Catch up with all five episodes of the new BBC One Wild Isles TV series, plus a 50-minute Saving Our Wild Isles special on BBC iPlayer
VAST SNOW-CAPPED MOUNTAIN ranges. Sweeping beaches of white sand. Herds of wild horses galloping across wide grasslands. Orcas seizing seals, golden eagles chasing hares, and white-tailed eagles learning to hunt a new kind of prey.
The epic scale of Sir David Attenborough’s new natural history blockbuster on BBC One indicates that this is another globe-trotting adventure. But Wild Isles may be the most unique and unusual series the 96-year-old has ever made: it is completely based in the British Isles.
In the first of five programmes, Sir David introduces us to the wildlife of the archipelago that is Britain, Ireland and more than 6,000 lesser islands, explaining what makes it so special. Themed episodes then explore woodlands, grasslands, rivers and finally the ocean. Sir David begins on the Dorset coastline overlooking the chalk stacks of Old Harry Rocks, and says that the wildlife spectacles in the British Isles match anything he has encountered globally. This claim “terrifies” Alastair Fothergill, the executive producer who devised the series because, he says, “we have to deliver on that”.
The idea that one of Europe’s most densely populated countries, which an RSPB study found to have lost more wildlife than 228 other countries, could supply astonishing and abundant wildlife seems implausible. The British Isles are famed for having destroyed their megafauna, driving to extinction every large carnivore. But Wild Isles casts our nations in a new light. It reveals vast flocks of knot and barnacle geese in winter and thousands of gannets and other seabirds that gather on our cliffs in spring to breed. There are vicious battles – rutting stags, rearing wild horses – and clashes between predators and prey that are every bit as heart-wrenching as something from an African savannah.
The series boasts a number of filming firsts, including new details about the extraordinary storybutterfly, whose caterpillars trick ants into looking after them in their nests all through the winter, and wild buzzards catching young rabbits. “This sounds like one of the most common phenomena across the British Isles,” says wildlife film-maker Simon King, who captured the sequence alongside thrilling visuals of peregrines hunting over estuaries, red deer rutting in western Ireland, and new adder behaviour (so unusual it is being written up for a scientific journal). “But if you look back across the film archives for a single shot of a wild buzzard catching a rabbit, you won’t find one. We see buzzards flying with little rabbits dangling from their talons but to actually witness the event is a different box of frogs.”
