Wales - After Dark and Secrets of the Land of the Wild

An epic journey following Wales’s rivers from their birth in the mountains to the sea, discovering the hidden secrets of wildlife.

Ep1: After Dark in the Land of the Wild
For the first time, the veil of darkness is lifted as cutting-edge technology reveals the secrets of Wales’s nocturnal wildlife. Filmed across the seasons, from the biting cold of winter to sweltering summer nights, a variety of innovative cameras capture wild action between sunrise and sunset. Military-grade long lens thermal cameras, which record heat rather than light, film 20,000 starlings racing to roost under Aberystwyth’s pier and bats hunting insects over Margam Lake. Super-sensitive cameras which film at night in colour reveal the nocturnal secrets of badgers, moths, hedgehogs, toads and owls. And infrared light illuminates three hundred lesser horseshoe bats leaving their castle roost. This is Wales like you’ve never seen it before.

Ep2: Secrets of the Land of the Wild
An epic journey following Wales’s rivers from their birth in the mountains to the sea, discovering the hidden secrets of wildlife. Along the way, cutting-edge camera technology captures icon animals like never before. Super slow-motion cameras film peregrine falcons on the hunt and reveal why their prey, the unsuspecting red grouse, are often able to evade the faster predator on Earth. Dragonflies’ amazing aerial acrobatics are slowed down four hundred times and red squirrels are captured as they leap through the trees. In a city park, pigeons hidden superpowers are laid bare, and in an upland garden a subtle hierarchy is at play as birds gather around a feeder. The latest underwater cameras take us below the waves off the Welsh coast as catsharks mate and lay their eggs, while in the headwaters of the River Wye a complex and surprising microworld is revealed.