We are an island nation,
surrounded by seas and buffeted by winds.
With weather and seasons like nowhere else on earth.
Unpredictable, always changing,
defining the nature of our extraordinary land...
..and giving us The Great British Year.
The sun is out. The days are long.
Temperatures are rising.
The fine weather has brought us out to the beach, into gardens
and into the countryside.
BIRDSONG
Swallows have arrived.
The air is filled with the sound of buzzing bees.
Life seems carefree.
Soon the sun will reach its highest point in the year.
It's a critical time when every living thing must make
the most of the sunshine and gather its energy.
Over the next three months,
the countryside will be heading towards a glorious harvest.
But there are two sides to this season.
If the wildlife doesn't get it right, making it through
the dark months beyond will be a very tough challenge indeed.
This is when their future will be decided.
It's summertime.
After the cold of the New Year,
spring brought the promise of plenty and now summer must deliver.
At an old aerodrome in Essex,
this year's youngsters are growing up fast...
..playing and learning to fend for themselves.
This young red partridge bathes in the dust to rid itself of parasites.
Every playful jump strengthens muscles and improves agility.
That's going to be important over the next few months...
..because hunters have young, too.
Some are already watching from the tree above the aerodrome.
Young little owls.
Luckily for baby rabbits, they are barely bigger than a pint glass.
They left the nest a few weeks ago
and now they are the owl equivalent of teenagers.
But they can't rely on parents for hand-outs any more.
They need to learn to hunt and now, while the going is good.
They may look fierce
but they will never be powerful enough to grab a rabbit.
When fully grown, they might just bother the local vole population
but for now, these youngsters have their sights on more modest targets.
Every success means getting stronger, fitter and faster.
Small steps maybe but each one improves their chances
of long-term survival.
At the height of spring, Britain's birds were singing
their hearts out, trying to claim territory and woo a mate.
BIRDS WARBLE
But times have changed.
All their energy must now be directed
into caring for their young.
Slowly, almost unnoticed, the singers fall silent...
..until the sound of spring is replaced by the sound of summer.
INSECTS CHIRP
The gentle murmur of buzzing insects.
They have been steadily building in numbers for the last few months
and now it's warmer, this is the time to take to the air.
Flying burns 200 times as much energy as resting...
..so they need plenty of high-octane fuel - pollen and nectar.
Each flower head becomes a tiny fuel station
where insects wait to fill up.
Hoverflies have extraordinary flexible wings,
twisting through 45 degrees 300 times a second.
It gives them the agility to negotiate
the tightly-packed hedgerows and gardens.
But even they are outmanoeuvred by the biggest
and fastest flying insect in our land.
Dragonflies.
They are all fast, agile hunters with romantic
names like damsels, chasers, skimmers, darters and hawkers.
High summer is time to find a mate.
Ponds, lakes and rivers resound
with the clashing wings of fighting males.
Male damselflies clasp their partners
as they lay eggs to stop other males getting in on the act.
Emperor dragonflies, the largest of all, wait in the margins.
The females then head to open water to lay eggs.
Whilst she is focused on creating new life, her own life is in danger.
A hobby.
This is the emperor dragonfly's nemesis.
Hobbies are small falcons from Africa.
After flying several thousand miles,
they arrive at the height of the dragonfly season.
The hunting technique depends on diving to build enough speed
to intercept the flight path of the dragonfly.
They snatch them out of the air with their talons...
..devouring their victims while still on the wing.
If a dragonfly is lucky enough to spot its attacker,
it has a split second to take evasive action.
Even if it means ditching into the water.
For these fast-flying insects,
summer is a deadly mix of hunting or being hunted.
BELL RINGS
It's the 1st of July.
At Hagley in Worcestershire, the field of play is being
carefully prepared for that most eccentric of summer activities.
SQUEAKING
Passion to those that play it
and utterly incomprehensible to most that don't.
Groundsmen around the country have their work cut out
keeping the pitch as smooth as a billiard table.
Because now the grass is growing.
And it's not just the grass.
Across the land, every shrub, flower and tree
is busy turning sunlight into luscious, luxuriant growth.
In fact, plants grow ten times faster
in July than they do in February.
The greening of the land is mirrored in our seas.
Tiny marine plants bloom in such huge numbers
that the effect can be seen from space.
This in turn creates a blooming of animal plankton.
The first harvest of the summer.
Visitors flock to our sunlit shallow waters, eager to share the feast.
Basking sharks.
One of the largest fish in the world,
they can reach 12 metres in length.
They follow the daily vertical migration of plankton
up and down in the water column.
At this time of year,
they are drawn up to the surface after their prey...
..where we are sometimes lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them.
By the middle of July,
a whole new cast of creatures has come to feast on our summer bounty.
On the heathlands in Arne in south Dorset
is one of the most unusual and best camouflaged birds in the world.
A nightjar.
By day it sits motionless and quiet.
Even if you stood next to one, you would have no idea it was there.
But what it gets up to at night is the stuff of legend.
The setting sun heralds a call that sounds barely natural.
NIGHTJAR CHIRRS
For centuries it inspired tales of the supernatural.
In the past, seeing the culprit in the pitch black
would have been impossible.
Now, using a newly designed thermal imaging camera,
we are able to see the nightjar's nocturnal antics
for the very first time.
At dusk, the male stakes his claim to his patch of heathland
by chirring...
..at over 13 notes per second. NIGHTJAR CHIRRS
He has timed his arrival from Africa
to coincide perfectly with the summer boom in flying insects.
The heather is alive with beetles and moths.
This is the first time we've been able to watch them
hunting in the pitch dark, ambushing their prey.
With plenty of food and his own territory,
now all he needs is to attract a mate.
The courtship goes off with a bang. Literally.
HE CHIRRS AND CLICKS
As the male flies, he repeatedly cracks his wings together.
CLICKING
If the female is interested, she joins him in flight over the heath.
After travelling thousands of miles to this small patch of Dorset,
these two nightjars have found each other.
CLICKING AND CHURRING
The male will find a nesting site,
usually a patch of ground hidden in the heather.
There they will take turns between feeding and incubating their eggs.
Midsummer nights are prime hunting time
for Britain's best-loved mammal.
SNIFFING
A hedgehog's spines may protect it from enemies
but they aren't so good at protecting it from the cold.
That's why they like a balmy night to visit a garden full of worms.
But when he catches a whiff of something on the breeze...
..a female on heat, all thoughts of food are now gone.
He just can't help himself.
There's not much point looking for her.
His eyesight is hopeless.
He will have to sniff her out instead.
Success. There she is.
SNIFFING
But his challenges are only beginning.
Female hedgehogs don't give up their virtue easily.
Other males are likely to be hot on her trail, too.
So he is going to have to work hard and fast.
SNIFFING
The male seems to be going quite literally round in circles.
But that's all part of the ritual.
She will give him a cold and very prickly shoulder to test him out.
The more persistent he is, the tougher
and therefore better a partner he is likely to be.
Alas, it looks like tonight is not his lucky night.
If and when he does get lucky, we will certainly hear about it.
GRUNTING
For most of us,
the trials of our British wildlife pass us by unnoticed.
For us, summer is playtime.
Right now is the best chance for a good spell of fair weather.
It's the time we hold fetes,
fairs and festivals up and down the country.
Most of us have our fingers crossed that the fine weather will last.
..Northern Ireland definitely getting the best of the day's sunshine.
Highs of 22, lows of 19. So make sure...
Sunshine will break through and we will see some sunny spells.
All parts of the UK...
The weather forecast becomes a national obsession...
..because so much of what we do in the summer depends on good weather.
One thing you can't do in bad weather is fly a balloon...
..as the hundreds of pilots at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta
know only too well.
On the same day, under a footpath on the other side of the city,
a colony of ants has also been waiting for the right weather.
They are about to mate and they are going to do it in the air.
This is flying ant day.
Ants all over the city have forecast this moment.
It is the only time they will ever fly.
The latest study shows that the ants prefer to fly
between 4pm and 6pm in the afternoon.
The balloonist needs a gentle breeze and cool temperatures.
Taking off en masse is simply good fun.
For the ants, mass ascent is important
to overwhelm insect-eating birds in the sky above.
No matter what the forecast is for the August bank holiday,
it seems everyone hits the roads and heads for the coast.
Unfortunately, the warmest time of our year can also be the wettest.
The key ingredients for a storm are moisture and warm air.
In summer, on a little island surrounded by sea, we have both.
THUNDERCLAP
Whilst we struggle to keep smiling, stuck on a wet motorway...
..a hungry army is mobilising.
# The weather is frightening
# The thunder and lightning
# Seem to be having their way
# But as far as I'm concerned
# It's a lovely day... #
Snails hate a dry summer.
When it rains though, gardeners beware.
# As far as I'm concerned it's a lovely day
# And everything's OK
# Isn't this a lovely day to be caught in the rain? #
The tidy gardener suffers more than the messy one.
With no dead or decaying leaves lying around,
the snails head for our vegetables instead.
# I can see the sun up high
# Though we're caught in the storm
# I can see where you and I could be cosy and warm
# Let the rain pitter-patter
# Well it really doesn't matter
# If the skies are grey
# As long as I can be with you it's a lovely day. #
Summer rain is just what the snails need.
But then they have their own house to shelter in when it gets too much.
For many other small animals, rain can be devastating.
One of Britain's strangest
and most deadly hunters never comes out in the rain.
We will only spot it when the sun is shining,
always laying its ambush on the warmer south side of the pond.
Raft spiders - Europe's biggest.
She doesn't spin a web but uses the surface tension
of the water as both trap and trigger to catch her food.
With her front legs resting on the surface
and her back legs on the reeds, she waits.
She senses every ripple and can tell
when it is being created by a raindrop or by an insect prey.
Pond-skaters are even faster than she is.
But with the glut of summer insects, her chance is sure to come.
A fly crash-lands and is held fast by the water's surface film.
By detecting the direction of the ripples
and the intervals between them,
the spider can pinpoint its exact position.
If there is ever a summer heat wave,
we can cool off
with a paddle or a quick dip.
# We'll sing in the sunshine Sing in the sunshine
# We'll laugh every day Laugh every day
# We'll sing in the sunshine... #
For our wildlife, it isn't always that easy.
# Sing in the sunshine. #
On this heathland, there are millions of wood ants.
In late summer, each colony has countless young to feed
so hunting parties scour the ground for prey
or carrion to bring back to the nest.
They deliberately construct their nest in the open to catch the sun.
But today is the hottest day of the year.
As the sun climbs,
the temperatures in the nest begin to rise, too.
It becomes dangerously hot.
But the ants have a solution.
They open up ventilation holes in the surface of the nest,
allowing cool air in and warm air out.
The sun's effects are also felt at sea, even on the sea floor.
In the shallow water off Cornwall, there is a secret world.
Beds of hard, pink algae called maerle bask in the sun.
Living amongst the maerle is a sea urchin
with exactly the same problem as a fair-skinned sunbather.
It needs protection from the sun's rays.
So it covers-up.
It uses its sticky feet to pick up small pieces of the maerle
and carefully covers itself.
Within an hour or so,
it has constructed its very own bright pink sunscreen.
By mid-August, the countryside is starting to look a bit weary.
Most flowers have gone over and the vivid greens are starting to fade.
But there is time for one last burst of colour.
Heathlands are transformed
as every heather plant produces thousands of individual flowers...
..that combined, smother the moors with pink and purple.
The heather is the last plant to flower.
As the sun's power fades,
most of Britain's wild plants have started to ripen and set seed.
The world is turning from green to yellow.
Now it's our chance to harvest the sun.
The window of opportunity can be brief. Farmers must act quickly.
The patchwork quilt of our countryside changes
as farmers race against the elements.
Long experience of so many fickle British summers has taught them
to make hay while the sun shines...
..even if that means working through the night.
In the hedges surrounding the harvested fields,
the wild harvest is underway.
As summer starts to fade, plants divert as much energy as possible
into dispersing their seeds before the spring.
They can't move so they get help from creatures that can.
They encase their seeds in something that is tasty and easy to see.
They've timed this incentive perfectly,
attracting birds looking to feed up for the lean months ahead.
Close to the city of Nottingham
is a river bank lined with bushes of blackberry and elderberry.
The fruit are ripe...
but not all will end up attracting a hungry bird.
Gudgeon, roach and perch completely ignore them...
..but one fish takes notice.
Chub.
They will eat just about anything they can get in their mouths.
It's thanks to these plump, unfussy fish that the word "chubby"
has been used in this country for around 500 years.
The chub may not disperse the seeds
but we can't blame them for eating the fruit.
Above the surface, many of us are doing exactly the same thing.
Blackberry picking marks the end of summer.
Pick enough and you can fill the freezer with enough pies,
puddings and preserves to last a winter.
If the kids can wait that long.
The last harvest of the British summer
is for some the most anticipated.
The tranquillity of this Hereford orchard
is about to be shaken to its very core.
ENGINE NOISE AND LOUD RUSTLING
It's not a very subtle way of picking apples and pears
but it does the trick.
And fast.
Some may be bruised but that's fine.
They aren't for eating.
They are destined to make a drink that is celebrated in many parts.
A drink that we make 600 million litres of every year
and drink more of than any other country.
Cider.
Summer is waning,
heralded by a new natural wonder
as early morning dew collects on spiders' silken webs.
The most obvious webs are built by orb-weavers
as they feast on the last of the summer insect boom.
This is a pretty good time to be a spider.
But it's the spiders we don't notice that are about
to leave their spectacular mark on the British summer.
An acre of meadow may be home to two million tiny money spiders.
Before they mate, most begin to climb as high as they can.
With so many brothers and sisters nearby,
the best chance to avoid inbreeding is to put as much distance
as possible between themselves and their siblings.
Once at the top, they anchor themselves with a safety line.
Then they spin a second line that streams into the air.
If conditions are right, the second ballooning line
catches the wind and they lift off in countless numbers.
Once they cut themselves free of their safety lines...
..all that is left is gossamer.
A late summer spectacle that captures the golden light
and captures the imagination.
It's September. Boom time is over.
The rush to feed, to grow, has come to an end.
Everyone has their own idea of what signals the end of summer
but few things symbolise it better than the swallows leaving.
They are just one of many visitors that have
shared our spectacular summer bounty.
Their chicks have been fattened on the glut of insects...
..and on warm summer evenings, they've quenched their thirst
and washed in our cool, clear rivers.
This is a visitor that, like the hobby and the nightjar,
has flown thousands of miles,
risking its life to be a part of the British summer.
But as the summer sun fades, they know that it is time to go.
As they leave, there is a gentle shift in the country.
For the animals left behind, there may be less competition
but tough times lie ahead.
Nature needs to get ready.
Autumn is coming.
Wildlife film-making needs technical knowledge,
years of experience, a lot of specialist equipment,
patience and of course, a bit of luck.
In any wildlife series, it's the animals that are the stars.
But The Great British Year had an extra challenge -
to evoke the dynamic nature of the British landscape.
This is where time-lapse photography comes into its own -
using digital stills cameras that record image after image
that are then stitched together to provide a unique perspective
of the passage of time.
The crew wanted to showcase the most dramatic seasonal changes
and the most spectacular weather not just in one location
but across the whole country.
The problem is we simply couldn't be everywhere at once.
To our surprise,
scattered across Britain were dozens of talented enthusiasts,
already filming time-lapses off their own bat.
Lots of them.
Social media really revolutionised this for us,
because we could find this network of people in the first place.
When we found them, we could contact them,
we could find out what they're doing on a daily basis,
we can look at clips of what they're shooting,
enabling us to keep in contact with this huge network of people.
As word spread online, the network grew,
and more and more clips started coming in.
These guys are filming on their local patch -
they know it, they know the best areas to film,
they know where to get the best of the light.
It's their kit, so they're used to it.
There's a lot of trial and error,
but the results have been astonishing.
Stills photographer Tom Walker had barely filmed time-lapses
before the project started.
But he quickly became something of an expert
at capturing the worst of the British weather.
I've been a bit of a storm chaser, over the past few months.
If you're watching a storm happening,
then you've missed it, cos it happens so fast
and it comes over so quick.
You've got to read the landscape,
read where the sky is going to end up, get to the place,
frame it up, and hope it comes - if it comes, you've got it.
Meanwhile, another cameraman was busy
tackling the unpredictable harvest.
I really like doing the human-related stuff.
When I was doing the harvest,
you can see it happening in front of you.
And my mum will laugh at this,
but it's a bit like hoovering - not that I do that much of it.
When you Hoover a really dirty carpet
and you leave a white line in it,
it's kind of, like, a sense of achievement.
You've got a field that starts off with chest-high corn or something,
and then it all completely disappears by the end of it.
The night harvest stuff was quite tricky -
there's only so many fields they needed to harvest,
and if the weather's good,
they try and do as much as possible during the day.
So I had to really nail that.
I think it worked, in the end - or I hope it worked.
Up to now, we'd been using social media
to mobilise the time-lapse teams.
But as word of the project spread,
the wildlife-watching public also got involved.
It sort of grew exponentially, it just went "boom!"
At one point,
it felt like every British natural history enthusiast in the country
was part of our team and helping us out.
We had thousands of people,
and they are amateurs, they're experts,
they're bird watchers, they're artists,
some of them are scientists, photographers,
stills photographers...
And it's this huge network of people with their eyes on the ground
and they know what's going on.
Stories started coming in that the team hadn't even considered,
critically tipping us off about where and when.
For one episode, it was the moulting seals in Cornwall,
and later in the year,
kites following the ploughs in Oxfordshire.
Jack Perks got in touch
about his own personal wildlife passion.
I describe myself really as a fish twitcher.
Certain fish species will excite me a little bit too much.
I mean, I can start to ID them just by looking at their backs -
you get a lot of similar species,
and as long as I get a fairly good look,
I can pretty much pinpoint it
out of the 45 freshwater fish that we have in the UK.
His knowledge of local rivers
led us to one of the stranger stories in the series -
fish gorging on late summer berries.
It's kind of something a lot of fishermen know that,
in autumn, a lot of fish will wait under the bushes
for elderberries and blackberries to fall into the water,
and these fish will take them.
I thought, "OK, this could make a nice piece for a seasonal series."
On the back of some early successes,
the team were ready to attempt the most complex shots,
filmed by a small group of specialists
who take time-lapse photography to the highest level.
The favourite shots I like to do
are shots that haven't been done before -
sort of, brand-new ground,
and see what I can do with the camera.
Chad's challenge was to evoke the dramatic beauty
of an ancient oak tree as it changed throughout the year.
To achieve this,
he would need to visit the tree on several occasions,
each time ensuring the camera's movement
was repeated precisely.
We couldn't resist filming the whole operation.
In time-lapse, of course.
What you have here, basically,
is a crane, time-lapsing the oak tree.
We have a track,
time-lapsing us time-lapsing the oak tree.
And just for fun, we have here another track,
time-lapsing the time-lapse
which is time-lapsing us time-lapsing the oak tree,
if that makes sense!
Time-lapse revealed a side of Britain that we rarely see.
What none of the team expected to see
was a phenomenon usually found in the high Arctic.
My name's Barry Stewart.
I'm a joiner to trade, but my passion is really time-lapse photography.
I usually come here to take some star time-lapses -
it's a lovely building to have as a foreground.
So one particular night, I came out. It was a lovely, clear, starry night.
On the way down, I could see some faint lights in the sky.
I wasn't sure what it was at first.
I just set my camera up and took a random exposure
and it came out bright green.
So I thought, "Amazing! This is an unpredicted aurora."
And then, all of a sudden, it was like an explosion of colour.
The aurora was just dancing, really high overhead,
and like electric currents and pulses.
It was just fantastic to see.
It's one of the best time-lapses I've took.
And you do get really good auroras here.
You don't have to go to Norway, you can just come to Wick.
Whether it was time-lapse photographers
or naturalists on the internet,
the Great British public were essential
to the making of The Great British Year.
To get a free copy of this poster about British seasons,
call 0845 271 0017.
Or go to bbc.co.uk/greatbritishyear.
Follow the links to the Open University
and take part in our seasonal wildlife census.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd