conditions who waited pongo for these are the ones that you read yeah so but some adult would appear in here it's incredible. to they one of the heaviest and six in the world this isn't at all funny so they don't get too much bigger than us which upon the can weigh up to seventy grams that's the equivalent of three small mice to think i can hold her hopes are a bit shocked wow. that's incredible do they do they fly not so they're totally flightless they're not really good camouflage they're nocturnal so they're very very well adapted for in predators mammals and just now in the mount says that when i started to die out they were considered really common and to the middle part of the eighteen hundreds and there humans extremely democrats new zealand and one to a century ago if i split start your side from one island for the birds the factor being credible why would you say. they have all functions to play in the ecology so

it's foliage does mess up players and i was the ground. for a species which i read about in books as a kind of star i feel privileged to be where. the breeding program started in two thousand and twelve with only twelve since then over three and a half thousand in six have been released onto a few key islands which still provide the ideal conditions for them to flourish today bends readying a batch for transport. so they will be the easiest ones because of a lot. so this whole thing comes out they like to harden these little choose to rule and there's a surprise that you want to be taking to the island yeah once they've got a bit of sauce on them they're a little bit more a boston but if you're going to choose to decide to just pump you're not sure was yeah that's. right that's the first. and also just to tell you here. what's the

success rate of writing programs up to about ninety percent of all right which is really really good. to see me upset everybody in the i'm sure that. that's what it was going to counter my. sense everything which going to really seems it's yet here. we found three hundred eighty five ways have packed and ready to move it's time to head to the docks. we're off to a private island in the how to keep gulf one of four still hospitable to west ham. it's a one hour boat journey from the mainland. right and sugo reuter the island's owners are avid conservationists who have given their land over to the protection of native species and. yeah yeah right in theory

but have you always been involved in the releases as much as possible in two thousand and three rodents who finally breed the island of invasive mammals like rats stoats and feral cats making it a safe home full weight of hunger. we've never really looked at their cells as i don't know but more as guardians of the wonderful place that we privilege of growing up and how does releasing the one upon going to the island actually fit into all of your plans sorry they're critical to the health of the island nothing exists in our selection so when a punk or a bit of one of the missing links for them how many guises and as a heart of a jigsaw. even though a row crucial piece of the landscape here the young in sixty will need to be handled carefully. selecting the. first exposed for the new hope.

how do you choose the fight for your release wes's yes so this is one of our early starts here and so we want to look for a place that's got lots of audience votes and someone that's got lots and lots of good food plants as well. my goodness is incredible hello how old is this tree just made to be about eight hundred years old . you can see the pellet from one of the wood a plant that's not a good way to sometimes to take it presents if you can actually find them and that's all this is really important for the ecosystem and yes so that's one pixel in the transfer which is recycling with eating and that's good for them in the soil health finding these droppings isn't totally a sign of a healthy environment but also evidence of an already thriving population that will surely go could you come with this this is kind of the ideal spot where the best place in the wall and for them to be released into this is going to heaps and heaps

and heaps of id holes for when opponent has one of their preferred food plants they can go from the straight industry is right across the whole far syracuse but a huge ground on. the west who will be released at night when they are based active this peak tafe will help us find this spot in the dark later on. i can't believe they have trusted me with phase one of. our ah it's the start of the really thought here yeah. you can see a much more active they're winning. this one i'm going to release more

on this trial now with more. so how important is it for you to reestablish what a pond a hero it's often because of just giving back something that probably would have been here years and years ago hopefully the droppings will add to the forest. once and not on. any skin real soft touch on the back. so how much longer do you think you're retiring may fourth of releases for all but a few more laces today and then after that it's mainly just monitoring the populations. which upon the now exist on for islands as invasive predators us lowly removed from other locations that number is expected to rise the hope is that one day later punk could return to the mainland with a wants thrived. there is certainly the bill for change

here in new zealand while people and institutions are taking action in support of native species the government has even committed to rid the country of human introduced pests by twenty fifteen there is still a way to go but at least the future is now looking optimistic. plants reproductive cells are found in its pollen. when an insect visits a flower to feed off its nectar pollen rubs off from the male stayman on to the insect and sticks to the hairs on its body. as the insect moves on to another flower grains of pollen are transferred to the female stigma that's when pollination happens so that seeds and fruit produced. around seventy five percent

of all crop species require pollination by an animal often insects including beads but also other animals such as birds and bats but two out of five insect pollinators a disappearing and with them our food supply. in southwest china wild bees have been eradicated by intensive farming so people are doing the work the bees once did . every year in hundred one county thousands of villages painstakingly pollinate every single apple and pear blossom by hand using a long stick attached to brushes or chicken feathers. the method works with some high value approaching us but this simply aren't enough people to pollinate the world's crops much more effective would be to nurture pollinating insects populations in orchards by banning pesticides and planting natural habitats. bees and other insects have been safeguarding our food supply for millennia the

least we can do in return is to provide them with what they need to survive. with a long history of habitat loss and industrialize farming feared has seen some of the worst cases of infected hine and extinction in the world i've come to the u.k. to see how all the industrial sites are being turned into bug reserve. in an attempt to reverse this worrying trend. professor dave goulston has been studying insects for over twenty years and understands just how damaging their rapid decline could be not to go so why are in facts disappearing that there's a whole host of challenges that they face to do with us modern farming methods become very reliant on using lots and lots of pesticides which mean the farmer can

grow a perfect monoculture without an insect inside the entire botanical diversity surrounding us is just the hunt for species instead of the hundreds of species that used to live here and a lot of people think that this is war the the british countryside should look like but it's only been like this for a few decades it's basically makes the landscape uninhabitable for most insects is there anything we can do to turn this around or have we sort of passed the tipping point for some species it's too late some of gone extinct but for the majority best still here and we need to make sure we look after we should be absolutely terrified about this this should should be something that everyone is talking about and everyone is key to it because if if we don't we face a really believe. it's a call to arms if there ever was one and here in the u.k. some groups are taking the warnings of entomologists seriously. i'm on my way to

camp you wait to see the you case first reserve for in sacks. i'm due to be dr sarah henschel an entomologist a bug life an organization dedicated to the protection of insects. but this desolate next industrial or brownfield site is not exactly what i was expecting. her you must be sarah i am married here and soon i'm very. welcome to come us for just two days got sacked as one of them a spider virus and while. rich sites in britain. join us take a look i really really. wanted this place used to be the best site you. know you were finery you can see remnants of industry all around us has been abandoned for more than forty years and why is an old oil refinery an ideal spot for protecting bugs hasn't been managed has been a pesticide so it's providing not true that it's been walks in the wider landscape

wildlife is using this is a refuge to really. there what does it look like a helicopter should be landing any minute now that a large tarmac base there's about sixty of them across the site they would have how was the large oil storage tank as you can see now is coring back and how many species of insects are there on the site there's over two thousand five hundred different species on this site alone including some found nowhere else this is why the size of the case facebook is three try to find some little hunting for there are things about as brownfield site which makes so many there is always different habitats and with a small place a barrier ground to back next flowers feed on scrope and trees to the winter and fight it shelter is an amazing mosaic of everything they need all in one place so why are these insects so important to the natural landscape so we need healthy

ecosystems invertebrates indicate forests if the book's a hop a and the metaphor is happy so the mammals and the birds have also hobbies and we need to look after the books and everything else will fall into line. camp the week has been described as a little brownfield rain forest and i can definitely see why. there are bugs everywhere so many that a team of volunteers carry out surveying work throughout the whole year. rorion image and already have their morning's work set out on their table which doubles as a lab i don't want to reach here what's going on in here this was really active ground beetles there's a predator a living this back grounds come to what we've got a few species that are actually only found here did you catch these all today or over the past week do you think spring day to day you still see this of which first you've lived here. and what will this help you through before and so give us a girl run our hair and not wait we can see how it's improved on what we see more

of what we're doing regular studies like this in such. like it is really important to see how the rest the country is doing do you release the insects or do you take them back to a laboratory what happens to them most of them we can so we can release. them we might need to take to have a better look at kind of caterpillars this is a mucky mouth cancer where they're living saw this protective on the joys you used to find and if you were out in the u.k. but. you probably found these consequence and we see them all over the place i think i suppose. the. rights that they were acting as real raccoons is this case is that it's a kind of the surviving on sites like this. since bug life started serving nearly ten years ago three insects species believed to be extinct has been discovered here and. it's exciting and i can't resist trying to find

a few myself but one thing i did for soccer sort of all right. i had something. this is a tree back here and i was home a flaw i have a fire that i really critically important to the ecosystem and i'm not. quite down to just. the sort of thing as well as i'm talking about. was a bomb yeah. in all seems like good fun but this surveying is crucial not only for monitoring insect numbers but also managing the land so that it provides the best possible habitat for these creatures to thrive. emission has offered to show me a declining species that needs some special treatment but i haven't hear it and say that's a brown debate and it's one of the two hundred different species of these and last so you can find on this site a member what creator hay is to remove some vegetations they have some background they can borrow into and make what we call b.

cliffs removing vegetation sounds counter-intuitive to a nature lover like myself but emission is the expert so i'll wait to see what she has to show me she's taking me to find an elevated spot to create our b. class. so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be cutting back a lot of across a lot of scrub a lot of people when they want to save invertebrates they figure they have to walk far meadows which is incredibly important but also they do really need these nice areas that they can live it and how do they occupy the space so they sort of burrow into the sand yes they were thought to yourself probably finest home like this one . and i'll take a bit on marston's have on them ok i. did like a really good dentist to release a bass yeah definitely. and. it's

so amazing to be so close to it especially when it's such a rush to be sure we often think of conservation and species we just think of these meadows in these perfectly manicured landscapes but we're in the middle of a wasteland it's not a wasteland to them it's about how bad it's in fact the last place they can be in this area so it's really important that we take that into consideration when we make decisions about. to date candy week has been a resoundingly success. but to save britain's in sex more land must be given over to their protection. sara wants me to see another site the bug life is looking to reclaim twenty kilometers down the road at western marshes if successful it could add an additional seven hectares of protected habitat to the cause it's been a quiet so far with. fire and i went over a few times already so. before

the site was abandoned it was a coal fired power station this black substrate is the fly ash which is the byproduct later on in the summer these low nutrient poor quality cereals really favor the wallflowers that bumble bee was. really loved and take advantage of untrained eye it looks like so we've had a huge amount of work campaigning and raising awareness and we hope this is going to be one of our next big reserves and. you have a lot of resistance when you approach developers and local governments when you want to talk about conservation on sites that could earn a lot of money for them of course because this is prime development land. fortunately in just ten years the hoff with the brownfield will person just to land in the thames gateway or you've been developed so it demonstrates the need for sites such as can be wet and hopefully this in the future that preserves these

things because we're losing this resource quicker than even finding out how important is. this i prize an amazing opportunity to challenge perception on the key drivers of size investments books that are important and i think we should have more of these not only in the u.k. but elsewhere in the world. after hanging out with sarah and her amazing team of bug life i don't think i can ever go by any piece of land no matter how derelict and forgotten and not see its full potential and we really need to have this shift in perspective because as our own species rapidly grows in industrialised his land every square inch counts.