TV series Scotland The New Wild looks at Cairngorms wildlife
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The focus for a new three-part series Scotland The New Wild which starts this Sunday is an intimate but also wide-ranging portrait of the varied and special wildlife of Scotland.
The programme includes behaviours that have never been filmed before and stories of several rare species, some of which face new and uncertain futures.
Each episode explores a different part of the country, the Islands, the Lowlands and the Highlands.
Reflected throughout the series is an assessment of the challenges facing the natural world in Scotland at a time of rising awareness of the climate change and biodiversity crisis alongside appreciation of how special Scotland’s wildlife really is.
The first episode is Islands.
From the Shetland Isles in the North to the Inner Hebrides in the South, Scotland’s isles are teeming with life.
In the north-west, sitting low in the Atlantic, are the remote Monach Isles, where the white sand beaches host the largest breeding colony of grey seals in Europe. Other locations include the Uists, the Shiants, Rum and Shetland.
Episode two on Sunday, September 24 focuses on the Lowlands and Aberdeenshire, with its low lying farmlands, that the nation’s character really comes to the fore as demonstrated in this episode..
This is a landscape characterised by sprawling urban centres, huge areas of agricultural farmland, fragmented forests and mighty rivers. It is the most intensely managed part of Scotland’s landscape.
But wildlife still survives here, clinging on, and in some places a few species are beginning to stage a comeback.
Episode three on Sunday, October 1 travels to the hills and glens of the Highlands which define Scotland for the world. Dominated by hills, glens, lochs, rivers and forests, it’s a landscape that’s been heavily altered by people and climate.
Once a great forest covered much of this land, but now little remains. In the central highlands lie the Cairngorms, a vast plateau where Scotland’s greatest Arctic alpine environment can be found and home to Scotland’s only free-roaming reindeer herd.
For thousands of years reindeer roamed these hills but were eventually lost due to hunting and climate pressures.
But in the 1960s this herd was reintroduced. By the middle of Spring, they’re joined on the high tops by a true Highland specialist, the dotterel. These trusting little birds return here from North Africa to breed, flitting around the melting snow patches in search of food.
They’ve been in huge decline in recent years as climate pressure takes its toll on this small population on the southern edge of its breeding range.
For the very first time their breeding behaviour is captured on camera.
In the glen below is the largest remaining fragment of the great wood of Caledon. This special forest is among the last places some very rare species can be found, including the critically endangered capercaillie.
Other species are found in much greater numbers here. Huge wood ant nests are seen dotted throughout the forest and in the branches of the Scots Pines above, these industrious insects farm groups of aphids, caressing them with their antennae to encourage sweet secretions of honeydew which nourish the ants and their larvae.
Scotland the New Wild airs from September 17 on BBC Scotland at 9pm
