Instant Genius - UK wildlife, with Dr Philip Wheeler

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

BBC’s Wild Isles, presented by Sir David Attenborough, is currently showing on Sunday evenings. The series showcases British wildlife, shining a light on some of the animals and plants we share our islands with. In this episode, we speak to Dr Philip Wheeler, a senior lecturer of ecology at the Open University. He is a consultant on Wild Isles, and here he tells us about some of the wildlife featured in the series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the managing editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. BBC's Wild Isles is currently showing on our screen on Sunday nights, shining a light on some of the wildlife of the UK. To find out even more about some of the incredible animals and plants featured in the program, we spoke to Dr Philip Wheeler. He's a senior lecturer of ecology and also an academic consultant on the series. Here, he tells us all about dormice, puffins, woodlands and how we can help UK nature. I'm Dr Phil Wheeler.

I'm a senior lecturer in ecology at the Open University. and I teach students about ecology and environmental science and do a variety of research on wildlife in the UK and in the tropics. But most recently, I've been working on trees and particularly on urban trees and the wildlife that lives around them. And is it right that you've been working on the new BBC series of Wild Isles as well? Yeah, that's right. So my role in that, along with my colleague Mandy Dyson, has been as an academic consultant to the series from the OU. We've got this long-running relationship association with the BBC, where we contribute to quite a lot of the factual programming. And so mine and Mandy's role in Wild Isles was to do that as academic consultants.

So to provide some input, a bit of fact-checking, identifying interesting things that we see when we're sort of reviewing the early stages of the rough cuts of the footage. So, I mean, it's currently showing on BBC One at the moment and it's showcasing British Wildlife. Now, British wildlife, I suppose you'd say, is under our noses, but it's not really had as much attention as some of the other environments. So have you any ideas why that might be? Well, exotic things, always have a different sort of interest. I think I suppose there's something very exciting about switching on

and seeing something that you've never seen before in a completely unfamiliar place. But I suppose as a kind of island off the coast of Europe, then we aren't necessarily as rich in wildlife, as many of the places. Obviously, most of the species in the world are around tropical regions and in the kind of northern areas that we have far fewer species anyway, and islands tend to have fewer species than the sort of big areas of the continents. And particularly where we are, of course, as well,

the last ice age covered most of the land in ice, and so we're still kind of in a phase of nature recolonising after that. So Britain and Ireland are relatively, poor Britain wildlife. And also then over the last decades and in fact centuries, then we've done quite a good job at reducing our wildlife, both the abundance and the variety of it. So there's certainly not enough or not as much to see in Britain and Ireland as there is in many other parts of the world. And that was one thing I know David Attenen touched on in the first episode where he said we're quite a nature poor country, were perhaps one of the

much nature poor countries in the world. I mean, obviously some of that is natural because, as you said, with the ice sheets retreating and we're an island nation, but is there anything we could do to maybe improve this to make us less nature poor? There's lots of things. I think we should kind of recognise that there is only one world and the world as it is, you know, somebody who studies the natural world and actually the fact that in some places there are more species and in other places there are fewer, that's actually quite a fascinating thing. It's an interesting aspect of the history of the world and the history of nature. And so I don't think we should be ashamed that we live in a place

that just because of the amazing history of our planet has naturally got fewer species. But we have a relatively high population density. The way that we've used and exploited the land over decades and centuries has meant that we've diminished the space for nature very considerably. And I think that the phrase that is used and is used in the series is nature depleted. So it's not just that there are,

are fewer species there. It's that of the species and the bits of the natural world that we're present, there's relatively little of it left. And so a big part of that is actually making more space for nature and identifying places where without too much conflict, we can just let nature come back a bit more and maybe sort of change the way that we go about our daily lives, the way that we use transport, but also the way that we manage the little bits of land that we have. So if if you have a garden, making it more wildlife-friendly, avoiding using pesticides or herbicides, and maybe not making it so sort of prim and proper and neat and tidy and letting a little bit of the wild come back into your garden. There are things that we can do as individuals, and then I think to encourage individuals and organizations that have got,

they're able to do things on bigger scale, so governments or businesses or whole industries to really, seriously think about what they can do to change what they do to let nature come back a bit more. And I think that includes putting pressure on our kind of elected representatives where it's appropriate to do so to really see nature as a priority alongside the many other priorities that politicians have to consider. I mean, there have been some success stories, haven't there? One of the scenes in the first episode was where you saw these white-tailed eagles and they were hunting the barnacle geese.

So it shows that these certain pockets, when you can reintroduce, juice animals, they can do really well. Yeah, and I think that's a positive that we can take from the recent history of nature conservation is that given the right circumstances, nature really comes back and comes roaring back. And so there have been some really brilliant examples of where nature has been restored or whereas it's restored itself. So the white-tailed eagles is a brilliant one and now there's moves to increase the spread of white-tailed eagles with a really introduction in the Isle of White and talk about bringing white-tailed eagles back to to other parts of Britain and to Ireland.

The Peregrine Falcon actually, which features in several of the episodes, which when I was young was a species that was really kind of rare. I really have a vivid memory of being driven out to the middle of the Peak District to see a peregrine nest. There was a whole setup, like a whole kind of porter cabin and it was an RSPB set up. to go and see a peregrine falcon nest, which back then in the kind of early 80s was quite a rarity because that species had really declined because of the effect of pesticides. And the changes in the law removing those pesticides, DDT and similar things.

So banning the use of those pesticides allowed for the recovery of peregrine falcons, sparrowhawk, in a way that those birds are now not uncommon. And it's a really good example of how scientists in that case recognize, an environmental problem fed through into legislation. And so the legislation was passed. And we're now seeing the benefits of having these spectacular birds back, you know, just very familiar to us. They're birds that I see every week.

Yeah, and that's happening quite rapidly, isn't it? Because if you think that's been a period of about 35, 40 years where that's happened, so we're not talking like hundreds of years. You make a change, you have to wait for centuries before you actually see anything. It's all happening really quite quickly. Yeah, that's right. There's certainly some changes where the, the thing that's detrimental to nature is removed and nature recovers and can recover very quickly.

Of course, there's other ecosystems which are much longer lived. So woodland ecosystems, as we've seen in the wild-out episode on woodlands, that the trees there, some of them can live seven, eight hundred more years. And so those ecosystems don't develop the full richness until they're tens or probably hundreds of years. old, so they don't become kind of really biodiversity rich. Having said that, in the development stages, as they are sort of developing the characteristics of nature, woodland, there's still an enormous amounts of biodiversity value. And that's a change that you can see almost instantly as you start to create or regenerate woodland. I did find that quite fascinating when it was talking about

woodlands and it says about the English oak trees. And just how important, I mean, everyone loves oak trees, everyone can identify, or most people can, but when you find out we've got more than other places in Europe, and you think we're such a small country yet. It's so important, you know, these oak trees we've got. Yeah, and there's a whole range of reasons for that around the fact that continental Europe has got quite a, quite a lot more different tree species. So there's fewer kind of individual oak trees, for example, but also the way the place is where these oak trees exist. Many of them were traditional royal hunting parks, for example, and so that there was a reason to conserve them as such. and the kind of big old trees were part of that landscape. Whereas in other places then kind of harvesting of wood

and sort of rotational planting and harvesting of woodland for timber has been much more active than it has been in some of these places. But it really just shows how there are some things that despite all of the fact that Britain is an island and nature depleted places, that there are still things of real international importance. The oak trees is one, and then, of course, the seabirds is another one

that features very strongly in the series and the kind of great importance that we have in our coastlines for those seabirds. And what is it about our location or our geology that makes us such an important place for seabirds? Yeah, that's interesting. So the geology of Britain is very interesting. And that's, that's, what one of the features of being a kind of small island off the coast of a continent is that our, well, this group of islands are made up of a whole mishmash of bits of geology that have come from different bits as, as the tectonic plates have moved around and the sort of landmasses have broken up.

And so, particularly when you get to the north of Scotland, there's a whole complicated stew of all sorts of stuff that has made the geology there. And the kind of fragments of that that make them any islands, many of them with steep rocky cliffs, is absolutely ideal seabird nesting habitat. And particularly those islands that are sufficiently remote that they don't have any predators or the cliffs that are sufficiently inaccessible, that predators can't get to them, mainly the mammalian predators and also the rodents. So there's sort of natural refuges from the challenges that ground nesting birds. face elsewhere. And so that's obviously why the seabirds nest there anyway and are adapted to

nest in such places. But why they do so well is because we have a lot of that landscape around our coastline. Kayak gets my flight, hotel and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, sky coin way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. bad travel advice, start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step? Not about changing who they are, just finding the right kind of support.

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So one of the quite iconic parts of the series was when you had these little puffins and they had their catch and they were desperately trying to get it back to their babies and they were being mobbed by these seagulls. And everyone was there rooting for these poor puffins. I was wondering how much were, I mean people moan about seagulls, but you know, girls have got their place. But you think how much of a nuisance are they, two other seabirds? any sort of threat or is it the amount of trouble they caused to puffins or sort of balances out?

Puffins and I think in the first episode there it was herring gulls and black-headed gulls. They're not strangers to each other. So these are contests that have been going on probably for as long as those species have been in existence. And then before then there would have been similar cases of a technical word is kleptoparasism. So cleptoparasitism, sorry. So stealing or parasites that steal. And we don't tend to like people who steal things, do we? But it's kind of anthropomorphising, changing, putting that kind of human slant on what's going on there.

These are just natural things that the gulls see the sand eels in the beak of a puffin as a resource that they can exploit. And they just try and do that in the way that all species try and exploit the resources around them. But that's not to say that there can't be problems there. and particularly where a species has declined a lot, for example, or whether a range of other factors have made a species vulnerable, then such natural processes can actually become problematic for the persistence of the species. So you can think about the kind of the natural environment, the ecological niche of a species as being a kind of big wide space,

and species can kind of sort of moot you along and that. But then if you start to put pressure on it, then you sort of remove the space that that species can effectively walk in until it ends up on a little tightrope. And if that tightrope is about precisely how much food it's able to bring back to its young, and then there's other animals that are coming in and nick in that food, then you can easily, just through natural processes, not the species off its tightrope. So, yeah, but at present, I don't think we think that gull, cleptoparasatism,

is really a big threat for puffins. The issues are really around the availability of food in the sea and particularly of those sand deals. I'm saying they're in quite a steep decline, aren't they, the sandials that the puffins feed on? Yeah, they are in many places. And as well as the geology helping to provide nesting sites, the other thing that makes our coastline very attractive is our position in the oceans, where the climate is relatively mild but still cool waters and nutrient-rich waters mean that we have very rich. marine life and very abundant marine life. So the abundance of fish in our seas is very high,

naturally is very high, but that has declined for a whole range of reasons, including changes in climate and to a degree overfishing. And that's the real threat to puffins and other marine birds. Now sandials aren't actually fished by people, are they? Is it just because of where their position is in the food chain that that then means that they get affected? There's a combination of things. They are fished by people actually and exploited for, so they're used for the production of fish oils for a whole variety of reasons and for sort of fish-based feed products for the animals.

So they are exploited by people, but also, yes, they underpin many other fish within ocean systems as well. So thinking now about another animal, it's maybe. quite rare is it's the hazel dormouse that we see. Now that's quite a surprise because it's quite rare. I mean, I've never seen when I'm sure most people who are listening to us have never seen a hazel dormouse. Yet in the UK we think of rodents has been quite ubiquitous. We see rats. We see mice around. So what is it about the hazel dormouse that makes it just so rare? That's a very good question. Actually, it's a good sort of illustration of how

what's happened to nature in Britain, which isn't that we've lost lots of rare species. because actually the Hazel Door Mouse historically would have been very widespread. It's one reason why in Alice in Wonderland, the Door Mouse features and everybody kind of knows what a door mouse is. Because obviously back then there weren't TV series, when that was written, there weren't TV series that would have been explaining to people what a door mouse is and that it hibernates and it looks all cute. The door mouse is there because everybody would have kind of got it.

They would have known. And actually what's happened to Nature in Britain has been that we've loved stuff that was common and familiar to everybody and widespread and abundant. And dormice live in woodlands and they feed on hazel nuts, hence the name, hazel dormouse and other fruits and berries. And they've really declined because of the loss of woodland and not just of woodland, but of woodland managed in a particular way that supports the growth of hazel. So hazel's a tree where if you chop it at the base, then it resprouts and grows very successful.

and makes good things like poles that you might use for fences or for making chairs or anything like that. And so was harvested in a way that kept it growing, but that also meant that those woodlands would be full of hazel making lots of nuts, and it would be sort of accessible to a little creature that likes to crawl around and climb up and down things. And with the loss of the management and the loss of the woodlands altogether, then Hazel Dormouse has declined. And so quite a lot of the story of what is now, well, it's not a success yet, but certainly there's been a reversal, I think, in the steep decline of dormouses,

has been an understanding of the importance of woodland management in conservation. So you can't just stick a fence around the woodland and let it go and not manage it and expect to keep everything that was there. So it does need some management. and then legislation that has required any development in an area where Dormouse is expected to account for that and to mitigate the impact of the negative impact that there might be of development. Now that's quite interesting where you say there that you have to sort of manage these woodlands as well to help the animals. So how is that related to sort of the hot wood at the moment is rewilding where we want to rewild the country

and these are all the ways we can do it, put it back to how it was historically. But do we always need that degree of management there? so we can make it as species rich as possible. That's a really good question. And it's not an easy question to answer, actually, because I suppose the answer is that it depends. There's no kind of one size fits all. And in truth, what we need to know is we need to know what we're doing

and to understand what we're doing. And there needs to be a purpose. So there is, I think, a place for just letting things go in some places. But that wouldn't mean just letting nature run its course out of some sort of ideology, but recognising that in this particular place, that's the appropriate thing to do. You might, in other places, realise that if one were to do that, then you would lose some biodiversity that you thought was important. So Dormice might be an example of that. And of course, before people had fundamentally changed the entire landscape

of Britain and Ireland, there would have been sufficient habitat to have, in other, bits that would have supported these species on their own, but because we're talking about very small areas, then actually there will be places where we do need to intervene to maintain the mix of habitats, the diversity of habitats to support species that exist there. Because if we did just leave them, then in some instances, many instances, then we might lose things that we would otherwise value. So we talked there a little bit more about management. Now, this series, We concentrate quite a lot on the wildlife that we see.

But do you think there could be more focus on some of the communities and people who are working to look after these animals and these habitats? Well, I suppose the series is a wildlife series. So the wildlife needs to be front and centre in that. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a need and an interest to sort of expose, yeah, to see the enormous amount of work that is being done to support wildlife. And I think the involvement of the charities, WWF and RSPB and National Trust in this series is a real plus because they're really the specialists at working with people to carry out conservation. So I think that's very important.

And there's an opportunity that I hope many people will engage with through this series to really get actively involved in nature conservation from the very small things like letting bits of your garden go a bit more nature friendly to really. really maybe sort of doing hands-on work. And certainly from my point of view, as somebody who teaches people about nature and the natural environment, I hope many people will be inspired to come and study and become the next generation of conservation scientists and help to tackle some of these problems. I think the other thing that's very important to acknowledge and to consider isn't just how people can get involved, but that people are part of nature. And so a lot of what we need to deal with, not necessarily to deal with, but what we need to consider in nature conservation, especially an island that is heavily populated and where every bit of the land

means something to somebody is how we work with people who are on the land and working the land to maintain their interests and their livelihoods whilst getting benefits for conservation. And that's kind of a challenging thing to do. It's why this is actually recovering wildlife in Britain and Ireland is difficult. It's because we can't just ignore what people think. And there are many people who've got different interests in the land and different interests in nature that we really need to work with and take account of. And did you have a favourite species or imagery that we saw in the whole series?

So many, actually. As a scientist, and you sort of think, well, I'm supposed to be interested in the really nerdy stuff, the kind of really intricate details. And there's brilliant stuff in that. So there's a fantastic, well, a whole bunch of sequences that are about the intricacies, particularly of the ecology of invertebrates of the insects and stuff. So the large blue butterfly is one that's a particular favourite and absolutely crazy science fiction styles. story that I won't give any spoilers away for because really you you have to see it to believe it. I had read about that over many years how their life cycle works and you think, okay, fine, this is interesting but really. And seeing it actually on screen is just wild. But as well as the nerdy small stuff, then I also really love the big spectacular things. and the kind of stuff that gives you goosebumps watching it.

The orcas in Shetland, and particularly the Golden Eagles, which is a bird that I've seen fairly often in the uplands, but the footage of Golden Eagles. And actually my favourite bit of that was the Golden Eagles nesting in the Caledonian Pine woods and the sort of fantastic drone flights through the forest, and then these eagles sort of flying up and landing on the nest as if they don't weigh anything and yeah.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was a psychologist, Dr Philip Wheeler, who's a consultant on the current series of Wild Isles showing now on BBC One. The latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy and store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

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