The past year has been unlike any we have ever known.
The pandemic has brought lockdowns, social distancing
and has altered our very way of life.
More people than ever before have turned to nature
and have found comfort in the natural world.
Animals pushed out by humans have had a chance to return.
There's no doubt that living through the pandemic
has made many of us re-evaluate what matters to us.
It's forced us to question how we are living our lives
and to consider the impact that we have on the planet.
We are losing more plants and animals today
than at any other time in history.
It's easy to think that nothing can be done, that it's too late.
But hard-fought victories are being won
by conservationists across Europe.
In this programme, we will see how here in Scotland,
the basking shark is being closely monitored
and how in Ireland,
the red squirrel and beautiful roseate tern
are being brought back from the brink of extinction.
We'll find out how the arctic fox in Norway
and the loggerhead turtle in Spain
are making a comeback,
both fighting back against climate change.
In Europe's cities, we'll see how we are learning to live with,
rather than force out,
the swift, the bat and the peregrine falcon.
From the oceans to our mountains and cities,
we'll show you how we can turn the tide
and bring Europe's wildlife back from the brink.
Europe is blessed with hugely productive seas,
with many animals feeding on their riches.
As a marine biologist,
I've experienced the beauty of the underwater world many times.
I've always been fascinated by the species in our oceans
and I'm passionate about their conservation.
I spend my time teaching marine biology
on the Isle of Cumbrae just behind me.
But sadly, the state of our seas
has recently been under the spotlight.
Plastic pollution, climate change and overfishing
are all putting extraordinary pressures on our oceans.
But against this background, remarkable efforts are being made
to understand and protect the species that live in our seas.
No more so than here in the waters off the west coast of Scotland.
Tobermory on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides.
A team of scientists is heading out into the Atlantic,
hoping to find one of our most secretive sea creatures.
Go!
They are heading into an area of waters
where these animals can often be found in high numbers.
Dr Lucy Hawkes from the University of Exeter
is on the hunt for basking sharks.
These creatures are the world's second-largest fish
and they come to Scotland each summer.
Their presence is a key indicator of the health of our seas
and the ocean's biodiversity.
Lucy wants to find out if these oceanic giants come here to breed.
She hopes to try and capture this activity on camera.
What's going to happen is we're going to attach this to the shark
via this tether,
so it's going to be dragging along behind the shark like this,
filming the shark as it goes.
And so the forward-pointing camera
will be able to see everything that the shark is seeing,
but the backward-pointing camera
is going to tell us if there's other sharks hanging out with it
that are actually following it.
And sharks following one another is something that they tend to do
when they're thinking about breeding.
So this is kind of like having a dance on a nightclub dance floor,
I suppose.
After eight hours of searching,
the team are finally rewarded.
Basking sharks!
Securing a camera to a shark is tricky.
Lucy will require the same kind of patience she needed
to track it down in the first place.
There's so many things you have to get right, the shark line-up,
the boat can't go too fast, it can't go too slow.
The shark has to stay nice and shallow in the water.
It's like you took this massive gamble and it just suddenly pays off.
Luckily, the camera was attached to the shark on the first attempt.
It's a split-second thing, it really is,
and you doubt your judgment, but if it comes off, it comes off.
I don't know where it's gone right now,
but there's a shark swimming right round here
with a camera filming front and back.
That's never been done before.
The camera is capturing pictures from a completely new perspective.
The point of collecting this data is to aid its conservation,
to find out if Scotland is this key place that they're breeding.
If Lucy can prove the sharks are breeding here,
it will make these waters even more significant.
And thanks to a growing body of scientific evidence,
the Sea of the Hebrides has now been designated
as a marine-protected area.
This will provide legal protection
for the habitat's vast range of wildlife,
including its sea birds, minke whales
and, of course, the basking shark.
We are heading to a pair of islands known collectively as Rockabill,
near Dublin Port.
It's the last place you'd expect to find
one of Europe's greatest conservation success stories.
These tiny islands are home to a beautiful migrant sea bird
and one of Europe's most endangered breeding birds,
roseate terns.
They are about one quarter the size of a gull,
have black beaks
and a gorgeous rose-tinted flush on their chests.
They share the island with common terns
and the black guillemot.
Recently, however, their very existence was looking bleak.
Europe's entire population of roseate terns
was reduced to just 400 breeding pairs
and nobody knew why.
That was until Rockabill Island came to the rescue.
Dr Steve Newton from BirdWatch Ireland
is leading the project.
We still haven't really worked it out,
but the decline happened right across Europe,
almost at the same time.
So we tend to think there was something going on
in the wintering grounds in West Africa,
that perhaps a collapse in fishery stocks out there,
but it's still something we keep asking ourselves
and we keep going back through the old data
trying to work out what it was that took them
from 3,500 pairs down to 400 pairs in a decade or so.
Everywhere you go on the island,
you find eggs on scrapes just like this one,
which would be easy picking for predators.
But because Rockabill lies so far offshore,
predators haven't been able to establish themselves.
And this is the key reason why this colony is more successful
than any other Irish tern colony.
To encourage the birds to breed,
the nesting habits of terns gave Steve a brainwave.
We'd struck across the idea of nest boxes.
Not your typical blue tit nest box,
but not that far different.
Three sides, a roof, plonk it on the ground,
gives the birds a bit of privacy and shelter from the elements.
Let's see how they get on.
The birds took to these boxes, very simple things.
We put out, you know, a hundred.
The next year we put out 200
and it's just grown and grown and grown.
And now we've put out about 900 boxes.
And at the moment, about half nest in the boxes,
the other half still nest under vegetation, under rocks.
So we have a nice little experiment.
And over the years, the ones nesting in the boxes always lay more eggs,
always raise more chicks than the ones out in the open.
It's pretty obvious when you see an Irish summer these days,
the benefit of being in a box.
Today, the only company the sea birds have
comes from the wardens
who live in the old lighthouse keeper's cottage
during the summer months.
Emma Tiernan is one of the wardens
and wears several hats to ward off attacks
from the protective parents.
I'm just about to go down to my study area,
where I'm going to check the nest boxes for fresh eggs
or fresh hatchlings,
any new hatchlings that have arrived in the last few hours.
He's hiding.
Hiding behind the box.
Twice a day, Emma takes key measurements
to monitor the chicks' growth.
And this guy hatched sometime in the night last night,
so he was first recorded today, this morning.
Roseate terns are one of nature's great travellers.
They're found in Europe during the summer and early autumn
and spend the rest of the year off the coast of West Africa.
Steve uses a telescope to check the ring numbers on the birds,
so he can identify them and monitor their family history.
It's always a great privilege to come here, you know.
Whatever the weather, it is just a beautiful place to be
around these birds.
OK, it is a bit noisy and a bit smelly at times,
but that's part of the attraction, I think.
It's certainly a flagship project for Ireland in a conservation sense
and it's something I'm just incredibly proud of.
The project's success means there are now enough terns
to repopulate other colonies around Europe.
So, we are out there trying to help them to build up the population
in other places in Europe.
You could say that it's Europe's largest roseate tern factory.
It's remarkable that a low-tech solution like plywood nest boxes
has had such a positive effect
on the numbers of these Rockabill terns.
The thousands of hours that Steve and his team have spent
monitoring the birds has deepened our understanding of them.
But there is little doubt that over the past few decades,
we have become more distant from the natural world.
Right now, one million species,
around one in ten of all life forms on Earth,
are at risk of total extinction.
84% of Europe's crops depend on insect pollination,
but insect populations are collapsing.
The value of insect pollination is estimated at £12 billion per year,
but we get it for free and take it for granted.
We often try to bend nature to our own needs,
especially when it comes to intensive agriculture.
Sometimes with devastating effects.
Wurzburg in the Northern Bavarian region of Germany,
famous for its mighty Marienberg Fortress.
In the fields around this city lives an animal that has been lost
for most areas of Germany,
the European hamster.
Their numbers in the wild have dropped by up to 90%
and are now on the critically endangered list.
Hamster life is a constant struggle for survival.
Night predators like the eagle owl target the rodent.
The young hamsters don't yet know the danger.
It's hard work for the mother to bring her seven cubs
into the protective den.
She's a little out of breath,
but safe.
Wild hamsters also have to live with the threat of combine harvesters.
Harvesting used to take weeks, but nowadays,
thanks to huge and extremely effective machines,
it can be done within a few days.
No grain is left behind
and the fields are ploughed immediately.
In a very short time,
the hamsters lose food and cover over a huge area.
These arable deserts are insurmountable for a hamster
who normally wanders no more than 300 metres.
If they try their luck, it usually doesn't end well.
But there is hope,
ironically, in areas that were not actually created
for the European hamster.
The wild flower mixture in this field was planted
to generate biomass for energy production
and provide a habitat for bees and other insects.
But it also attracted hamsters.
Kornelia Marzini from the Bavarian State Horticulture Institute
manages the project.
To our great surprise, hamsters settled quickly in this field,
and we are even able to prove, with the game camera,
that the hamsters reproduce.
Numerous hamster cubs have grown up here
over the past three years.
Why has this happened?
After all, the field is harvested every year.
Unlike other fields, this area is not ploughed after the harvest
and the plants are cut high enough to leave vegetation for
the hamster to feed on.
To find out how many hamster burrows there are, biologist Elina
and her dog Nara examine the area after the harvest.
Nara is trained to look for and show hamster burrows.
Elina takes precise records of every burrow found,
each with several entrances.
For Nara not to lose interest,
Elina throws the ball as a reward every time the dog has found
a hamster burrow.
It's Nara's favourite game.
Eight hamster burrows were found in the field in 2019,
and by 2020 there were 14.
They seem to feel at home in their tiny refuge.
I'm very happy that the hamsters obviously feel very comfortable
on this area, and it seems with these extensively farmed areas
we are not only helping farmers and insects, but also making
a contribution to the survival for the hamster.
Although the hamsters are doing really well here and their numbers
are increasing, overall the situation remains critical.
But with a little thought, the creation of many more retreat
areas will ensure other endangered species can survive permanently.
What if the species that you are trying to save spends its entire
existence completely out of the public gaze underwater?
Europe is home to no fewer than 546 species of freshwater fish,
and around 80% occur nowhere else on Earth.
Nearly half are under grave threat of extinction.
And it's no wonder.
Our rivers have become polluted with agricultural fertilisers,
industrial runoff, and have sometimes had their courses changed.
It's become increasingly hard for the fish that live in them,
creatures that can live nowhere else to survive.
Here in western Slovenia, the Vipava River is fed by brooks
which flow down from the stunning Karst plateaus.
In order to expand agricultural lands the larger meanders
of the river were cut and straightened,
changing its flow and destroying the natural habitat of many species.
A small fish which has lived here for thousands of years,
the lasca, was almost wiped out.
Dr Kaja Plibersek from the Slovenian Fisheries Institute
realised that something needed to be done.
South European nase or lasca has a slender body
with dark stripes.
For living, lasca needs very highly shadowed stretches of watercourse,
with dynamic watercourse, with a healthy proportion of
pools, runs and rivers.
It needs fish cover such as borders, undercut banks.
Tone Tavcar from the Fisheries Research Institute
explains that a breeding programme was started in order to repopulate
carefully protected stretches of the river.
We're very happy to find around ten individuals in
a very short section, even though we released 1,000 individuals,
or more than 1,000, in the whole watercourse.
To find them in a short section shows that the fish is surviving
all the natural conditions.
After intensive interventions in watercourses in the Vipava Valley,
with a little helping hand nature has returned.
Of course we'll continue with habitat protection and
public awareness activities for years to come.
This example shows that when we try to tame nature,
our actions can have far-reaching consequences.
By restoring and protecting the natural ecosystems of rivers,
biodiversity can still flourish.
We can work the land in ways that leaves enough space for animals
to thrive alongside us.
Three quarters of Europe's population now live in cities,
and as a result we have become more divorced from the natural world.
But some threatened species pushed almost to extinction appear to
have discovered that proximity to humans may not be
such a bad thing.
This is Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands.
Not exactly a city where you'd expect a lot of wildlife.
Amsterdam is home to 870,000 people and 180 different nationalities.
It's also home to 10,000 species of plants and animals,
300 of which are protected.
BELLS TOLL
One species that is often seen in the city in spring and summer
is the common swift.
They're from Africa, and like so many other Amsterdamers
with different origins, they found themselves a home here.
There are plenty of places for them to nest, like here in this church.
Thea and Geert are working as volunteers to provide the swifts
with a safe place to stay.
Swifts do everything in the air - eating, drinking.
Some even mate on the wing.
They spend many months of the year in southern Africa
and towards the end of April they return here to their old nest,
and then put their feet back on the ground for the first time
in nine months.
The common swifts are in Africa from August until April.
During this period, Geert and Thea check how many
birds have been breeding here.
A church tower is not an obvious location for a nest box.
There is a danger of the chicks being overwhelmed
by the bell chimes.
These young swifts' very first flight is 9,000km to Africa.
And to prepare for this arduous journey,
some of them exercise in their nest box.
Back on their way to Africa.
But next year they will return, and their numbers are increasing.
Amsterdam is showing the rest of Europe that when it comes to swifts,
if you build it, they will come.
BELL TOLLS
In the Swiss town of Bellinzona, conservationists have been trying
to save one of Europe's least understood creatures of the night,
the bat.
Highly nocturnal, bats are rarely seen,
which is why many of us might not realise that they could be
living right under our noses.
And we may have been having detrimental effects
on these small flying mammals without ever realising
or intending it.
Light pollution is one of the biggest problems facing
these enigmatic creatures.
Studies have shown that artificial lights shining on roosting sites
delays the night-time for bats, so they come out later and therefore
have less time to hunt.
The bell tower of this church is home to a breeding colony
of about 100 vesper bats.
Massimiliano Foglia is the local nature office.
Dark flight corridors are essential for these bats and proof that
a few simple changes can make coexistence possible.
However, most creatures that have learned to coexist
with humans in urbanised areas do so out of necessity, not choice.
For centuries, Rome, the Eternal City,
has been offering hospitality to visitors.
Many animals, too, have found refuge in the Italian capital, which,
thanks to its parks and its historic mansions, is one of the greenest
cities in Europe.
Professor Bruno Cennini, from the University of Rome,
has been studying the presence of animals in the city
all of his life.
The star of the Roman animal kingdom is the peregrine falcon.
This was because farmers had begun to use powerful pesticides
like DDT to get rid of insects.
The accumulation of DDT in the food chain badly
affected peregrine falcons.
Its use in Europe was banned in 1986.
In recent years the number of nesting pairs in Rome
has been increasing,
and now the peregrine falcon has taken over the city,
from the centre to the suburbs.
Its presence as a top predator in the food chain is useful in
the urban ecosystem as it helps to keep the number of pigeons and
newly arrived parrots under control.
In the winter, another resident of Rome has a defence
against the falcon.
Incredible murmurations of thousands of starlings appear over the city.
These spectacular dances in the sky are the starlings' strategy to avoid
falling victims of the falcon, which often wait for them
as they arrive.
Rome has one of the richest varieties of animal life of any
city in Europe, and shows how humans can live alongside nature.
As our climate warms, many of Europe's species
are feeling the heat...
..and having to react to uncertain times.
Human pressures have also combined to push polar species
to the brink of extinction, as their fragile habitat shrinks.
Climate change is having a more dramatic impact
on these animals than any other.
The ice caps are melting six times faster than they did in the 1990s.
And the creatures that have adapted over millions of years
to call the ice-bound regions of our planet home
are suffering greatly.
Sadly, it seems clear that some of them will not make it.
Significant work is being done to ensure that one animal,
the arctic fox, will not be amongst them.
This hardy fox is able to survive in temperatures as low as minus 40.
He shares his icy world with other cold-adapted species
like the reindeer, grouse and snowy owl.
But the arctic fox has long suffered at the hands of humans.
Its fur has always been highly prized
and over 100 years of extensive hunting
pushed it close to extinction.
The arctic fox was protected by law in 1930, but population levels
have always been low.
Their breeding success depends almost entirely on the availability
of their favourite prey - the lemming.
1963 was one of the great lemming years, but recently climate change
has severely affected population levels.
Mild weather and rain causes ice to form over the vegetation,
which the lemmings usually feed on.
Fewer lemmings means less prey for arctic foxes.
FOX YELPS
Warmer winters also means that the arctic fox's larger,
more aggressive cousin, the red fox,
could invade its territory and steal its food.
By 1998, it was estimated that there were only
about 50 arctic foxes left in the whole of Norway.
Norwegian scientists became seriously worried that the species
was on the verge of disappearing,
so they decided to act.
A captive breeding programme was started and animals were released
back into suitable mountain areas.
The results have been positive.
Today, there are about 1,000 arctic foxes in Norway and Sweden.
The hope is that there will soon be enough foxes able to survive
on their own in the Scandinavian mountains
and cope with the problems that beset them from all sides.
But many years remain before that goal is reached,
and in the meantime, the population is being monitored closely.
Whilst cold-adapted species struggle with a shrinking home
thanks to climate change, rising ocean temperatures
are also having a profound effect on some creatures.
Barcelona, north-east Spain.
Unusually, it's a city with a beach.
In July 2020, this scene was filmed and shared on Instagram.
The youngsters who posted it tagged the CRAM Foundation,
an organisation that works for the recovery of marine animals.
Amazingly, their experts found 77 eggs from a loggerhead sea turtle.
This was the first evidence of a sea turtle nesting
on the beaches of Barcelona.
The eggs were guarded day and night by local volunteers,
a good indicator of the passion people feel for the species.
In late August, researcher Elena Abella witnessed
the recently hatched turtles emerging from the nest.
Turtles are a good symbol for conservation.
Big, eye-catching and non-threatening.
But increasing maritime traffic,
plastic pollution and industrial fishing all pose
complex threats to this species.
Vet Albert Basolls treats rescued turtles.
The caiman came to the CRAM facilities on June 30th, 2020.
Although she'll never regain her flipper, on October 1st,
she did regain her freedom.
The arrival of sea turtles on the beaches of Barcelona
will become more common in the future, according
to CRAM's Lucia Garrido.
Turtles have been swimming the seas for millions of years.
But it's only in the last few decades
that their ancient breeding grounds have shifted so dramatically.
With the help of locals along this coastline,
the turtles have found new places to lay their eggs.
But humanity needs to realise that climate change
is disrupting our planet in ways never seen before.
And we must do everything we can to slow and even
stop its potentially devastating effects.
Restoring the natural balance, the biodiversity in a landscape,
can be done remarkably quickly and have very positive results.
Darkness cloaks Slieve Gullion in County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
Footsteps are crunching through the forest.
Dr Josh Twining, a researcher from Queen's University Belfast,
is hoping some of the traps he's laid
will contain a very elusive creature.
I'm looking for a small carnivore that's a member of the weasel family
related to the stoat, the otter and the badger.
I'm quite hopeful we'll find one today, but with wild animals,
you just never know.
As dawn breaks, waiting in a trap is the subject of Josh's research -
a pine marten. The animal has been temporarily anaesthetised.
Here we've got a young female under the age of two years old.
We tell this by the colouration and wear on her teeth.
Very sharp, white, and the canines completely unbroken.
So after anaesthetising her,
I'm replacing that collar with a new one.
Got a few ticks on her ears, which we'll be removing.
We'll check her weight and then hopefully she'll probably be coming
around at that point and we'll get her back in a trap.
With the tracking collar replaced, the pine marten
will be safely released.
Protected under law and with increased forestation,
they have recently been making a comeback.
Surprisingly, pine martens are playing a critical role
in the unlikely comeback of another endangered native animal.
Red squirrels have existed in Ireland for millennia.
They can jump more than two metres and play a key role
in maintaining woodland biodiversity.
The nuts and seeds they burrow into trees help
sustain forest dwellers.
Red squirrels were once plentiful on these isles,
but by the year 2000,
conservationists feared the species was doomed.
Their decline was down to an invader -
one which destroyed rather than benefitted the woodland.
In 1911, a wedding was taking place in the grand surroundings
of Castle Forbes in Ireland's County Longford.
One of the more unusual gifts
was a dozen North American grey squirrels
that were released on the lawn that day.
Within 100 years, this creature would populate
the island, leaving destruction and disease in its wake.
Red squirrel numbers fell sharply, but in the last 20 years,
this species has staged a major comeback,
while grey squirrels have declined.
And it's mostly down to the pine marten.
The recovery of the pine marten has really shown us
the exceptional benefits of native predator recovery.
Where the pine marten has recovered,
we've seen landscape-scale declines of the grey squirrel
and subsequent recovery of the red squirrel.
What puzzled researchers, however, was why the red squirrel flourished
in the presence of pine martens while the grey squirrel declined,
particularly when pine martens are known to prey on both.
It's down to two main reasons.
The first one is selective predation.
So the pine marten eats significantly more grey squirrels
and we see peaks of predation in spring and summer.
And so these are aligned with the squirrels' breeding season.
So what we think is happening here is when you have juvenile
grey squirrels with females taking care for them,
pine martens are raiding those dreys and taking both
juveniles and adult females, which leads to this disproportionate
effect on the population.
In a separate experiment, Josh discovered that there was another
reason why red squirrel numbers were flourishing.
We had 20 sites throughout Northern Ireland.
At each site we deployed a squirrel feeder
and we monitored it with a camera trap.
We then applied pine marten scent.
Where red squirrels occurred,
red squirrels would stop visiting the feeder for about 48 hours,
and when they did visit the feeder, they showed a much higher level
of vigilance, scanning for threats.
Grey squirrels, on the other hand, showed no behaviour response at all.
And in fact, at some sites, they visited and fed more.
So the reds have developed this fear response over sharing landscapes
with the pine marten for many millennia.
The continued recovery of the pine marten is under threat, though,
and that's the focus of Josh's latest work.
The greatest threat to their recovery is persecution
by humans, so conflict that occurs due to pine martens trying to
recover in these landscapes
to fulfil their biological requirements.
So, for example, finding food might lead
to them predating chickens.
So what we wanted to do was investigate the health
of pine marten populations and their behaviour in these sorts
of landscapes and see if we could work to mitigate conflicts
in the future and therefore continue to help their recovery,
because if we can continue pine marten recovery,
then with any luck we can secure a meaningful future
for our red squirrels in Ireland.
The red squirrel story is a unique example of a native predator helping
an indigenous creature fight back against an invasive species.
This important conservation work will hopefully ensure that both
the red squirrel and the pine marten have a viable future in Ireland.
Our planet provides us with free food, water and clean air.
And that's the problem.
We don't put a real value on it and we take it for granted.
Our entire way of life needs to be rethought.
We're facing urgent choices now.
And Covid-19 may just give us an opportunity to pause and rethink
everything, especially our place in the natural world.
From the perspective of the threatened animal,
we humans are the most dangerous pandemic of all.
But, unlike a virus, WE are capable of recognising the harm that we do
and of changing our behaviour.
It's surely in our own interest to do so,
to ensure the beauty and survival of our planet and its creatures
for generations to come.