Winter’s Wildlife Resilience

Winter is a season of extremes – from frosty mornings and snowy days to grey days of endless drizzle – it can be a tough time of year for us and our wildlife. With an overarching theme of Resilience and Renewal, Winterwatch will be shining a light on the wildlife and people who battle through this inhospitable season and come out the other side. We’re here to warm your bones and your soul and this time it’s through four extraordinary encounters with wildlife.

Peter Lau worked in the fire service in West Yorkshire for 25 years. In his adventurous spare time, he enjoyed mountain biking, scuba diving, kayaking and hiking but in 2014 he had a terrible mountain bike accident which left him paralysed. He hit a very low point in his life until his wife Debbie bought him a camera. It ignited a huge passion in Peter for wildlife photography, but he soon discovered that, as a wheelchair user, accessing reserves to capture wildlife on film was an additional challenge. So, he’s worked with a number of organisations to make reserves more accessible for people like him, keen to explore the natural world and experience all the benefits it brings.

Gillian Burke is testing her own resilience by travelling to the breath-taking Orkney Isles for this year’s Winterwatch. It’s one of the most dramatic places in the UK in winter and is one of the best places to spot whales, dolphins and porpoises, so a perfect place for Gillian, with her love of the ocean, to jump on a boat to see what she can find. She joins Emma Neave-Webb from Orkney Marine Mammal Research in the hope of seeing ‘something’ but what they discover, quite by chance, turns out to be one of Gillian’s best wildlife encounters of her life!

It might be the depths of winter, but while the land freezes, in our coastal shallows temperatures are a little kinder… and rather than hunkering down for the season, life for many marine species is business as usual. Shore crabs are busy jostling for scraps. With a set of fearsome pincers they wrestle with pieces of rotting fish. Little do they know that danger is lurking right next to them. A curled octopus, perfectly camouflaged against some rocks is awaiting the perfect time to strike. This is the most intelligent invertebrate in the world. And a fearsome ambush predator. It waits for a crab to come closer – and then it pounces.

And finally, back to Orkney, where Gillian is in search of a small mammal which is ONLY found on the Orkney Isles – the Orkney vole. She takes a ferry to Sanday in the north of the archipelago where her first sighting is not of a vole but of sanderlings on the beach. These beautiful migratory birds forage on the beach whilst cleverly dodging the waves. Gillian then meets up with landscape gardener Adam Hough who she hopes can introduce her to the Orkney vole. The weather is against them but maybe a bit of apple can tempt one out?