Tonight's Nature of Britain with Alan Titchmarsh is about all the wildlife living in Britain in places that you wouldn't expect anything to be. Sounds like a good one, there's probably plenty of wildlife that we don't even realise is there and I'm looking forward to finding out about it.

It's on at 9pm on BBC1 and lasts for an hour. The website is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/natureofbritain of you want to take a look.

Damn, missed it by 45 minutes! I would have liked to have seen it, I'm sure they will repeat it at somepoint though.

Unfortunately, I only managed to catch the end of the programme.

I did however catch the fascinating programme that followed it on BBC4: The Nature of Britain: A User's Guide, which looked at the history and relevant success/failure of wildlife conservation in the UK.

It started by looking at how wildlife was greatly impacted after the war by government pressure on farmers to produce more food and the impact of mechanisation. This lead to larger farms being created and hedgerows being destroyed to make way for the new 'more efficient' machinery and methods. Farmers were also encouraged to make liberal use of the latest pesticides in another attempt to become more efficient. Then when the UK joined the EU, even more pressure was put on farmers (via massive subsidies) to tear up the remaining hedgerows to grow food that nobody actually wanted (hence the famous food mountains).

The programme then looked at conservation attempts over the last 50 years and investigated why these had invariably failed. It concluded that conservation tended to fall into one of two schools of thought. Either they were single-species oriented (e.g. the re-introduction of the red kite) and failed because they created a mono-culture whereby the dominent species exhausted the food supply then quickly died off itself. Or conservation 'islands' were created, whereby the area was bio-diverse but it was surrounded by a hostile environment (e.g. a large arrable farm using massive amounts of pesticides). This lead to the island becoming a prison with the wildlife unable to expand, which in turn lead to a decline. Also there was very little cooperation between the various conservation groups, so there was no chance of integrated solutions.

Finally, the programme investigated the latest thinking whereby whole landscapes are being devoted to conservation with farmers, local conservation groups and local people being encouraged to get involved. Where this is currently working the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The overall feeling I got from the programme was that although we have spent many years getting it 'wrong', there are some really good conservation thinkers out there who are at last beginning to be heard. It also highlighted the important role that local communities have to play in ensuring that wildlife habitats are created, restored and managed for the enjoyment of all and for the benefit of our struggling wildlife.

I don't know if the programme will be repeated but if it is it's definitely one to catch.

Repeated on Sunday afternoon/early evening BBC2 - December 9th

Timberwolf, sounds a very interesting program. I don't spend much time on BB4, but maybe I should give it more of a chance.
Thanks for the repeat time too greypawn.

It's good to know that something is being done to change the way we go about conservation. It has taken a long time to realise where we are going wrong, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and the two methods you describe to have failed in the past must have been quite difficult to understand what was going wrong. I think the main reason for all the failed attempts was as you pointed out the groups never seemed to work together, so they always made it much harder for themselves.