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tv   Extreme Conservation  BBC News  January 11, 2023 1:30am-2:00am GMT

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this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. i am michaela strachan, a wildlife presenter who is passionate about conservation. my work has taken me all over the world and in that time i have seen huge changes, many due to climate change. in extreme conservation, we meet inspirational people who have dedicated their lives to protecting the natural world. this time, i'm in turkey.
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this country's stunning forest are facing devastating losses. but it is notjust the trees that need saving, it is also the creatures. i'm meeting the remarkable people trying to save honeybees. you are a bee whisperer. and those building turkey's rown bears a safe to roam. this is extreme conservation turkey. turkey is huge, a vast and varied country stretching over 1500km. turkey is surrounded by water on three sides, the mediterranean
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sea, the black sea and the aegean sea and in the east its mountainous and rugged and all that influences the climate in very different ways. it is a country that is so rich in natural diversity, its sweeping pine forest one of its key assets. but as temperatures rise these forests are being destroyed by wildfires, getting ever more intense. i start myjourney on the western coast, a short boat ride from the coastal town of bodrum with thick pine forests stretch all the way to the beaches. like so many places around the world, summers here
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have got hotter and drier, and recently they have had horrendous forest fires that have completely changed the landscape. all of this used to be green forest and now look at it. here, an area bigger than 100 football fields was wiped out in days. these most recent fires were more ferocious than any wildfire turkey has ever seen before. hussain is one of many thousands of people who have
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people rely on these forests to make a living, not from the trees themselves but from the creatures that live in them. these trees are vital to the survival of one of the most important insects on the planet, an insect you might not immediately associate with forests. the honeybee. stroll down a street in the region and you can clearly see how central honey is to the economy. this is the honey that is unique to this area, not flower honey, it is pine honey, produced from pine
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trees and almost all the pine honey in the world comes from this little corner of turkey. i have never tried pine honey so i am looking forward to this. apparently it tastes very different. that is so good. it tastes woody and almost spicy. pine honey is not made by a bee alone, a small grub has a big role to play. i am meeting yonca tokbas, a bee expert, to find out more about these intriguing insects and how they contribute to making pine honey. she has dedicated herself to preserving the bees�* way of life even running marathons. what a beautiful forest. you get the smell and the sound of the forest.
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this is the bug. that tiny thing. it is taking the sap from the pine tree and creating this liquid and that is what the bee is taking from the pine tree. this tiny animal that you have so much difficulty seeing is the magic creator of the whole process. more than half the essential grubs were wiped out by the fires. if you do not have the insects, you do not have food for bees and you do not have pine honey. with natural food sources dwindling and many hives destroyed, yonca warns some honey producers are
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putting too much pressure on the remaining bees. we encourage them not to feed them chemicals or unnatural sugars to produce more than they can. we are exploiting bees. exactly. this man comes from a long line of bee farmers and bees are notjust a source of income but a way of life. they clearly know you. not evening bothering you.
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you are a bee whisperer. he uses traditional methods to look after his 10 million bees. look at that. his way is simple, he believes the bees should be left to do it naturally, collecting nectar from the wild and return it to the hive to make honey. this is not the optimum production method. intensively farmed bees just come out of the hives and drink sugar water and then go back in to produce what he calls false honey. the do not travel around the ecosystem as they should, pollinating plants, including ourfruit and vegetables. he said they get unhealthy and die sooner. this is a pot of honey naturally produced and it really
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does taste delicious. it is interesting how we are all familiar with battery farming and exploiting chickens for eggs and meat but how many of us have thought about the exploitation of bees with intense beekeeping and the damage that is doing. it seems to me the extreme conservation for bees is to go back to basics, back to this traditional way of beekeeping. the recovery of the pine forests is crucial and until then these bees have limited resources to survive. what are the main things people need to understand about bees for future conservation? plant some of the flowers they love, it is a food resource for them. this is the amount of honey that a bee can produce in a lifetime.
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just in that, do not waste it. finding out a bee producesjust 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey has made me think about how much we use. for yonca, she is determined to save the bees by inspiring the next generation. the youth is amazing, much more aware than we are and they are working on trying to help nature more than our generation. when we think of forests, we hink of their importance to fight climate change but they are equally important for biodiversity, so much of our wildlife lives and thrives in a forest. as we have seen with the honeybee and that tiny bug marchalina hellenica it would not survive if it
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was not for all these trees, a precious ecosystem that desperately needs protecting. continuing myjourney of extreme conservation i am in the mountains of east turkey. i have travelled 11100 kilometres from the aegean coast to the armenian border. in winter, this area is popularfor skiing but it is mainly a farming region. over time, lots of forests have been felled for pasture leaving just a patchwork of trees behind. but i am here as this is home to turkey's majestic migrating brown bear.
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naturally, the bears would live in these mountains in spring and summer and when food becomes harder to find in autumn some of them travel over 100 kilometres to the black sea reagion when they fatten up and come back to hibernate for winter. this natural pattern of behaviour has now been disrupted. researchers emrah coban and aysegul 0neren have been observing the bears for a decade and dedicated their lives to protecting them. i am joining them in the hope of getting a glimpse of these magnificent creatures. hi. you're listening for the bears? we are searching for the signal of one of the bears. they have been
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collecting detailed data on the bears to understand human activity is impacting the migration habits of the bears. the forest they live in has become fragmented, dramatically changing their behaviour. we are here before dusk to increase our chances of seeing them. and we are in luck. this has been really exciting, we have seen seven bears come out of this forest including two cubs but the only reason we are seeing so many of them together is because they are on their way to this, the dump site and they are going there to feed. the bears are here to scavenge. some of their forest had been overtaken by urban development so they are forced to
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feed on our rubbish. oh my word. look at them, so many. 18. this is really depressing. you can see the cubs even. for me it's exciting to see bears, but not like this. this is really, really sad. here is too much food. they are trying to eat leftovers, but many times they eat plastic. the young cubs copy the adults and so learn this scavenging behaviour.
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the cubs are learning to eat in the garbage. he's walking off with a whole bag of rubbish. some bears are very fat and very lazy because they're not moving too much. this is a really sad sight, and it is all—too—familiar across the world as habitats are being destroyed and wild animals forced to come into built—up areas to find food. a massive problem that needs a massive solution. the team has come up with an ambitious plan to lure the bears away from the dump. they want to create a new travel route for the bears, taking existing patches of forest
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they're planting 11 million trees to fill in the gaps. this forested route will stretch over 160 kilometres, right up to the georgian border, creating turkey's first wildlife corridor. they hope it will entice the bears to migrate once again. this is perfect for bears. it's thick, healthy forest, but then it just stops and there's this vast expanse of nothing. and the next forest is 1a kilometres away, so this habitat has become really fragmented. the bears have a big role to play in this ecosystem. they keep the balance amongst the animals that roam these forests — the lynx, the wolves, even the rabbits.
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they all have a kind of silent agreement with each other. if you take out one species out, we could think the healthy agreement would not exist any more. we are tracking along their route looking for any clues to show at least some of them are still trying to make the journey. look. 0h, are they the prints? this is footprints. this is rubbing trees. this is where they come and rub. yes, some hairs and scratching. i can see that. yes, some bears scratch but most bears like this. oh, that must be great to see. this is the sort of information emrah and aysegul have been painstakingly
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collecting for ten years. this is like our eyes in the forest. they have installed around 50 of these cameras, which help them document the natural behaviour of the animals and their relationships with each other. and they've also collared some with gps trackers so they can map how they move around in this patchwork of forest and see where they are running into trouble. this is the bear movement. it is recorded every hour. we have the information of their movement, their behaviour, the time they are spending in the spot. it tells us that these animals need more space to move, to go further. also in the way are the pastures cleared for farming.
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these are the gaps that are planned to be planted. aysegul and emrah�*s data shows some of the braver bears do still move between forests, and they hope that more tree cover will encourage others to migrate.
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the initial trees in the project were planted only a few months ago. i'm joining bulent aydin to plant one of the first saplings in the area. well, i've played a tiny part of a huge and exciting project. it's going to take years before it's finished, but wouldn't it be amazing to come back here and
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see this whole area forested, full of bears and lynx and wolves and so much other wildlife, and become an incredibly precious ecosystem 7 only when the wildlife is roaming freely in the forest and can find food in nature can this dump be safely shut off to bears. 20 years later, i hope everywhere is trees, not open area like this. the bears do not eat the trash, just the healthy food. and can you imagine these large carnivores we are working withjust hanging around here and having fun being in the real wildlife. during my time here, i have met incredible individuals fighting to protect the creatures living alongside them, desperately trying to manage the delicate balance between people and nature. rewilding the forest will take
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time, but it also takes care and consideration of all its inhabitants, big or small. we've pushed so much of our wildlife into unsustainable pockets, and we've lost whole ecosystems already. climate change and our insatiable appetite for development has destroyed so many habitats, and it's up to us now to try to find ways to recreate them. what they're doing here in turkey is ambitious, but if it works, hopefully it will be an inspiration for other projects around the world.
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hello. 0ur wet and windy week of weather continues on wednesday with the low pressure still very much driving our weather. there's going to be heavy downpours for some of us through the day, and actually over the next few days. 0ften we're going to see rain, strengthening winds. mainly still quite mild for the time of year. but gales developing, overnight rain sweeping its way eastwards. so by the time we get to about 6:00am on wednesday morning, most of us generally frost—free. but some heavy showers from the word go, pushing in from the north and the west. and low pressure is going to sit to the north of the uk through the day. you can see the proximity of all these isobars on the chart. that's showing us that it is going to be a blustery sort of day. plenty of showers driven in from the atlantic, so the heaviest of the downpours will be in the west during this morning — parts of scotland, northern ireland, and also then pushing into wales and western england too. gales around coastal parts
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of the english channel, through the irish sea coasts, up towards the western isles for instance, 60 mph gusts possible there. but even further inland, we're looking at 30, possibly a0 mph gusts of wind through the day on wednesday. so a blustery day. heavy downpours reaching eastern areas during the afternoon after a fairly bright morning here. and temperatures a little cooler than recent days. about 7—11 degrees, feeling colder if you are exposed to the brisk wind and those heavy showers that many of us will see. some snow for a time over the higher ground of scotland too. 0vernight showers ease in the north, but the next batch of heavy rain sweeps eastwards across much of england and wales, so it's going to be a really quite damp start to thursday morning, i think. could be a touch of frost with some sheltered glens of scotland, but still mild to start the day towards the south on thursday. and thursday's weather driven by yet another low pressure system, this time just moving in towards the north—west. this occluded front bringing some heavy showers, but down towards the south we've also got more heavy rain across southern parts of england lingering on that frontal system, combined with gales that are once again
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going to develop through the english channel around some of these irish sea coasts, and turning windy later in the day across the north—west too. so the next band of rain crosses from west to east, followed by sunny spells and scattered heavy downpours moving in from the north—west. temperatures still about 7—9 in the north but up to about 13, possibly 1a, down towards the south—east. so it stays mild. a hint that through the weekend things turn a little less unsettled, but those temperatures are going to drop a little bit until we get to sunday. bye— bye.
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welcome to bbc news, i'm monika plaha. our top stories: torrential rain causes deadly floods in california leaving residents, including celebrities, fearing for their properties. new climate data suggests 2022 was the fifth hottest year on record, with europe and the polar regions hardest hit by global warming. cardinal george pell, the australian former vatican treasurer who was found guilty of sexual abuse before his conviction was quashed, has died. a chance to read up on the royals, as prince harry's

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