Wild Isles: The book of the BBC TV series presented by David Attenborough

Product Information

Wild Isles is a major new five-part natural history series from Silverback Films that aims to do for the wildlife of Britain and Ireland what the ‘Planet’ series have done for the wildlife of the world. As Cocker aptly points out: man and women are part of nature and thinking otherwise is the root of our planet's problem. It is a stunning portrait of breeding orcas, golden eagles, foxes and dormice; woodlands, meadows and rivers.

Among the 70-odd contributions from 18th Century to current writing, I was particularly struck by those of Gilbert White, Kathleen Jamie, Isabella Tree, Anna Adams, Thomas Hardy, Jay Griffiths, Chris Packham, Kenneth Grahame, Sara Maitland, John Fowles, Roger Deakin, Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell, Victoria Whitworth, E. Our aim is to meet the Science Based Targets (SBTs), set in October 2021, to cut our GHG emissions to Net Zero and which are in line with staying below the threshold of 1. Silverback Films was commissioned by the BBC to create the series, with co-production and part funding from the RSPB, World Wide Fund for Nature and Open University. To accompany the activity on-air, the BBC has worked in partnership with multiple external organisations, including Art Fund, Girlguiding, the National Trust, RHS, Scouts and The Wildlife Trusts, who have created real world opportunities, activities and events for audiences to directly experience nature. Wild Isles is a celebration of the wildlife found on a relatively modest collection of islands positioned at a latitude so northerly to be unattractive to many animals and plants.

There is also a strong conservation message that runs through the series and that is needed more than ever now as our natural environment continues to be under threat. Ever since I worked on the original Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet series, I have always wanted to cover the British Isles and our natural history with a similarly ambitious and epic approach.

A collection of the finest British and Irish nature writing, organised along 14 themes (birds, four seasons, swimming, islands and coastlines. Of course there were some excerpts that I did not enjoy, mostly due to the writing style (and the odd one that was too high brow or just not interesting).On the west coast, abundant food and a mild climate attract enormous flocks of barnacle geese which travel to Islay to feed on the lush grass, but they must watch out for white-tailed eagles that have learnt to hunt them down. Attenborough explains that “our seas are among the richest in Europe”, but who can hear that without thinking of the sewage flowing into those seas, again and again, dumped by UK water companies that in turn blame the government for its inaction? Thermal cameras were used to capture glowing images of the spadix when it was heating up to lure in the flies.