Autumn's Animal Advocates

Autumn. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us!
This is a time of nature's plenty, with a wonderful hedgerow harvest of blackberries, rose hips, crab apples, hazelnuts and seeds. Many of our much-loved creatures take advantage of this wild harvest to build up reserves of fat for migration or for hibernation.
To warm your bones and your soul, Autumnwatch is here to keep you connected to the wildlife we love and this time it’s through four extraordinary people.

As autumn takes hold in Chelmsford, bat carer Kim Wallis is inundated with all sorts of new patients. From brown long-ears, which can detect the footsteps of an unsuspecting lacewing wandering along a leaf stem, to matchbox-sized common pipistrelles, which will feed on over 3,000 midges a night despite weighing less than a teaspoon of sugar; it’s Kim’s busiest season. Test-flying the patients in her custom flight school, Kim will rescue, rehabilitate and release over 70 bats in her free time before the year is up - all from a shed-turned home-made bat hospital on her parent’s farm.

In the last two years, there’s been a strange sound coming from the trees of conservationist, naturalist and vet Sean McCormack’s local patch in London.
Now, as the nights draw in and this nocturnal resident becomes easier to find, Sean is tracking down the squeaking and rustling to find Ealing’s newest resident – the Edible Dormouse. Whilst their focus might be on fattening up for hibernation, Sean is investigating just how many of them are calling his patch home and aiming to understand what the presence of this non-native species might mean for the area.

Following in the century-old footsteps of the little known but highly accomplished female entomologist Alice Balfour, Katty Baird spends her autumn meticulously charting the abundance of the magnificent moths on her doorstep in East Lothian. Inspired by Balfour - one of the UK’s first citizen scientists - Katty might gather as many as 8,000 moth records before the year is up, comparing her data with her predecessor in exactly the same locations in autumn. Far from the annoying creatures that eat your favourite jumper (just two species are guilty out of 2500), Katty believes that moths are the busy and often neglected nocturnal pollinating workhorses keeping our biodiversity ticking along behind the scenes.

Every autumn, PhD student Julia Sutherland arrives in the Shetland Isles to catch a glimpse of the UK’s most powerful predator: Killer Whales. As the only person in Britain studying orca, Julia is leading the charge on uncovering the poorly understood habits of these school bus sized super geniuses. Focusing on their little-known predator-prey relationships, she can get incredibly close to the orca from the Shetland coast, where they make the most of the busy seal season in Autumn. Now halfway through her PhD, the 5-feet-tall glistening black dorsal fins of the 27s pod suddenly emerging from the surface is hard a sight to beat.