population to Britain being in Scandinavia, no one really knows how or why it is here, or how it survives in this upland lake. Aware the last confirmed sighting of a Malham Sedge was in 2007, from the beginning, Paul does not know if the Malham Sedge still exists in Britain. Joining Ian on an agreed research project, the pair attempt to re-locate this caddisfly while along the way testing and devising acceptable monitoring techniques for future research.

On a tranquil summer's night Paul and Ian clamber into a rowing boat and head off onto the calm waters of the lake. As darkness envelops them, using a light trap, within a short while a snowstorm of thousands upon thousands of emerging caddis fly surround the pair and the boat. The air is alive with tiny wing beats but are any of these of the caddis fly the actual species they are searching for?

Paul Evans travels to Malham Tarn to try to locate rare caddisfly the Malham Sedge.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway gets very close to the marsh harrier, an icon of the East Anglia marshland. It is quite a sight to see it rise, effortlessly, when looking across the seed head tops of a large yellow reedbed. The marsh harrier has characteristically large and broad wings and the male is stunningly beige.

Lionel Kelleway gets very close to the marsh harrier.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

There is almost something hypnotic watching an expert fly fisherman presenting his lure on the sunlit waters of a beautiful chalk stream on a warm summer's day. However, in 2005 when Lionel Kelleway joined freshwater biologist and angler Mike Ladle to explore the secrets of the River Frome in Dorset, their quest for the mayfly became something of a detailed search. As Lionel watches Mike cast his fly he explores what makes a chalk stream so special to the life of a mayfly.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from 50 years of the Living World archives. In this episode from 1988 Peter France is on the South Downs with ecologist David Streeter.

Hips haws and honeysuckle berries enliven the hedgerows. On the ground toadstools appear as if by magic and acorns rain from above - all to ensure future generations of their kind. David Streeter and Peter France sample the fruits of autumn while delving into the many evolutionary mechanisms plants employ to move the next generation across the landscape, with a little help of course.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Peter France is on the South Downs with ecologist David Streeter. From 1988.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Living World presenter Chris Sperring this week joins Dr Fiona Mathews, Senior Lecturer in Mammalian Biology at Exeter University on a quest to unravel the secrets behind one of the most abundant if secretive mammals in the UK - the vole. Travelling to the Mendip Hills in Somerset their journey begins with the knowledge that there are five types of vole found in the UK, water voles, bank voles, Orkney voles, Guernsey voles and field voles; five species not to be confused with similarly sized mice. At nearly 1000 feet above sea level, the Mendip Hills is a hotspot for both field and bank voles and as Chris and Fiona set out to see a vole for themselves it proves much harder than they think. Despite an estimated population of 75 million field voles in the UK these animals lead a precarious and all too brief life. Living for just a few months voles are prolific breeders and populations can fluctuate up to tenfold on a three to four year cycle which can have drastic effects on the species which prey on them including arguably Britain's most loved bird, the barn owl.

Produced by Jim Farthing.

Chris Sperring searches for one of the most abundant mammals in the UK, the vole.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

11/18. Many people think it's just birds that migrate to and from the British Isles. In this Living World, Lionel Kelleway travels down to Church Cove on the Lizard peninsula where he meets moth specialist Mark Tunmore. Sitting with their backs against a stone wall of the old lifeboat station on a warm autumnal evening overlooking the sea, Mark discusses with Lionel why and how moths migrate from not only the near continent, but as far away as Africa.

With a low pressure system promising an influx of migrant moths, Mark and Lionel set up 6 moth traps around the Cove, and as dusk gathers pace, the lights of the traps begin to glow ever brighter. What will make landfall tonight? All will be revealed at the dead of night.

In the morning will the number of moths change significantly? Only by opening the moth traps will they know the true picture of our migrating moths.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Andrew Dawes.

At a moth trap on the Lizard in Cornwall, migrating moths from the continent make landfall

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the Falkland Islands in search of the mollymawk.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Mountain Hare, sometimes called the Arctic or Blue Hare, is a native of Scotland but to most people's surprise a colony also live in England.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. This episode from 2005 Sarah Pitt heads into a wintry Peak District with the late Derek Yaldon in search of mountain hares, one of the great relics of the ice age. Nestled into the hills and as white as white during the winter these animals are very at home straddling the Pennine Way. But how did they get here? To discover this Sarah Pitt is led by zoologist Derek Yalden deep into wintry moors to find these animals, and much to his surprise is given a special device by Sarah to enable him to see the hares at night, something he's never done before. So a double surprise. Hares by day and hares by night. It certainly seems from Sarah and Derek's encounter that the night time is the right time for Mountain Hares.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Sarah Pitt heads into a wintry Peak District in search of mountain hares. From 2005.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Hedgerows are a unique part of the British landscape, and many in Devon are medieval in origin, some even going back as far as the Bronze Age in origin. On a farm in mid Devon, Rob Wolton a hedgerow ecologist continues the management of his hedges in the traditional way. As a result his hedges are home to a surprising number of dormice. In this programme Lionel Kelleway delights in the abundance of many native hedgerow species which he encounters along the field edges, sampling some of the fruits of autumn along the way. While walking this allows for the long held theory that a hedge can be aged by the number of individual species in it to be dispelled.

Over centuries, many animal species have become adapted to this unique man made landscape, which itself has provided a safe wildlife corridor for those whom it shelters. And of course dotted along the hedgerows is another important wildlife habitat, hedgerow trees, which themselves can increase biodiversity of species by up to 60%.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway heads into Devon to explore the delights of an autumnal hedgerow.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This week's Living World sees presenter Chris Sperring heading to Hampshire where with native lime tree specialist Hugh Milner they embark on a journey into the remarkable life of the UK's native lime trees. Most people's association with lime is a sticky mess on car windscreens from street planted non-native common lime. This is a hybrid of the 2 native species of lime tree in Britain, the small leaved lime and the large leaved lime.

Small leaved limes were one of the 40 or so tree species which recolonised the country after the last Ice Age, before the land bridge between Europe and England disappeared under the sea. For millennia these two species have been something of a relic species in Britain as they were unable to produce viable fertile seed following a change in the climate which cooled dramatically around 3000BC. From then until now they were lost from the pollen records. In recent years however lime trees have begun to occasionally produce seed again and Hugh Milner takes Chris to see small leaved lime saplings in possibly the only woodland in Britain where lime seedlings are being established.

As a woodland species, small leaved lime has been used for centuries as a coppicing tree, not just for wood, but primarily for bast, a thick fibrous bark layer that was prized by rope makers. The bark, or more importantly the sap from the bark is also a great delicacy for great spotted woodpeckers, who it is now believed, after drilling their holes, wait until insects become trapped in the sap to take back to their young in the nest. More surprisingly lime trees can walk across a landscape, as they have the ability to regenerate from fallen timber or if branches make contact with the ground. This vegetative regeneration means that some of our oldest British trees may be lime, such as one in Westonbirt Arboretum which may be 3000 years old.

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Chris Sperring is in Hampshire looking at lime trees with lime tree specialist Hugh Milner

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

5/18. If you're out walking on Dartmoor and see a hump of camouflage netting with binoculars poking out, don't be alarmed. It's likely to be Mark Lawrence at work.

Thousands of birds make their nests amongst the bracken and gorse of dartmoor, tucked into hollows low in the brush. Finding them is Mark's passion. But they are totally hidden, so how does he do it? Lionel Kelleway asked the same question and goes on a nest-finding expedition with Mark to watch him in action. It turns out that it's all about observation. Picking up clues which signal where the nests are: clues from the behaviour of the parent birds.

In just one morning Mark and Lionel find Pippits' nests, two of which have been taken over by enormous cuckoo chicks; a whinchat brood just hatched and finally a rare and precious family of young Grasshopper Warbler chicks.

So why does Mark do it? Listen now to find out.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kelleway and Mark Lawrence hunt for birds' nests hidden on Dartmoor.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this programme from 2010, Lionel Kelleway is on Dartmoor with BTO nest finder Mark Lawrence.

If you're out walking on Dartmoor and see a hump of camouflage netting with binoculars poking out, don't be alarmed. It's likely to be Mark Lawrence at work.

Thousands of birds make their nests amongst the bracken and gorse of dartmoor, tucked into hollows low in the brush. Finding them is Mark's passion. But they are totally hidden, so how does he do it? Lionel Kelleway asked the same question and goes on a nest-finding expedition with Mark to watch him in action. It turns out that it's all about observation. Picking up clues which signal where the nests are: clues from the behaviour of the parent birds.

In just one morning Mark and Lionel find Pippits' nests, two of which have been taken over by enormous cuckoo chicks; a whinchat brood just hatched and finally a rare and precious family of young Grasshopper Warbler chicks.

So why does Mark do it? Listen now to find out.

Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway and Mark Lawrence hunt for birds' nests hidden on Dartmoor. From 2010.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

The countryside at night was once the preserve of the poacher or gamekeeper, expertly tracking their quarry by the light of the moon, and a lifetime of local knowledge. Those skills are much in evident in this programme from 1997, when Lionel Kelleway joins Chris Sperring from the Hawk and Owl Trust in the West Country.

As the light fades, their quest is to see, or should that be hear the four owls possible in the Somerset countryside in summer, the tawny owl, little owl, barn owl plus the cryptic and elusive long eared owl. As the night gathers they begin with the most often heard sound of the night, the Twit Twoo of the tawny owl, but will they manage to hear a long eared owl before dawn? With just 2000 pairs of Long Eared Owl in Britain could it be a task too far even with skill and patience high up on the Mendip Hills.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is on a nocturnal owl prowl in Somerset. Presented by Chris Packham.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Sperring is in Somerset during the last days of summer to find a bird that is one of the first to leave before the autumn.

As the light fades a strange whirring sound fills the air and silent masters of flight hawk for moths and other airborne insects.

Producer: Ellie Sans

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2014.

Chris Sperring is in Somerset during the last days of summer listening for nightjars.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

John has long been researching the ecology and life history of the four species of oil beetle found in Britain, the violet, black, short necked and rugged. By far the rarest species to be found in the country is the short necked oil beetle, a species that until 2007 was thought extinct in the United Kingdom. Can he and Paul possibly see all four species in a single day?

On a warm sunlit spring day, Paul and John begin their quest in oak woodland near Dartmoor, a wood carpeted with celandines, the favoured flower of the oil beetle. Soon they discover a male violet oil beetle and its associated cloud of minute flies, an indicator of the remarkable life cycle of these little understood beetles. Close by a huge egg bearing female absorbs the suns rays on her jet black jewel-like body. From here the pair head off to an unimproved wet meadow where John has been studying the flight patterns of this wingless insect, using solitary mining bees to hitch a ride and in return parasitize the eggs of the unfortunate aerial host, once in its burrow.

Paul and John leave this area near Dartmoor to travel south to the coast. With sunlight shimmering off the sea, the first migrant swallows making landfall overhead, the rugged oil beetle proves elusive; but there, under a single gorse bush, the rare short necked oil beetle delights these beetle hunters.

Devon hosts four oil beetle species, one of which has only recently been rediscovered.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

First published 90 years ago this year Henry Williamsons 'Tarka the Otter' followed the life and death struggles of a male otter and raised the awareness of this much loved mustelid in the public imagination. Suffering from years of decline by the 1960's the otter population was in steep decline, but by the time of this programme from 1993, the fortunes of the otter were beginning to improve. Joining Jessica Holm on the then newly opened Tarka Trail in Devon are local naturalist Trevor Beer who knew Henry Williamson, and otter biologist Paul Chanin. The programme follows in the footsteps of Williamson's book thereby allowing Jessica to uncover along the way signs of otter activity, though the chances of seeing this largely nocturnal animal were unlikely.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Jessica Holm searches for otters along the Tarka Trail in Devon. Recorded in 1993.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Unlike blackbirds, these are shy creatures which winter in North Africa and breed in remote craggy places in Wales, the north of England and Scotland, but are nowhere common. In southern England their decline has been sharp, with just a handful of pairs remaining on Dartmoor.

For The Living World, Miranda Krestovnikoff tracks down these elusive birds with the help of naturalist Nick Baker who's been studying the Dartmoor ouzels for the RSPB in an attempt to find out why the birds are in decline.

By late June, some birds have already fledged, but near other nests, the male birds are still singing and both parents are visiting the young. Although singing birds are easy to locate, proving that birds have bred at any particular site is a different matter as Nick admits, and this season has already provided him with some surprises.

Miranda learns that while the birds are declining across the whole of the UK, ornithologists are still uncertain about the reasons. Climate change may be drying up their mountain grasslands, or disturbance and nest predation may be the reasons, but the mysteries surrounding this stunning bird remain to challenge the dedicated teams striving to save it.

Miranda Krestovnikoff visits Dartmoor in search of ring ouzels, the mountain blackbirds.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway heads up to Scotlands RSPB Forsinard Reserve to explore the extraordinary and fascinating world of carnivorous plants. Norrie Russell, RSPB Forsinard's Head Warden, joins him to reveal the bizarre strategies which carnivorous plants deploy to secure a meal. The Sundews - of which there are hundreds of thousands scattered amongst the bracken and gorse, use glistening sticky globules of moisture to attrack insects; The Butterworts exude a buttery slime on their slidey leaves from which there is no escape and the aquatic bladderworts suck their prey into a vacuum trap triggered by the slightest touch. Once in contact with a Peat Bog Gremlin, there is no escape.

There is a war of stealth raging in the undergrowth of the peat bog. Gremlins lie in wait.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Though often seen as wild and unforgiving places the peat bogs of Ireland are important and special habitats for wildlife and they are a natural sponge to store water. In 1996 when this Living World was recorded, the extraction of peat for a number of purposes was still common place.

Lionel Kelleway visits Fallahogy Bog in Northern Ireland and is joined by Valerie Hall and Roy Anderson from Queen's University to explore one of Northern Ireland's great peat bogs.

Chris Packham relives a programme from the Living World archives recorded in 1996.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Many a naturalist today grew up to the well-known voice of Phil Drabble as the founding father of backdoor wildlife on TV in the 1970's and 80's. In this programme recorded in 1991, Peter France is joined by Phil Drabble at his home, which is surrounded by a nature reserve Phil has managed since buying the land in the 1960's. At the time of this recording it was 21 years after Living World's first visit here in 1970. Much had changed in that time so Phil takes Peter on a tour to explain his life's work.

Peter France explores a nature reserve founded by a homeowner in the 1960s.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The pike has a fearsome reputation as Britain's most successful freshwater river predator. Keen fisherman and retired freshwater biologist Mike Ladle will never forget the first time he landed a pike. He was trying to catch eels, and hauled up a pike instead. When he tried to release the hook from inside its mouth, he soon found out why fishermen treat pike with such respect: their mouths are lined with rows of backwardly pointing teeth. They even have teeth on their tongue, a tongue which is green in colour! So once a pike has trapped its prey in its mouth there is no escape from those rows of thorn-like teeth.

Lionel Kelleway joins Mike Ladle on the banks of the River Frome in Dorset for a spot of fishing, using a curved hook and a dace as bait to lure their pike. While the two men watch the cork on the line bobbing in the water, Mike reveals some of the traits which make the pike so successful and why these fish are not choosy about the species of prey but the shape of the prey. Pike are also cannibalistic and will eat their own relatives, and even their own young.

Pike have been described as jet-propelled mouths. They are cylindrical in shape and all the large fins are at the rear end of the fish, which gives them the thrust they need to spring forwards in the water after prey. They hide under cover at the edge of the bank and then curl their tail round which then acts like a spring to thrust them forwards at their prey.

Years of catching, tagging, releasing and studying pike has given Mike a fascinating knowledge of these formidable creatures, but even so, there still remain some mysteries about the pike as Lionel discovers when he meets a self-confessed 'pikeoholic', gets to peer inside the mouth of a predator and learns about a fish called Isaac.

Lionel Kelleway goes fishing for a fearsome predator, the pike.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This week on Living World, presenter Trai Anfield travels to mid Scotland for an encounter with one of Britain's rarest mammals, the pine marten. Here in a remote landscape she meets up with Martyn Jamieson from the Field Studies Council for a safari with a difference, can they find a female with young, high in the tree tops? Although martens are not confined to woodland they do prefer this habitat as they are expert tree climbers. Like other Mustelids, pine martens are mainly carnivores and feed on small mammals, invertebrates and carrion, but they will also eat a lot of fruits and nuts. Best seen at dawn or dusk, pine martens are sometimes referred to as nocturnal, but they are frequently active during the day, especially in the summer months.

Until the 19th Century, pine martens were found throughout much of mainland Britain, the Isle of Wight and some of the Scottish islands. Habitat fragmentation, persecution by gamekeepers and a trade in marten fur, drastically reduced this distribution. Their low point in terms of numbers came in the 1920's when they were restricted to a small area of north-west Scotland, with small numbers in North Wales and the Lake District. More recently through changes in land management and conservation research, pine martens are slowly recolonizing their old areas but still remain one of the rarest native mammals in Great Britain, with a total population of around 3-4,000. In Ireland there are probably more but data is sparse there.

The planting of big conifer woodlands has really helped the marten recovery as a territory can be around 150 hectares in size. Finding one in this Scottish woodland will be a challenge for Trai. Luckily at this site martens are seen regularly, and in the evening Martyn and Trai head to a quiet location to sit and wait by a well-used area as the dusk gathers. Will they be lucky on this July night?

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Pine martens were once persecuted to near extinction but now are making a comeback.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Victorian Britain saw animals like the polecat persecuted almost to extinction surviving only in a few isolated upland areas of Wales. By the time in 1996 that Lionel Kelleway joined Johnny Messenger on a farm in mid-Wales farm, polecat numbers had begun to recover. It's a fact of life when studying shy mammals that most of the time is spent grubbing around for the signs of activity rather than seeing the animal itself. But for this Living World Johnny has brought Lionel to possibly the best place to see a polecat in Britain.

Chris Packham relives a Living World programme from 1996 about the secretive polecat.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

This pond contains water all year round, but temporary ponds are a speciality of the New Forest. At Burley, Jeremy shows Miranda a roadside pool which fills with water in winter but is a grassy hollow in summer. Here they dip for one of Britain's rarest animals , the delicate fairy shrimp which can only survive in pools which dry out. These beautiful creatures are some of the oldest living animals on the planet, virtually unchanged in appearance from their ancestors 400 million years ago. Their eggs can survive in soil until the rains fill their ponds again in autumn and a new generation hatches to swim safe from fishes in the New Forest's temporary ponds.

Producer: Brett Westwood

Editor: Julian Hector.

Miranda Krestovnikoff explores the surprising world of New Forest's winter ponds.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. This episode from 2012 sees Miranda Krestovnikoff with Jeremy Biggs then from Pond Conservation (now known as Freshwater Habitats Trust) for a special Living world devoted to the ponds of the New Forest.

Jeremy has chosen these as some of the finest of their type because they are keep open by grazing ponies and deer, don't suffer from pollution from roads or agricultural run-off , and are some of the cleanest ponds in the United Kingdom. When they go pond-dipping , kneeling in muddy water in chest-waders, he proves it by finding some of our rarest plants and animals including the mud snail which thrives in shallow pools whose margins dry out in summer . Damselfly larvae prowl among the plants and there are even newts active in January , animals which have grown too slowly in the previous summer and are spending the winter as youngsters. Best of all, in the shallows of the pond are clumps of the year's first frogspawn, in mid -January.

This pond contains water all year round, but temporary ponds are a speciality of the New Forest. At Burley, Jeremy shows Miranda a roadside pool which fills with water in winter but is a grassy hollow in summer. Here they dip for one of Britain's rarest animals , the delicate fairy shrimp which can only survive in pools which dry out. These beautiful creatures are some of the oldest living animals on the planet, virtually unchanged in appearance from their ancestors 400 million years ago. Their eggs can survive in soil until the rains fill their ponds again in autumn and a new generation hatches to swim safe from fishes in the New Forest's temporary ponds.

Producer: Andrew Dawes.

Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jeremy Biggs explore the ponds of the New Forest. From 2012.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway joins Cairngorm Mountain Head Ranger Nic Bullivant on the snow fields of Caringorm looking for the Ptarmigan in their harsh and open mountain-scape.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway

Produced by Polly Procter.

The Living World treks up the slopes of the Cairngorm mountains to find Ptarmigan.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

On a cool, windy spring day, Paul and John first explore a small wet woodland, a relic of a once extensive ancient habitat in this area, long cleared by man for farming. Emerging from the trees there in front of them, is an expansive open moss. Mosses in this area are glacial depressions which over time have become filled with peat deposits and are a valuable wetland for a myriad of wildlife. Fed by rainwater these are ideal habitats for the raft spider Dolomedes fimbriatus, Britain's largest native spider.

But this spring has been unusually dry, with strong dry winds from the east, so much so the wetlands are drying out. Walking over the moss, evidence is everywhere of the lack of rain in these parts for weeks. Will this wetland specialist still be able to cling on to a precarious existence in this increasingly hostile environment? Join Paul and John to find out if they indeed do find this beautiful spider after all.

In Shropshire's wetlands Britain's largest and arguably most beautiful spider can be found

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

2/18. Lionel Kelleway teams up with The Amphibian & Reptile Conservation (ARC) Trust's Dorset Reserves community officer, Roland Griffin, on a quest to find Britain's rarest reptiles. They've come to the right place. Town Common, just north of Bournemouth, offers a wide variety of habitats and is home to all six of Britain's reptile species. The forecast? Cloudy and cool with sunny intervals - ideal reptile finding weather. To increase their chances further, pieces of corrugated iron sheet are deliberately placed around the common by ARC to help them with reptile surveys. Snakes like to slither under the tins for shelter and warmth.

Within minutes, and to their utter delight, under the first tin they discover Britain's rarest snake, the Smooth Snake. Permitted by ARC's special licence to handle reptiles, Lionel has the thrilling privilege of holding the slender brown snake which rests calmly in his hands. Smooth Snakes have severely restricted distribution, being found only in coastal heathland. This habitat is declining fast. A few empty tins later, they uncover two slow worms, legless lizards which look like snakes. Finally, as the sun emerges from behind the clouds at last, conditions become perfect for lizard spotting. As Lionel and Roland wander along a sandy track, there under the heather at the side of the path, is a Sand Lizard, Britain's rarest lizard. It's a beautiful male, resplendent in pea green breeding colours. They get close enough to make out the speckles on its flanks before it slips away into the undergrowth. Sand Lizards are enjoying something of a resurgence as captive breeding and release programmes boost their numbers. It's not often you'll get to encounter both of Britain's rarest reptiles in one morning and Lionel and Roland are elated.

Produced by Tania Dorrity.

Lionel Kellaway gets close to a smooth snake and sand lizard, our rarest reptiles.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter was inspired by the red squirrel, a species once so common across most of the British Isles. But in this programme from 2002 as Brett Westwood discovers one of the few remaining areas of mainland England to regularly see a red squirrel was in County Durham and Northumberland.

Out competed by the introduced grey squirrel and affected by a virus they carry, the native red squirrel is as Brett discovers being steadily pushed to the north and western extremes of the United Kingdom.

With Brett is squirrel biologist Jason Reynolds, as the programme begins at a less than usual habitat for this loveable mammal, the sitting room of a local resident who has squirrels coming to her bird feeders. A perfect bird's eye, (or is that squirrels eye) close up view is guaranteed.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood is in the north east of England looking for red squirrels. Recorded in 2002

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 1995, Lionel Kelleway heads over to Wales near the town of Llanthony in search of dippers, a songbird uniquely adapted to an aquatic way of life. Joining Lionel as he looks out for this plump-little-stub-tailed-bird, bobbing up and down in the cascading water is otter expert Geoff Lyles and Stephanie Tyler from the RSPB.

Dippers are slowly recolonising some once polluted rivers, but it is a complex story for the poetically named water ouzel. In some rivers dipper numbers are thought to be declining due to changes in water quality or exposure to 'more modern' pollutants such as flame retardants or excess nutrient run off.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in search of dippers. Recorded in 2002.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 2008, Lionel Kelleway is joined by Joe Cullum and Ian Henderson in Norfolk. At the time of recording, Lionel finds himself in a woodland setting at dusk after an unseasonably warm February day in anticipation of one of Britain's wildlife spectacles, thousands of rooks coming to roost. This particular roost next to Joe's house has connections back to the Domesday Book and once was thought to contain around 100,000 birds.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by roosting rooks.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the Falkland Islands in search of amorous marine mammals. The aptly named Sea Lion Island is a temporary home for sea lions and elephant seals. While it is winter in the UK, it is summertime in the Falklands, and peak time for mating and pupping. Lionel may even get to experience the incredible spectacle of the local pod of killer whales in full hunting action.

Lionel Kelleway travels to the Falkland Islands in search of amorous marine mammals.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In the first Living World of the autumn run, Chris Sperring travels to Exeter to find a species hidden within the walls of Exeter's magnificent Cathedral. First found at the Cathedral as far back as 1890, the large tube-web spider or Segestria florentina, is the largest European spider from the Segestriidae family and one of the largest spiders found in the UK. Believed to be native to the Mediterranean region, the species was introduced on ships and first recorded in the UK in the mid-19th Century.

Chris Sperring and Peter Smithers, Professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Plymouth University, go on a quest (with a surprising array of props) to find the species concealed amongst the Cathedral's gothic architecture.

Members of the Segestriidae family have six eyes rather than eight and their front six legs point forward in contrast to many arachnids which have only the front four legs pointing forward. They spin tubular webs in cracks of walls and hunt using a series of trip wires which when triggered causes the spider to spring out of the hole using its back two legs and bite their prey with their large green jaws.

Presented by Chris Sperring
Produced by Jim Farthing.

Chris Sperring searches for tube web spiders at Exeter Cathedral.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from 50 years of the Living World archives. In this episode from 2009, Lionel Kelleway is in Dorset with Dr Anita Diaz from Bournemouth University, for the sika deer rut.

Lionel heads to Purbeck in Dorset with Dr Anita Diaz to experience the sights and unusual sounds of sika at the start of the rutting season. Sika Deer are aliens to the UK but now are well established as part of the British landscape, though Purbeck has one of the larger concentrations. As the night draws in, the sika come off the salt marsh around Poole Harbour to graze the grasslands of Purbeck. This being the rutting season, the sika are noisily proclaiming their status, with a call once described as a mournful whale song across the English countryside.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in Dorset with Dr Anita Diaz, for the sika deer rut. From 2009.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In the early 1980's Norfolk farmer Chris Skinner had a natural history epiphany. He had inherited and ran a profitable mixed farm and shoot. Then following a successful shooting day a chance comment began a life changing moment. From that day the farm was managed with wildlife in mind. Visiting in 1995, Lionel Kelleway joins Chris in his farmhouse kitchen to discuss a wildlife watching day across his one square mile of Norfolk.

Chris Packham relives programmes from the Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood travels to the island of Skomer off the Pembrokeshire coast in search of burrow-nesting puffins. As well as these 'clowns of the air', he finds an island carpeted in pink sea campion, fading bluebells, and lime green bracken. Away from the cliffs which are bustling with sea birds, he enjoys his very first encounter with the Skomer vole, which as its name suggests, is endemic to this island. Producer Sarah Bunt

Brett Westwood is surrounded by the clowns of the air on Skomer island

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Fast, furious and dashing, the eruption of a sparrowhawk after its prey - can be a heart stopping moment. This opportunistic hunter of the woodland edge, sparrowhawks are increasingly coming into our gardens attracted by a smorgasbord of birds coming to our feeders. In this programme from 1993, Jessica Holm joins renowned sparrowhawk scientist Ian Newton along with ecologist Ian Wylie in a Northamptonshire wood where the chance of glimpsing a sparrowhawk may be slim but they persevere to find evidence of this highly skilled predator.

In the UK sparrowhawk populations have risen by about 150% between 1975 and 2008; although recently there has been a modest decline to a fairly stable population of about 40,000 birds.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Jessica Holmes looks for signs of sparrowhawks. Programme from the Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

So legend has it, Robert the Bruce who was on the run and in exile hid in a cave. It was while there that he watched a spider repeatedly attempt to spin a web which it eventually succeeded in doing. That act of determination which inspired Bruce is one of the many fascinating aspects of spider biology in this programme from 1995. In their Bristol garden Lionel Kelleway joins spider experts Rod and Ken Preston-Mafham. With over 650 species of spider in Britain where do they begin? Luckily in their garden there are fewer species to find, but as Lionel discovers spiders use a number of mechanisms to capture their prey, not just webs. They even come indoors.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in a West Country garden looking for spiders. From 1995.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The ancient tradition of coppicing, the periodic cutting of trees and allowing the stumps to regrow, was once common throughout lowland Britain but has been on the wane since the late 1800's. The mosaic habitat of coppiced woodland provides opportunities for a wide variety of wildlife to thrive. With more light reaching the forest floor, recently cut areas are awash with springtime flowers. As the trees regrow they provide habitat for the sleepy and secretive dormouse and many woodland butterflies. Presenter Chris Sperring visits a traditionally managed hazel coppice in Dorset and is joined by coppicer David Partridge and botanist Andy Byfield. As David describes this ancient form of woodland management Andy identifies the woodland plants that are given breathing space by this vanishing tradition.
Produced by Ellie Sans.

Chris Sperring visits a hazel coppice awash with springtime flowers.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Marine biologist Peter Heyward leads Lionel Kelleway through the rock pools at low tide on the Gower Peninsular in search of starfish. The common starfish is among the most iconic of sea shore animals, but they also meet rather less visible members of the family, including the extraordinary sea potato.

Marine biologist Peter Heyward and Lionel Kelleway search for starfish.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Sunlight reflecting through a jam-jar of small fish - collected from a local stream is often a golden childhood memory and one which can open the door to a lifetime of wildlife observation. Those 'tiddlers' in the jar were often the three-spined stickleback - one of the most common of British fishes and a voracious predator to boot. In this programme from 2005, Lionel Kelleway joins stickleback biologist Dr Iain Barber in a mid-Wales lake to relive his boyhood nature rambles and with his net in hand.

For such small fish, sticklebacks have an impressive reputation as models for scientific research. They have aided our advancement and understanding of many diverse fields from behaviour to evolution, biology to disease, propelling this little fish to the forefront of modern biological research.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is by the river looking for sticklebacks in this programme from archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

One of our most engaging mustelids, the stoat is the subject of this Living World from 2003. Normally stoats are more often only seen in open countryside dashing across open ground and out of sight. Yet in North Yorkshire stoats have made their home closer to humans, within the ruins of Mount Grace Priory near Osmotherley. To find out more Lionel Kelleway headed to Europe's best preserved Carthusian Priory where in the company of stoat expert Robbie MacDonald, and Priory custodian Becky Wright they head off to find out more and in the course of their visit explain some of the fascinating and unique stoat biology and behaviour.

In the years since this episode was first broadcast, our knowledge of these engaging mustelids has developed, allowing wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman to revisit this Living World and gently update the story for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World from 2003 on stoats in a Carthusian Priory.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The stone curlew is one of the rarest birds in Britain. The historical change in agricultural practices across the country resulted in the decline of suitable habitat, such as grazed chalk grassland and fallow areas, which are the kinds of habitat most favoured by the stone-curlew for breeding. Subsequently, their numbers dwindled to an all time low in the mid-1980s of just a few dozen pairs in the Brecklands in East Anglia and the Wiltshire downs.

For this weeks' Living World, Joanna Pinnock travels to a remote part of Wiltshire to meet Nick Adams of the RSPB's Wessex Stone Curlew Project where she is keen to discover for herself the lifecycle of this strange almost prehistoric wader, with wide open beady yellow eyes and knobbly knees.

Secretive and difficult to see in the breeding season due to their nocturnal behaviour, in the autumn, stone curlews gather in roost flocks to prepare for their migration to Africa. So, after a wet autumnal day, as the light begins to fade, for this Living World, the pair listen and wait for the eerie calls of this summer migrant resonating around the equally strange and prehistoric landscape near Stonehenge. With increasing darkness, stone curlews begin to leave their daytime roost sites to forage and disperse over the landscape. In doing so Joanna and Nick become eager spectators to a cacophony of calls as birds fly from area to area, calls that in days gone by people likened to banshees of the night. All too soon darkness envelopes the pair, but pointedly this is Nick Adam's very last day on the project, and as the calling becomes more intense, are the birds saying goodbye to Nick for one last time?

Producer : Andrew Dawes.

On a wet autumnal day Joanna Pinnock goes in search of the rare stone curlew in Wiltshire.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The stone curlew is one of the rarest birds in Britain. The historical change in agricultural practices across the country resulted in the decline of suitable habitat, such as grazed chalk grassland and fallow areas, which are the kinds of habitat most favoured by the stone-curlew for breeding. Subsequently, their numbers dwindled to an all time low in the mid-1980s of just a few dozen pairs in the Brecklands in East Anglia and the Wiltshire downs.

For this weeks' Living World, Joanna Pinnock travels to a remote part of Wiltshire to meet Nick Adams of the RSPB's Wessex Stone Curlew Project where she is keen to discover for herself the lifecycle of this strange almost prehistoric wader, with wide open beady yellow eyes and knobbly knees.

Secretive and difficult to see in the breeding season due to their nocturnal behaviour, in the autumn, stone curlews gather in roost flocks to prepare for their migration to Africa. So, after a wet autumnal day, as the light begins to fade, for this Living World, the pair listen and wait for the eerie calls of this summer migrant resonating around the equally strange and prehistoric landscape near Stonehenge. With increasing darkness, stone curlews begin to leave their daytime roost sites to forage and disperse over the landscape. In doing so Joanna and Nick become eager spectators to a cacophony of calls as birds fly from area to area, calls that in days gone by people likened to banshees of the night. All too soon darkness envelopes the pair, but pointedly this is Nick Adam's very last day on the project, and as the calling becomes more intense, are the birds saying goodbye to Nick for one last time?

Producer : Andrew Dawes

On a wet autumnal day Joanna Pinnock goes in search of the rare stone curlew in Wiltshire

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In 1947 David Lack, Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology began observing swifts around Oxford. His observations, led to the creation of one of the longest continuous studies of a single bird species in the world, the Oxford Swift Research Project. In 2000 Lionel Kelleway joined Chris Perrins high up the Oxford University Museum tower to take Living World closer to these 'devil-birds' than ever before. They begin the programme high up on the outside of the tower, watching swifts feeding in the air.

Chris Packham relives a Living World programme from 2000 about swifts.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In the years since the programme was first broadcast, the situation of brown hares has changed considerably. Wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman revisits this Living World from 2011 before bringing the story gently up to date for today's listener.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World, from 2011, on brown hares in Hertfordshire.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

18/18. We all know about the myth of the Mad March Hare, but what is the background to it? Is there any biological reason for the name? Lionel Kelleway meets Gill Turner, who has observed the behaviour of brown hares for the last 15 years to explore this question. Together, they marvel at the antics of the brown hare - one of the first signs of Spring - on a very special farm in Hertfordshire.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway

Produced by Polly Procter.

Lionel Kelleway travels to Hertfordshire to marvel at the antics of the Brown Hare.

In an area where 200 days of rain each year is normal, Paul and Ray don their waterproofs and venture up the valley of the Rhaeadr Ddu, the Black Waterfall. The landscape in this valley is dominated by water, not only from the exceptional rainfall this area is known for, but from the river thundering along many rapids and waterfalls providing a constant mist of high humidity within the Atlantic wood enveloping the valley. Linked to a mild climate in this part of Wales, everything in the woodland is a carpeted in a magical sea of emerald green moss, fungi and lichen.

This valley is home to some rare and exotic plants, the filmy ferns are however special in this landscape. Ray and Paul eventually make it to the side of the huge Rhaeadr Ddu waterfall itself, where, as the roar of the water almost drowns their voices, there on a single rocky outcrop, bathed in constant spray they discover the rare, minute and exotically beautiful Tunbridge Filmy-fern. Nearby a Wilson's Filmy-fern is found on a single boulder of an ancient moss encrusted dry stone wall. How did this Filmy-fern get here is a point of discussion.

We all know of the importance of the Tropical Rainforests, however these Celtic Rainforests are in a way even rarer, with Britain being home to most of the best preserved examples in the World. The Valley is changing and time could possibly be running out for these remarkable and sensitive habitats, which have been suffering from pollution and climate change since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

Producer : Andrew Dawes.

In Snowdonia, a hidden valley reveals a magical Celtic rainforest along the forest floor.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives, this episode from 2011. Wales is home to a remarkable and rare forest. Paul Evans joins Ray Woods from Plantlife Cymru in Snowdonia.

In an area where 200 days of rain each year is normal, Paul and Ray don their waterproofs and venture up the valley of the Rhaeadr Ddu, the Black Waterfall. The landscape in this valley is dominated by water, not only from the exceptional rainfall this area is known for, but from the river thundering along many rapids and waterfalls providing a constant mist of high humidity within the Atlantic wood enveloping the valley. Linked to a mild climate in this part of Wales, everything in the woodland is a carpeted in a magical sea of emerald green moss, fungi and lichen.

This valley is home to some rare and exotic plants, the filmy ferns are however special in this landscape. Ray and Paul eventually make it to the side of the huge Rhaeadr Ddu waterfall itself, where, as the roar of the water almost drowns their voices, there on a single rocky outcrop, bathed in constant spray they discover the rare, minute and exotically beautiful Tunbridge Filmy-fern. Nearby a Wilson's Filmy-fern is found on a single boulder of an ancient moss encrusted dry stone wall. How did this Filmy-fern get here is a point of discussion.

Producer : Andrew Dawes.

Paul Evans joins Ray Woods in Snowdonia in a remarkable and rare forest. From 2011.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In many ways 1985 changed Raury MacKenzie-Dodds life. Idly walking along a London canal towpath a dragonfly landed on his shirt. So mesmerised was Raury by the beauty and form of this dazzling 'devils darning needle' as dragonflies are sometimes known, that a few years later he created the Ashton Water Dragonfly Sanctuary in Nottinghamshire.

In this programme from 1994 Lionel Kelleway travels to the Dragonfly Sanctuary to discover for himself why these aerial predators delight Raury so much. With them is dragonfly ecologist Erica Towner who's studies are providing a vital link between dragonflies and a changing environment.
Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is on the lookout for dragonflies. Presented by Chris Packham.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

On a very blustery autumn morning, Lionel Kelleway joins naturalist Phil Gates from Durham University in Bishop Auckland Deer Park in County Durham where he learns about the history and wildlife of this undulating landscape in the grounds of Auckland Castle.

Auckland Castle is the home of the Bishop of Auckland. It is built above the Rivers Wear and Gaunless, 10 miles south-west of Durham. It was established about 800 years ago, and has expanded over the centuries. In 1822 it became the official residence of the Bishop of Durham. The grounds would have been a managed forest in medieval times, then converted parkland with a collection of now slowly disintegrating trees (wonderful habitats for wildlife) - amazing old sweet chestnuts whose trunk and branches grow twisted like a corkscrew, decaying beeches, giant redwoods with soft bark, horse chestnuts, poplars, birches and old oaks.

A fine stone deer house still exists. This would have been used to shelter the deer. A watchtower was built for guests to view the animals, and there was at one time a banqueting apartment where guests would have feasted on the venison. Today, while only the occasional wild roe deer might be spotted in the park, there's a metropolis of meadow ant hills.

Yellow Meadow Ants, Lasius flavus live primarily underground in meadows and very commonly in lawns. The nests are often completely overgrown by grass and mosses and form mounds. Below ground, the nests are highly intricate with numerous fine channels; the whole structure strengthened by the plant roots. Usually the mounds have one flat face which faces south east to gain the maximum benefits from the heat of the sun.

Like all ants, meadow ants live in organised social colonies, consisting of the reproductive female, the queen, a few males and large numbers of workers, which are non-sexual females. Mating takes place in summer during a 'nuptial flight' when a male and female form a pair and mate on the wing. After mating, the female finds a suitable place to establish a new colony.

Where there are meadow ants, there are often Green Woodpeckers, as these birds feed on as many as 2,000 ants a day, digging a hole into the mound and licking up the ants as they rush out.

As they explore this undulating landscape, Lionel and Phil also find a fine collection of autumn fungi and huge numbers of berries and nuts before the blustery wind blows them on their way. It's a beautiful and fascinating park in any season, but in autumn, when the wind whisks up the leaves in a whirling dance, and the river in the valley gurgles and chuckles over the rocks, nature is perhaps at its most playful.

Lionel Kelleway discovers a metropolis of ant hills in a Deer Park in Durham.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Island of Islay is probably best known for the production of fine peaty whiskies. Yet each winter thousands of geese and other northern birds find refuge on this Scottish island. It also has Britain's most thriving colony our rarest corvid the choughs. In 1987 Michael Scott headed over to Islay for Living World to see for himself why this island attracts more than its fair share of birds. Here he joined Dave Dick and Peter Moore from the RSPB.

In the 30 years since the programme was first broadcast, there have been many changes on Islay which allows wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman to revisit this Living World and gently update the story for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World from the green isle of Islay. From 1987.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Autumn is the best time of the year to look for harvestmen and so Trai Anfield travels to Sheffield where entomologist Paul Richards accompanies her on a harvestman safari unravelling the many differences between harvestmen and spiders.

One of the joys of studying harvestmen is that most of the 27 species can be seen in and around people gardens and to illustrate this Paul leads the way into his suburban garden to explore. As they rummage amongst his garden borders, Paul explains that harvestmen are more closely related to scorpions than to spiders and that their scientific name Opiliones is Latin for shepherd referring to the ancient use of stilts by shepherds to watch over their flocks.

Harvestmen do not spin webs, and although they do feed on other invertebrates, unlike spiders they will eat berries and fruits.

After a thorough search of his garden, Paul reveals that although there are 27 recognised British species of harvestman, earlier that week he found what is believed to be a newly discovered harvestman in Britain; so newly discovered that this species 28 doesn't even have a name yet.

Producer: Andrew Dawes

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2012.

Harvestmen are a classic creepy crawly to be found in our countryside, but what are they?

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Despite its tiny size, the highland midge is often dubbed the scourge of the Scottish holidaymaker. In this programme recorded in 2008, Lionel Kelleway is joined by midge scientist Dr Alison Blackwell at Loch Laggan in the Scottish Highlands. On a warm damp day the mighty gathering as Alison calls it has not quite arrived but as the day warms clouds of midge begin to encircle them.

Our own annoyance at its ability to disrupt our BBQ's, camping trips, countryside walks - oh and of course bird watching, it is worth remembering that midges are a vital part of the natural food chain. And our knowledge and understanding of midge biology has continued to grow.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is on the look out for the Highland midge.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Sperring accompanies entomologist Richard Comont to Dry Sandford Pitts in Oxfordshire in search of a relative newcomer to the UK.

Only named as a new species in 1993 and first recorded on British shores in 2001 the ivy bee (Colletes hederae) has been working its way north ever since.

A real autumnal species the ivy bee is only active between September and November so its short year begins and ends within the space of a few weeks.

As the name suggests its primary food source is the pollen from ivy blossom - the last of the year's flowers. Male ivy bees emerge first in order to be ready for the first females. Unmated females are pounced on my several males all attempting to be the first to mate with her.

Unlike honeybees or bumble bees the ivy bee is solitary - the female prepares a nest-hole on her own in which to lay her eggs which she will provision with ivy pollen. Whilst the ivy bee is solitary they tend to dig their nest holes in large aggregations, sometimes in the thousands, in suitable sloping sandy banks.

The ivy bee seems to be bucking the trend of general decline in bee populations and spreading northwards as its range expands.

Dry Sandford Pits is one of the most northerly of its known locations. Where will it be spotted next?

Producer: Ellie Sans

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2013.

Chris Sperring meets up with Richard Comont to find out more about the ivy bee.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

More familiar in our gardens and parks, the red admiral butterfly is found throughout the British Isles and is one of the highlights of the butterfly season. It is an unmistakable butterfly with its black wings, and striking red bands. But how do they get here?

Well for this Living World, Lionel Kelleway travels to Lulworth Cove in Dorset where, standing on the cliffs and fully expecting to be looking out for autumnal bird migration, instead he witnesses the small bands of Red Admiral butterflies flying in from the sea as they migrate from mainland Europe. With Lionel is Richard Fox from Butterfly Conservation, who explains what's happening.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway witnesses butterfly migration at Lulworth Cove in Dorset. From 2008.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In Living World this week, Trai Anfield travels to an old park woodland near Helmsley in North Yorkshire where she meets up with entomologist Dr Roger Key for a daylong safari looking for invertebrates contained within deadwood. The story begins with fungi. Fungus spores carried in the air are deposited on the dead wood and with luck will germinate and send hyphae into the wood gradually breaking the wood down and thus providing suitable habitats for invertebrates and their larvae.

During her quest, Trai Anfield uncovers what is actually meant by deadwood, and that as a specialist Dr Key is known as a saprophytic entomologist, one who specialises in the lifecycles of deadwood insects. During the day, Dr Key uncovers a species he has known about but never seen in the wild in 30 years of searching for it.

Exploring the park woodland it becomes clear that a complex ecosystem is in place which if we become too tidy and clear up our fallen wood it can often be the worst thing people can do as this removes vital habitats from the lifecycle of many invertebrates and ultimately reduced the vigour of the woodland itself.

~Living World is in ancient woodland in North Yorkshire looking for bugs in fallen wood.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The machair is a unique coastal grassland, rich in wildflowers, that form one of the rarest habitats in Europe, and for this Living World wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman relives the magic of this man made but fragile landscape which Brett Westwood experienced on this visit to South Harris in 2004.

Brett meets up with Martin Scott from the RSPB who guides him across this sea washed habitat to discuss the special nature of botanically rich grasslands. This grassland is a result of many centuries of grazing by farm animals through the crofting system, the programme unearth how that grazing benefits not only the wild flowers, but the birdlife too. Along the way Brett discovers wonderful flora such as meadowsweet, silverweed and knapweed. But on a cold wet day their quest to find the great yellow bumblebee does prove problematic. This habitat is unique to western and northern Scotland and today faces considerable threats, from changes in the traditional crofting system to the introduction of hedgehogs and mink which can affect ground nesting birds making their home in the Machair, and controversial projects to remove them.

To bring this story up to date since this programme was first broadcast, Lindsey Chapman offers some recent updates into the magical world of the Machair.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood explores the magic of the machair in South Harris. From 2004.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Miniature World of Slitt Wood

Lionel Kelleway joins botanist Phil Gates in his open-air laboratory in Weardale and discovers a fascinating miniature forest of mosses and liverworts carpeting the riverside rocks. Scrambling about amongst this moist green foliage are a wealth of bizarre creatures including nematodes and water bears.

The Miniature World of Slitt Wood: Lionel Kelleway joins Phil Gates in his open-air lab.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

A visitor to Skomer island in the daytime in late summer will find sea the strewn with rafts of guillemots, razorbills and puffins, which scatter, leaving watery trails of sunlit footprints across the surface, or dive deep to make a pathway for the approaching boat. But at night a more dramatic wildlife spectacle unfolds as storm petrels and tens of thousands of nocturnal Manx shearwaters return to their burrows, skimming the air like half-seen shadows and tumbling clumsily to the ground.

Once the day flying seabirds have fallen quiet, in the semi-moonlit night Chris and David sit on a cliff edge waiting with anticipation for the first birds to come in from the sea; soon bat like shapes fly around their heads as the sparrow sized storm petrels begin to arrive. Although few in number on the island, storm petrels give a clue to the islands other and much bigger nocturnal seabird, the Manx shearwater. Moving further into the island Chris discovers that these true global seabirds, who travel thousands of kilometres from Wales to South America in a year, have difficulty landing and walking as their legs and feet are designed for swimming and digging. A true seabird.

Sitting amongst the huge Manx shearwater breeding colony, birds begin to crashland all around them and with so many birds all calling at once, the intensity of their discordant cries smothers the island in a nocturnal blanket of noise.

Chris Sperring looks for the Manx shearwater and storm petrel on Skomer Island.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this episode from 2012, Chris Sperring heads to Skomer Island with ecologist David Boyle

As dusk begins for this weeks Living World ornithologist Chris Sperring travels by boat over to Skomer where he is on the look out for two of our most mysterious seabirds, the Manx Shearwater and the storm petrel.

A visitor to Skomer island in the daytime in late summer will find sea the strewn with rafts of guillemots, razorbills and puffins, which scatter, leaving watery trails of sunlit footprints across the surface, or dive deep to make a pathway for the approaching boat. But at night a more dramatic wildlife spectacle unfolds as storm petrels and tens of thousands of nocturnal Manx shearwaters return to their burrows, skimming the air like half-seen shadows and tumbling clumsily to the ground.

Once the day flying seabirds have fallen quiet, in the semi-moonlit night Chris and David sit on a cliff edge waiting with anticipation for the first birds to come in from the sea; soon bat like shapes fly around their heads as the sparrow sized storm petrels begin to arrive. Although few in number on the island, storm petrels give a clue to the islands other and much bigger nocturnal seabird, the Manx shearwater. Moving further into the island Chris discovers that these true global seabirds, who travel thousands of kilometers from Wales to South America in a year, have difficulty landing and walking as their legs and feet are designed for swimming and digging. A true seabird.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Chris Sperring heads to Skomer Island with ecologist David Boyle. From 2012.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lindsey Chapman hosts this revised Living World from 2004 by gently bringing the story up to date for today's listener.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Brett Westwood heads for the oak trees of the Wyre Forest with John Tulley. From 2004

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Joanna Pinnock joins a botanist and reserve manager at one of the largest remaining colonies in Cambridgeshire to find out more about the fascinating history and botany of the pasqueflower and how colonies are being helped back from the brink with grazing - as it needs short grass in order to be able to thrive - and other conservation methods. (First broadcast in 2012 )

Producer: Sheena Duncan

Editor: Julian Hector

Joanna Pinnock visits a display of one of Britain's most beautiful wild flowers.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The beautiful purple pasqueflower with its distinctive yellow anthers is one of the few Spring flowers to be in bloom around Easter. Once found across most chalk and limestone grasslands in Britain the flower declined severely from the late 1700s when these grasslands were ploughed so that crops could be grown.

Joanna Pinnock joins a botanist and reserve manager at one of the largest remaining colonies in Cambridgeshire to find out more about the fascinating history and botany of the pasqueflower and how colonies are being helped back from the brink with grazing - as it needs short grass in order to be able to thrive - and other conservation methods. (First broadcast in 2012 )

Producer: Sheena Duncan

Editor: Julian Hector

Joanna Pinnock visits a display of one of Britain's most beautiful wild flowers.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Surprisingly, the British Isles are home to 6500 species of wasp and bees. But only one species, living on southern heathlands, can build a delicate clay pot no bigger than a pea: the potter wasp. This clay pot is made in just a few hours by the female before she lays an egg and seals it before winter sets in. In late spring the larval wasp emerges to begin the cycle again. Today very little is known about this wasp in Britain, though increasingly it is being noticed and studied along English southern counties. Lionel Kelleway travels to Devon where he meets an ecologist who spent 4 years before he finally became one of only a handful of people who have ever seen a wasp build its pot in Britain. So much more is yet to be discovered about the life cycle of this fascinating solitary wasp amongst the British countryside.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Of the 6500 wasp and bee species in the UK, only one can make a clay pot: the potter wasp.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 2003, Lionel Kelleway is joined by Michael Woods in a Somerset woodland. On a warm late summer day Lionel and Michael head off in search for one of Britain's most secretive mammals, made famous by Lewis Carrol. To do this they check artificial tubes in the hope of finding a dormouse as they fatten up in preparation for a seven month sleep. As Lionel discovers, for such a small mammal who sleeps for most of the year they are quite elusive, and therefore difficult to monitor in the wild.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by Michael Woods in search of dormice.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

Sitting as it does on the junction between the Firth of Forth and the North Sea, the Isle of May acts as a magnet for seabirds. During the breeding season it is home to thousands of birds, along with a small group of seabird ecologists.

In 1993 Lionel Kelleway visited the island for Living World to look at one species in particular, the shag. Here he was joined by Mike Harris and Sarah Wanlass from the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. After arriving on the island, Sarah and Mike unfurl the up's and down's of seabird ecology.

Chris Packham relives programmes from the Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from the Living World archives and in this episode from 2004 Brett himself travels to Somerset to explore the fascinating world of snowdrops with one such galanthophile Christine Skelmesdale. They start by discussing the snowdrop cultivars in Christine's garden before moving on to 'Snowdrop Valley' (or the more correctly called Avill Valley) on Exmoor. Christine explains the origins of UK snowdrops as imports from abroad, and that far from being native, snowdrops are a naturalised alien, though wonderful, plant.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Brett Westwood travels to Somerset to explore the world of snowdrops. From 2004.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Living World is a natural history strand that revels in rich encounter, immersion in the natural world and warm, enthusiastic story telling.

The spined loach is a small freshwater fish that spends most of the time burried in the silt of riverbeds. It is believed be in the UK as a result of the melting from the last Ice Age when the UK was connect to Europe. After the Ice Age rescinded, the ocean water levels increased for a time before decreasing enough to essentially separating some of the species from the rest that live in Europe. Brett Westwood joins Environment Agency Fisheries Officer Andy Beal and his team conducting a survey of this secretive and rare animal at Morton's Leam; a 15th Century river artificial course of the River Nene in Cambridgeshire.

Brett Westwood heads to Cambridgeshire in search of one of Britain's rarest vertebrate.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Living World is a natural history strand that revels in rich encounter, immersion in the natural world and warm, enthusiastic story telling.

The spined loach is a small freshwater fish that spends most of the time burried in the silt of riverbeds. It is believed be in the UK as a result of the melting from the last Ice Age when the UK was connect to Europe. After the Ice Age rescinded, the ocean water levels increased for a time before decreasing enough to essentially separating some of the species from the rest that live in Europe. Brett Westwood joins Environment Agency Fisheries Officer Andy Beal and his team conducting a survey of this secretive and rare animal at Morton's Leam; a 15th Century river artificial course of the River Nene in Cambridgeshire.

Brett Westwood heads to Cambridgeshire in search of one of Britain's rarest vertebrate.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

When Living World presenter Lionel Kelleway was a boy, his exploration of the New Forest was enhanced by the sheer volume of stag beetles filling the air on warm summer evening; obeying that most ancient of urges to find a mate.

On a similar warm summer evening in 1999 Lionel returned to the New Forest where, in Denny Wood he joined forest manager Jonathon Spencer and ecologist Roger Key in search of Britain's largest terrestrial beetle, the stag beetle.

Chris Packham relives programmes from the Living World archives.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For many the emergence of the daffodil is the real, true harbinger of spring. That flash of yellow across the countryside breathes vitality into a previously grey and dormant winter landscape. The spring of 2013 has been exceptionally cold and so these vibrant flashes of sunset yellow are an even more welcome sight to gladden the heart. There are around 26,000 species of daffodil in the World, however Britain is home to a special collection of true wild daffodils; smaller and less showy than the more usual cultivated stock, but superbly adapted to survive in our cold wet climate.

For Living World, presenter Chris Sperring joins botanist Ray Woods in search of one such daffodil, the Tenby daffodil, the National emblem of Wales. This daffodil is unique in that it is found nowhere else on the Planet except around Tenby and southwest Wales. Most often associated with places of habitation, its origins and history are now lost in history, but by the 1800's this species was abundant in hedgerow and field.

In the 1830's a horticulturalist in Tenby saw the economic potential of selling these miniature wild daffodils to gardeners and with the arrival of the railway to London, thousands of tons of Tenby daffodil bulbs were dug up from the Welsh countryside and sent to Covent Garden markets. For a few years daffodil mania gripped Britain, the countryside was harvested for bulbs, with reports of one farmer receiving £80 for the daffodil bulbs which were dug up in a single field. By the 1950's this once abundant species was almost extinct in the wild and it was only a chance query in the Tenby Tourist Information office in the 1970's saved this species from extinction, and in doing so revived the fortunes of other wild daffodils in Britain.

Chris Sperring joins botanist Ray Woods in west Wales to search for the Tenby daffodil.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Joanna Pinnock discovers the UK's rarest frog, the pool frog, in deepest Norfolk.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The UK's rarest frog is the pool frog and they can be found in ponds at a secret location in Norfolk. Although the last native English pool frogs died out over a decade ago, they were reintroduced here from Sweden in 2005-2008. Joanna Pinnock meets John Baker, a consultant specialising in reptiles and amphibians, who is monitoring their numbers. Joanna also comes face to face with a couple of grass snakes on site and encounters their very smelly defence strategy! Producer Brett Westwood

Joanna Pinnock discovers the UK's rarest frog, the pool frog, in deepest Norfolk.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Today's fashion for self-built homes may have started a few decades ago, but for nearly 200 million years, a family of insects have been quietly developing their own, des res. Depending on where you come from, they are sometimes known as ‘straw worms', or ‘case worms', but for most they are simply called ‘caddis'. The origin of the word "caddis" is unclear, but it seems to date back as far as Izaak Walton's 1653 book The Complete Angler, where the angling hero notes how to fish for roach or dace using "case-worms or cadis" as bait.

There are almost 200 species of caddisfly in the UK, the largest of which is more than 3cm long. In this episode of Living World, Lionel Kelleway hopes to find just a few of this number when he is joined on Lake Windermere by caddisfly expert Ian Wallace, who attempts to guide Lionel through these curious pond, lake and river dwelling insects. Along the way they discover some of the intricate biology which leads to the creation of their self built homes, a process that has even been adopted by jewelry designers in recent years.

Lindsey Chapman hosts this revised Living World from 2007 and gently brings the story up to date for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lionel Kelleway is with Ian Wallace looking for caddis in Lake Windermere. From 2007

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Vernal Lantern Fish

Global warming and rising sea temperatures have resulted in the appearance of a number of formerly rare species around our coast, including the lantern fish which was formerly restricted to deep offshore oceanic waters. Lionel Kelleway goes in search of this beautiful luminescent creature.

The Vernal Lantern Fish: Lionel Kelleway searches for this beautiful luminescent creature.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this programme recorded in 2000, Lionel Kelleway is joined by Andy Wilson in Norfolk. There was a time when lapwing, green-plover, pewit, call it what you will, were a common sight over the British countryside. At the time of recording Lionel Kelleway tries to discover why lapwings - our only crested wader - are disappearing from the British countryside.

Lionel Kelleway investigates why lapwings are disappearing from the British countryside.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For many I suspect the sting of a yellow and black banded wasp is the first thought when confronted with these fascinating aerial predators. But as entomologist Tom Ings explains to Lionel Kelleway in this programme from 2000, wasps are more often benign and beneficial than people realise. There are many wasp species in the UK and to fins some of them Lionel and Tom head to a Bristol garden. Quickly come across a number of wasp species, and a few we may think of as wasps but are not. In doing so Lionel discovers wasps are more beneficial than first thought and play a vital role in controlling predators. Later, heading indoors, Lionel receives a timely piece of advice as he peers into a very active wasp nest in the roof space. Don't poke it with a stick.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in search of wasps. Recorded in 2000. Presented by Chris Packham.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

For this week's Living World, presenter Chris Sperring goes in search of a large carnivore he's never seen before in the wild, the grey wolf. To do this he travels to Sweden where he meets up with Pierre Ahlgren a wildlife ranger in the Vastmanland area of Mid Sweden, where they are also joined by Tom Arnbom from WWF Sweden.

With thick snow on the ground Chris, Pierre and Tom travel to a snowy woodland 50 km northeast of the town of Vasteras. Heading deep into the woodland almost immediately they stumble across wolf tracks. Closer inspection reveals these tracks are nearly a week old but as this is Chris's first sign of this illusive animal his excitement grows and the pair head off into the woods in the hope of seeing more recent tracks and maybe a wolf. One surprising fact is that wolf plays a vital role in the whole forest ecosystem. Along the way Pierre and Tom discuss with Chris the conservation of these wolves and how Sweden although it did not have any wolves until 1983, it is now one of the best places in Europe to see them with nearly 300 individuals roaming this vast empty country.

Chris Sperring is in mid-Sweden in search of wolves, following their tracks in the snow.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In the company of Marc Brouard and Nigel Fisher, Conservator of Wytham Woods, Trai Anfield hears how these small mammals have a vital role to play in the ecology of the woodland.

Wytham Woods, is reputedly, the most studied woodland in World. Marc Brouard is the latest in a long line of scientific researchers to undertake field studies on small mammals. In 1943 Charles Elton, known as 'the father of modern ecology', studied wood mice and bank voles and his work was followed up by H.N. Southern who examined the impact of predation by tawny owls on populations of small mammals. Marc aims to understand how the characteristics of individual wood mice and bank voles can affect the survival of each species.

Trai Anfield visits Wytham Woods, where wood mice have been studied since 1943.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Sarah Pitt finds one of the few remaining sites where they can be seen in England and finds out why they are also known as 'the Woodsman's butterfly'. This butterfly is termed a 'habitat specialist'. As it emerges from winter hibernation, its larvae feed only on leaves of violets. Woodland management techniques have changed over time and violets are no longer common in British woodland. What can be done to help the highly endangered Pearl Bordered Fritillary? Richard Fox and Gary Pilkington discuss the state of Britain's butterflies.

Produced and Presented by Sarah Pitt.

Sarah Pitt goes in search of the endangered pearl-bordered fritillary.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lindsey Chapman revisits this edited Living World from 2008 to bring the story up to date for today's listener.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lionel Kelleway is in Dartmoor looking for the ash-black slug with John Walters. From 2008

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In traditional Chinese culture the mandarin duck is believed to bring lifelong fidelity to couples and frequently used as symbols for wedding presents or in Chinese art. Formerly abundant in their native Far East, numbers of mandarin ducks have declined due to habitat destruction (mainly logging) and over-hunting. It is difficult to estimate exactly how many remain in the world, but estimates are around 60,000 to 80,000 birds, which includes a free living introduced and naturalised population of 7,000 birds in the UK.

For this Living World, presenter Chris Sperring travels to the river Dart in Devon where starting underneath the busy A38 trunk road he meets up with naturalist John Walters who has been studying a winter roost of mandarin ducks here. In mid-winter up to 100 birds can roost here but in early spring they are beginning to pair up and disperse along the river Dart. Leaving this noisy suburban area, Chris and John then head off up the river to search for pairs of these wonderful tree ducks in the Devonian landscape.

The male mandarin is possibly one of the most colourful species of waterfowl and an unmistakable bird with its plumage covering most colours in an artist's palate. The male has a red bill, large white crescent above the eye, a reddish face and "whiskers". In full breeding plumage the most striking of all these feathers are two vibrant orange "sails" at the back which signal his presence to females and other males. Despite all these vibrant colours they are a surprisingly difficult bird to find in the wild as they are well camouflaged against the shrubs and habitat they move into to breed. Unlike most British ducks, these 'tree ducks' nest in tree holes, the emerging day-old ducklings have a perilous fall to the ground below.

Chris discovers in the programme that Britain's wild Mandarin population could probably be more numerous than that of the duck's true home, China and the Russian Far East, where it is now endangered. But how did this exotic alien came to be in Britain in the first place and how it is now on the British Bird List? First recorded in the 17th Century where they were brought to Britain as ornamental waterfowl on stately homes, they eventually escaped; although it was not until the 1920's that they became a truly wild living species, although as Chris discovers, intervention from humans plays a vital role in maintaining this exotic species in the British countryside.

Chris Sperring goes to the River Dart in Devon to look for mandarin ducks.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

The loveable Mr Toad in Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows talked long about what he planned to do in the days to come. In this programme from 2000 Lionel Kelleway heads to a Surrey woodland to see for himself what toads really get up to on a warm damp evening in March. Disappearing from our view in early winter, once the conditions are suitable in early spring toads will reappear en-masse as if by magic it seems. These warty amphibians are a much loved part of the British countryside but as Lionel discovers from herpetologist Julia Wycherley while still widespread their numbers are declining. Many factors are at work to threaten toads, loss of wet woods and ponds, fragmentation of the habitat and human disturbance to name a few and as this programme begins by a busy road, the famed toad movement in spring across a busy road often poses another barrier.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in Surrey on the lookout for spring toads. Recorded in 2000.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Tree sparrows were once so common in Britain they were at best ignored, at worst considered a pest by farmers. In China, Chairman Mao, led to believe it was enough of an agricultural pest to justify a purge that in 1958 he included it in ' the great leap forward' by ordering the nation to kill all sparrows . It was a part of the 'Four pests campaign' against the rat, mosquito, fly and tree sparrow. China went on a peoples campaign to stamp out the Sparrow, many were harassed by people banging pots and pans together, the aim being to keep them airborne until they dropped from exhaustion and could be killed, others were shot, trapped and their nests destroyed.

In Britain the population of this once abundant bird crashed spectacularly between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, by more than 50% due to changes in agricultural practices, and now in western Britain it is a rare bird indeed. It should be remembered that, for every Tree Sparrow today there were perhaps around 30 in the 1970s, and any recovery therefore has a very long way to go.

This programme looks to identify the bird in situ and discuss the history, current population and the future of this most wonderful little bird, which comes in to gregarious winter flocks with other birds at this RSPB reserve.

Trai Anfield heads to RSPB Old Moor reserve to seek out the once-common tree sparrow.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Living World is a natural history strand that revels in rich encounter, immersion in the natural world and warm, enthusiastic story telling.

As boa constrictors go the Caicos Islands pygmy is unlikely to frighten even the most committed herpetophobe. It may belong to the same family as the South American anaconda, but at 25cm long the pygmy (or dwarf) boa is small enough to be gobbled up by house mice. The island of North Caicos 200 miles east of Cuba is one of the last large undeveloped islands in the Caribbean. Amongst the ruins of a slave plantation a healthy population of pygmy boa is watched over by local naturalist Bryan Naqqi Manco. At dusk in the crumbling plasterwork of the plantation well it's easy to spot the heads of these endemic snakes poking out, waiting patiently for baby frogs and tiny geckos to hop into range.

In the first of two programmes from the Turks and Caicos Islands Tom Heap joins Bryan for a night safari. In the tropical dry forest of Wade's Green Plantation they find tailless whip scorpions, contemplate the Milky Way and enjoy the astonishing chorus of katydids and tree frogs.

Presented by Tom Heap
Produced by Alasdair Cross.

Tom Heap joins a night safari in search of the Caicos pygmy boa constrictor.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Living World is a natural history strand that revels in rich encounter, immersion in the natural world and warm, enthusiastic story telling.

Some of the Caribbean's most spectacular wildlife can be surprisingly easy to find. A short boat ride from the main island of Turks and Caicos brings you to the flat, limestone island of Little Water Cay. Within moments of stepping onshore you can be pretty sure of finding something large, shimmering and spectacular at your feet. These dinosaur-like creatures are the Turks and Caicos Rock Iguana, endemic to these islands and to one location in the nearby Bahamas.

Mark Parrish is a marine biologist who runs a local eco-tourism business. He tells Tom Heap about the problems facing this critically endangered species, particularly the tendency of feral cats to predate on the young lizards. Cats have been spotted crossing onto the island but the warden Alex Williams is determined to keep the local population safe. He takes Tom to see Rocky, the dominant male, his harem of mates and the young challenger to his crown.

Presented by Tom Heap
Produced by Alasdair Cross.

Tom Heap meets the critically endangered rock iguana of the Caribbean.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Over the past 200 years the UK red kite population dwindled, largely due to human persecution, until only a small population remained in mid-Wales. Since 1989 a number of reintroduction projects have begun to restore the red kite to its former range across the UK.

Between 2004 and 2007 the Northern Kites Project re-introduced 94 red kites into the lower Derwent Valley. This Project was unique; whereas the previous ones had been carried out in rural areas, this one brought back the kites to a semi-urban environment, close to the large conglomeration of Gateshead and its neighbour on the north bank of the River Tyne, Newcastle. People can now walk to admire the red kites in the Lower Derwent Valley and yet only six miles from the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne.

For this week's Living World, Trai Anfield travels to Tyneside to see for herself these majestic birds. Starting at one of the release sites, Trai is joined by Harold Dobson from Friends of Red Kites in the north east of England, who takes Trai on a journey through the Tyneside landscape following red kites in the winter landscape. But the real spectacle is when 46 red kites cover an electricity pylon like candles on a Christmas tree, only to fly slowly over head and into a woodland roost. Something everyone there found a deeply moving experience.

Seen soaring overhead red kites are one of the most iconic birds of the Tyneside landscape

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Producer Mr Andrew Dawes.

A wildflower rich landscape in a Durham Dale has a sinister botanical twist in its tail.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In this programme recorded in 1999, Lionel Kelleway is joined by the late Rob Strachan on the outskirts of Oxford in search of water voles; the original 'ratty' in Kenneth Graham's 'Wind in the Willows'. When that book was written water voles were a much more common sight than today. But as Lionel is about to discover, looking in some of the most unlikely places near to modern human infrastructure can often bring about great rewards.

Lionel Kelleway is joined by Rob Strachan in search of water voles.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

West Wales receives a lot of rain, which is perfect for this week's Living World. Paul Evans joins Bruce Langridge from the National Botanic Garden of Wales and Dr Gareth Griffiths, a mycologist from Aberystwyth University on a fungal foray with a difference, as they look for waxcaps hidden amongst grass.

With over a million fungal species in the World, understanding these could be a daunting prospect for someone new to the science of mycology. However waxcaps are a good entry point as in Britain there are just 40 or 50 of these beautiful fungi species. Apart from being wonderful to view, waxcaps are now known to be an indicator species of the health of a grassland, especially below ground.

Waxcaps generally are in decline in Western Europe as unimproved grasslands succumb to agricultural intensification, with increased nitrogen fertilizers being especially harmful to their microrhiza in the soil. So to begin the journey Paul travels to a remote rural chapel where Bruce has been working to improve the habitat of the graveyard for the benefit of waxcaps. The vibrancy of colour these little fungi buttons produce is astounding, but as Gareth recalls, no one really knows why they are so bright as their one and only function is to disperse spores across the landscape.

From there the trio head down the valley to an organic farm to find the fabled ballerina waxcap, a shocking pink candy sweet looking fungi poking through the green sward. Once thought very rare, these waxcaps have now become the iconic flagship for waxcaps. So why should we conserve these waxcap grasslands? Well as both Gareth and Bruce explain they are the visible evidence of a healthy soil ecosystem underneath the grass who's activity is as important as photosynthesis.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

From a rural graveyard to an organic farm, Wales is an important place for waxcap fungi.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Brett Westwood relives programmes from The Living World archives. In this 2011 episode Paul Evans joins Bruce Langridge from the National Botanic Garden of Wales and Dr Gareth Griffiths, a mycologist from Aberystwyth University on a fungal foray with a difference, as they look for waxcaps hidden amongst grass.

With over a million fungal species in the World, understanding these could be a daunting prospect for someone new to the science of mycology. However waxcaps are a good entry point as in Britain there are just 40 or 50 of these beautiful fungi species. Apart from being wonderful to view, waxcaps are now known to be an indicator species of the health of a grassland, especially below ground.

Waxcaps generally are in decline in Western Europe as unimproved grasslands succumb to agricultural intensification, with increased nitrogen fertilizers being especially harmful to their microrhiza in the soil. So to begin the journey Paul travels to a remote rural chapel where Bruce has been working to improve the habitat of the graveyard for the benefit of waxcaps. The vibrancy of colour these little fungi buttons produce is astounding, but as Gareth recalls, no one really knows why they are so bright as their one and only function is to disperse spores across the landscape.

From there the trio head down the valley to an organic farm to find the fabled ballerina waxcap, a shocking pink candy sweet looking fungi poking through the green sward. Once thought very rare, these waxcaps have now become the iconic flagship for waxcaps. So why should we conserve these waxcap grasslands? Well as both Gareth and Bruce explain they are the visible evidence of a healthy soil ecosystem underneath the grass who's activity is as important as photosynthesis.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Paul Evans joins Gareth Griffiths and Bruce Langridge in Wales, looking for waxcap fungi.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

When freezing temperatures descend on Iceland, whooper swans migrate south to the Highlands of Scotland where they flock together on wet land, whooping musically to one another in high and low tones. The beauty of the whooper swan has long been revered and over the winter months the Insh Marshes Nature Reserve plays host to this spectacular gathering. Living World presenter Trai Anfield and the RSPB's Catherine Vis-Christie take to the marshes to see how these elegant birds are faring after their long journey to Scottish shores.

When the cold descends on Iceland, whooper swans migrate south to the Scottish Highlands

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The wild boar has had a checkered history in the British countryside. This once native species was hunted out of existence in the 13th Century and despite a number of reintroductions finally disappeared from our fauna in the 17th Century. And for the next 300 years the sound of boar, the onomatopoeia collective term for boar is , sound, lay silent across the landscape. Until around 20 years ago, when wild boar once again roamed some areas of the British countryside. But how did they get there?

To find out more, in this Living World, Lionel Kelleway heads to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire on the trail of this shy and evasive animal, which although now firmly re-established in the British landscape is surprisingly hard to track down. Lionel enlists the help of boar expert, Dr Martin Goulding and after a day in the woods, the result was a surprise to both of them.

In the decade since the programme was first broadcast, the situation of wild boar has of course changed. Wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman revisits this Living World from 2007 before bringing the story up to date for today's audience.

Producer Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World on wild boar in Gloucestershire. From 2007

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Sperring meets Peter Wright, former head ranger of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and an expert in merlin having studied them in their upland breeding habitat for many years. Chris and Peter join Andy Gibson, the Outer Humber officer for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust who shows them what attracts merlin - and other birds of prey to Spurn Point National Nature Reserve.

Chris Sperring joins Peter Wright and Andrew Gibson at Spurn National Nature Reserve.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

These dollies are expert dancers and can be seen on most garden ponds in summer when the males pose on the surface film and wave their wings to flirt with females and threaten other males.

Flies are excellent indicators of good habitat, claims Erica. With over 7,500 species in the UK they outnumber butterflies, moths and beetles and get into every niche, so if you want to study the health of a habitat look for its diversity of flies. Producer: Brett Westwood

Miranda Krestovnikoff finds out where flies go in winter.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Where do flies go in the winter? It's a question often asked and Miranda Krestovnikoff goes is in search of the answers. Her guide is Erica McAlister, the Collections Manager of Diptera (two-winged flies) at London's Natural History Museum. The location is an icy pool and woodland near Kidderminster where the conditions look anything but favourable. When they arrive nothing is flying, but Erica's backpack suction sampler (what she calls her ghostbuster gear) reveals a host of metallic greenish flies hiding under the leaves of a tussock sedge. These are known as dollies to fly experts ... easier to say than dolichopodids!

These dollies are expert dancers and can be seen on most garden ponds in summer when the males pose on the surface film and wave their wings to flirt with females and threaten other males.

Flies are excellent indicators of good habitat, claims Erica. With over 7,500 species in the UK they outnumber butterflies, moths and beetles and get into every niche, so if you want to study the health of a habitat look for its diversity of flies. Producer: Brett Westwood

Miranda Krestovnikoff finds out where flies go in winter.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

It's autumn, the leaves are falling, the temperature dropping and the nights lengthen.

This is a time when many animals begin to slow down and prepare for the long winter months ahead. The gardener's friend, the ladybird is one such animal which in late autumn begins to move into many houses as a welcome guest.

Joanna Pinnock heads to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire where on a windy day, she joins Dr Helen Roy and PhD student Richard Comont to investigate what is happening as ladybirds come indoors.

Beginning inside Helen's house, Joanna notices ladybirds all around the windows. Ladybirds like pale walls, a reminder of their natural environment, rocky mountains with light coloured surfaces.

But recently our native ladybirds have been joined by the harlequin ladybird, a species that is more likely to be seen in the house this year. Why this is the case remains a mystery.

There are over 40 species of ladybird in Britain, with the 7 spot the most familiar. However when they come into their dormant state, parasites and fungi begin to attack the 7 spot and other ladybirds, with the winter months being the time of greatest mortality.

But new research is being carried out to see if this parasite is about to begin attacking the harlequin. Richard takes Joanna to see his experimental plots and explain why the ladybirds need a winter dormant state to survive.

Producer: Andrew Dawes

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.

As the cold nights draw in, ladybirds come indoors for the winter months.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

It's autumn, the leaves are falling, the temperature dropping and the nights lengthen.

This is a time when many animals begin to slow down and prepare for the long winter months ahead. The gardener's friend, the ladybird is one such animal which in late autumn begins to move into many houses as a welcome guest.

Joanna Pinnock heads to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire where on a windy day, she joins Dr Helen Roy and PhD student Richard Comont to investigate what is happening as ladybirds come indoors.

Beginning inside Helen's house, Joanna notices ladybirds all around the windows. Ladybirds like pale walls, a reminder of their natural environment, rocky mountains with light coloured surfaces.

But recently our native ladybirds have been joined by the harlequin ladybird, a species that is more likely to be seen in the house this year. Why this is the case remains a mystery.

There are over 40 species of ladybird in Britain, with the 7 spot the most familiar. However when they come into their dormant state, parasites and fungi begin to attack the 7 spot and other ladybirds, with the winter months being the time of greatest mortality.

But new research is being carried out to see if this parasite is about to begin attacking the harlequin. Richard takes Joanna to see his experimental plots and explain why the ladybirds need a winter dormant state to survive.

Producer: Andrew Dawes

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.

As the cold nights draw in, ladybirds come indoors for the winter months.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

13/18. The raven is both agile and majestic in flight but shrouded in mystery, superstition and folk law. How was it that our biggest member of the crow family, a bird once protected as an important scavenger in ancient times, was then persecuted almost to extinction in the British Isles, with less that 1000 pairs clinging onto a precarious future in few remote hills in upland Britain?

In this week's Living World, Lionel Kelleway travels to a remote part of Shropshire where thankfully the raven is making a remarkable comeback. Here on the Stiperstones National Nature Reserve he meets up with Leo Smith and Tom Wall from the Shropshire Raven Study Group, a group who have been studying these magnificent birds for nearly 20 years, and who have recorded the changes in the fortunes for these huge members of the crow family.

As they walk to an old raven nest in wet woodland, Lionel encounters many ravens on the wing. A raven's nest is easy to spot by its size, similar to that of an eagle, beautifully illustrating how easy it was to persecute these birds in the past.

But the tide has turned and now Shropshire is home to a remarkable wildlife spectacle, a raven roost. Travelling to a private mixed woodland Lionel is chorused by over 60 ravens wheeling and displaying in the gathering dusk. Remarkably, even in early November, the spectacular barrel rolls and shadow flight ravens are noted for when pairing up, is taking place. Nature on the wing at its very best.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway
Produced by Andrew Dawes.

Shropshire's ravens are recovering from persecution, and returning in ever greater numbers

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The raven is both agile and majestic in flight but shrouded in mystery, superstition and folk law. How was it that our biggest member of the crow family, a bird once protected as an important scavenger in ancient times, was then persecuted almost to extinction in the British Isles, with less that 1000 pairs clinging onto a precarious future in few remote hills in upland Britain? In this Living World from 2010, Lionel Kelleway travels to the syperstones in Shropshire where thankfully the raven is making a remarkable comeback. Here he meets up with Leo Smith and Tom Wall from the Shropshire Raven Study Group, a group who have been studying these magnificent birds for nearly 20 years. As they walk to an old raven nest in wet woodland, they encounter many ravens on the wing. But the tide has turned and now Shropshire is home to a remarkable wildlife spectacle, a raven roost in a private woodland where Lionel is chorused by over 60 ravens wheeling and displaying in the gathering dusk.

Since the programme was broadcast, the Shropshire Raven Study group has completed it's work. In this revised episode wildlife presenter Lindsey Chapman updates the listener with this corvid success story.

Produced by Andrew Dawes

Lindsey Chapman updates this Living World on a winter raven roost in Shropshire. From 2010

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Trai Anfield visits a wintry Bovisand Bay in South Devon in the company of Keith Hiscock, Associate Fellow of the Marine Biological Association.

They rummage amongst the storm strewn seaweed making up the strand line at the top of the beach. It is here that insects and crustaceans flourish in the food rich and clement micro world, in turn drawing in birds like wagtails and turn stones.

Down in the inter-tidal zone, along with finding a host of marine molluscs are the excitingly named volcano barnacles and beautifully coloured beadlet anenomies.

Trai Anfield finds the wildlife on the wintry shores of Devon.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Woodcock are nocturnal , hiding by day in dense woodland. To see one, Miranda enlists the expertise of Dr Andrew Hoodless, a woodcock biologist with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust who's been studying the birds for 20 years to find out where they feed, how they're affected by hard weather and what type of woodlands they require in the breeding season. Producer Brett Westwood.

Miranda Krestovnikoff searches for the mysterious wading bird, the woodcock

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

In this week's Living World, Miranda Krestovnikoff tracks down one of our most mysterious and elusive birds, the woodcock. This mysterious wader spends most of its life in woodland and is wonderfully patterned to blend in with dead leaves. In summer there are about 160, 000 woodcocks in the UK, but in winter their numbers are swelled to over a million by migrant birds from Scandinavia and Russia. With their long bills, woodcock probe for worms and when the soil freezes, birds are forced to move south to the British Isles.

Woodcock are nocturnal , hiding by day in dense woodland. To see one, Miranda enlists the expertise of Dr Andrew Hoodless, a woodcock biologist with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust who's been studying the birds for 20 years to find out where they feed, how they're affected by hard weather and what type of woodlands they require in the breeding season. Producer Brett Westwood.

Miranda Krestovnikoff searches for the mysterious wading bird, the woodcock

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Lionel visits Woolston Eyes nature reserve near to Warrington where he meets up with Brian Martin who at the time of recording had been at the reserve for over 20 years recording the wildlife. This reserve is owned by the Manchester Ship Canal company and for years was used as a site to deposit dredging's from the canal. Over the decades as Lionel discovered the site became a hotch potch of heaps and shallow areas which since 1980 when the site began the long process of conversion from the devastation of canal spoil into a wildlife haven, yet only a stone's throw from the Warrington urban area.

Along the way Lionel discovers some of the species which had moved in to make this their home, such sedge warbler and black necked grebe which the site has become an important breeding area for. In summer many butterflies, moths, other insects can be found, including dragonflies making use of the lagoon ponds which have been created on site.

To bring this story up to date since this programme was first broadcast; Lindsey Chapman offers some recent updates into the denizens of Woolston Eyes

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway explores a remarkable nature reserve close to Warrington. From 2000.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Chris Packham relives programmes from The Living World archives.

In ancient Greece, so the legend goes - a competition to see which of all the birds could fly the highest was won by the eagle - until that is, a miniature wren emerged from the eagles feathers and flew just a little higher. The wren was crowned and evermore known as "the King of the Birds".

In this programme first broadcast in 1999 Lionel Kelleway travels to a woodland setting named Minewood near Sterling in Scotland. Despite their reputation as the King of the Birds, until the early 20th Century wrens were still hunted on St Stephen's Day, which is December 26th. But today with nearly 8 million territories in the United Kingdom, Lionel goes on a hunt with a bit of a difference as he searches for the wren king. Joining Lionel is Matthew Evans from the British Trust for Ornithology who has been coming to this woodland for many years to study this bird with an explosive song.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Lionel Kelleway is in Scotland looking at the diminutive wren. Recorded in 1999.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Scientist and broadcaster Aubrey Manning has a Great Yew tree in his garden in East Lothian. In comparison with the Fortingall Yew, the Ormiston Yew is intact making it, in many ways, far more impressive to visit than the Fortingall Yew. Though it looks like a 'green mound' from the outside, Lionel and Aubrey venture inside the tree and are filled with wonder at what they find.

Presented by Lionel Kelleway

Produced by Polly Procter.

Lionel Kelleway travels to Scotland to wonder at two very different yew trees.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

The Dormouse and the Vet

Lionel Kelleway joins Sue Tatman from Cheshire Wildlife Trust and a group of volunteers on a day out looking for dormice. The reintroduced population is being monitored with the use of microchip technology and a vet is on site to weigh and measure the creatures in order to learn more about them.

Lionel Kelleway joins Sue Tatman from Cheshire Wildlife Trust to monitor dormice.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.

Getting up close and personal with wild nature in Britain and beyond.