Coming home to roost

Britain's greatest living nature broadcaster charts a lifetime of decline in his own backyard.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Wild Isles returns that ancient and much beloved W creature, the Sir David Attenborough, to his natural element. While the many shows he's made in recent years have mainly kept him studio-bound or caged in the voice-over booth, the new series has the man who won't be put out to pasture back in the field.

He hasn't been out in the wild much of late. After all, he's 96. The last time he was out in the field, that field was probably still a forest. One full of species that are now on the endangered list.

But Wild Isles takes him, gently, back to where his fascination with nature started - the English countryside outside Leicester he first explored as a boy on a bike in the 1930s.

"Back then, it was easy to find hay meadows rich with wildflowers and swarming with butterflies and insects of all kinds," he says in publicity for the series. "But since then, we have lost more than 95% of these wonderful habitats."

There are quite a few more alarming numbers in Wild Isles' survey of the fauna and flora of Britain and Ireland. So much so, that it proved controversial when it started screening in Britain last month. The BBC came under fire for supposedly kowtowing to Conservative government pressure and relegating a sixth episode about the causes of the decline to its iPlayer streaming platform rather than broadcasting it in primetime.