Amazing wildlife images from BBC's Scotland The New Wild

“We didn’t know about the bog raft spider before we did this series,” raves Gill. “We like to challenge ourselves and find new things, and this idea came through a spider expert who used to work for the RSPB in the Cairngorms, and now is one of the few people in the world who knows this bog raft spider. 

“We asked, ‘What do you think is something that nobody has told the story about that deserves its moment in the spotlight?’ He said – ‘Have you heard of the bog raft spider?’” 

Scotland The New Wild is a remarkable attempt by wildlife production company Maramedia to capture Scotland’s nature in a state of flux and change, to document the wonders and positive changes, as well as the worrying signs as climate-change and biodiversity loss hits. 

While it features startling footage of familiar iconic species – grey seal pups struggling to survive on the Monach isles, stags fighting, urban foxes, mountain hairs and squirrels swirling around a tree in bluebell woods – most striking of all are the tales it tells of less familiar creatures. 

Among these is the courtship of the dotterel, a wading bird which breeds on the plateaux of Scotland’s highest mountains, and which is notable in being a species in which the female is more colourful than the male. It’s she that does the overt courtship display. Dotterel males incubate the eggs, while the females go off and breed again. 

“The species has only been filmed once before in the UK and never in this sort of detail,” says Gill. 

“We thought that filming the courtship would be the most difficult thing because when that happens varies from year to year and depends on access to the hills in terms of snow. 

“We had to get up there with our equipment and find the birds. But we got lucky. And nailed the courtship perfectly. And in my head, I thought filming chicks later on should be easier. But it turned out to be the opposite.”

Also marvellous amongst Scotland The New Wild’s insights is footage of wood ants living in the treetops of the great wood of Caledon. “They farm aphids,” raves Savery. 

“They basically milk the aphids for the honeydew which they live on. That’s such a mad thing to be going on at the top of pine trees.” 

The series was filmed over two years, in a hectic schedule of shoots, many of them crammed into the spring and summer months when nature goes into a full action bloom of rebirth and activity. 

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Savery describes orchestrating this as “the ultimate jigsaw”, and one which began with a long wishlist of species, landscapes and wildlife events. 

The team called the three-part series The New Wild from the start, even when it was just a glimmer of a pitch, a working title. 

“We didn’t want it to be a static look at Scotland’s wildlife,” says Savery, “because it’s changing all the time. 

“We wanted to show the amazing things happening as well as the really worrying things.” 

For Gill, the programme’s aim is to take stock of “where things are at the moment in Scotland and where they might go”, not just in terms of species and landscape, but also the human factor, our “relationship with wildlife”. 

The series is not one that focuses simply on the most remote wild, the Highlands or the islands. 

It also has an episode on the lowlands, including species that had never before been filmed to such an extent in Scotland – from city water voles to bearded tits living off reed seeds in the Carse of Gowrie. 

Fergus Gill started photographing nature as a child, growing up in Perthshire, the son of NatureScot photographer Lorne Gill. 
Twice, as a youngster, he won junior wildlife photographer of the year, on both occasions with photographs taken from his own back garden. 

Fergus Gill with his father, Lorne Gill

“My dad always encouraged me to try to take photographs,” he says. 

“I was interested in animals, and I didn’t really know what I was seeing, so I would try to take photographs of them and come back and look in a book to see what it was. 

“That was the way my mind worked. I like to absorb information and find out more about things. Photography was a really fun way to do that. Back then it was on film and slide so you would have to wait quite a long time. 

“Digital photography changed all that.” 

Gill spent his Saturdays photographing animals and his Sundays playing football. His father, for the most part, photographed landscapes and plants, and nurtured in him an appreciation of habitat, ecosystem and “the interconnectivity of nature”.   

“When,” Gill says, “you’re seven years old you only tend to think of species in individual terms but he was thinking more about the landscape as a whole.” 

It takes a particularly hardy type to film nature like this – someone who can take all weathers and endure extremes. For Scotland The New Wild, for instance, Gill made the trip out to the Monach Isles whose white sand beaches host the largest breeding colony of grey seals in Europe.  

The first challenge was reaching the island – for it has no infrastructure, no pier, and the route in and out is surrounded by rocky skerries under the water.  “Just getting there,” he says, “is like an absolute epic. You’re taking all your drinking water, your generator, emergency food. In the end, we were there for nearly three weeks and the weather was so poor most of the time it would have been impossible to get off the island.” 

Gill already knew what it was like to work in extremes. For a previous Maramedia series, Stormborn, he endured freezing temperatures and high winds to film those tenacious species living on the remote northern edges of the Atlantic Ocean, in Shetland, Norway and Iceland.  

Roe deer at dawn

The other art that Gill has developed is that of sinking into the background, whether by elaborate camouflage, or finding a perfect concealed viewpoint.  “A lot of the animals," he says, "don’t like to be close to people so it’s finding ways to blend into the landscape -  to try to get them to behave naturally – rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. It’s about using your fieldcraft and knowledge of the landscape.” That hard work done to conceal himself resulted in one of the most entertaining sequences in the film – a female beaver cleaning herself with comical vigour and diligence.  

What’s also notable is that the ‘new wild’ of this series includes people. It features, for instance, crofters, whose sheep and cattle shape a vibrant landscape; ecosystems, like the Carse of Gowrie reedbeds, formed by deliberate human planting.  

Gill is keen that people don’t get caught up in arguments about what rewilding is, or use of the different terms around conservation. “Rewilding,” he says, “doesn’t necessarily mean what everyone thinks it does. It might not be bringing back water voles. It might just be about creating a nice habitat for a bog raft spider to live in.  

“It’s also about people doing things on their own scale. I now have a wildflower meadow and a bit of grass in my garden that I didn’t have before. People can do whatever they want on their own scales to make a difference. We can all do it.” 

Scotland The New Wild is on the BBC Scotland channel and BBC IPlayer, 9pm on Sunday, September 17.