Episode
Natural World: Butterflies: A Very British Obsession
Overview
Wildlife documentary featuring the fascinating lives of Britain's beautiful butterflies filmed in exquisite detail and also a celebration of their enduring appeal to the British people. Butterfly-costumed carnival-goers dance at Notting Hill, street artist Nick Walker uses their image to brighten bare city walls, burlesque dancer Vicky Butterfly recreates butterfly dances and at Britain's biggest tattoo convention women reveal their butterfly tattoos. Britain's butterflies have never been so threatened, three quarters are in decline. A search for butterflies leads to some of the most beautiful parts of Britain. It opens up the intriguing possibility that a passion for butterflies could help us preserve the landscapes that we love.
Details
- Series
- Natural World
- Season
- Season 30
- Episode
- Episode 8
- Air date
- 2010-12-17
Episode context
Butterflies: A Very British Obsession is Episode 8 in Season 30 of Natural World. It aired on 2010-12-17.
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Episode 7: Panda Makers
Giant Pandas were on the brink of extinction but now they are coming back, thanks to an extraordinary conservation project. The Chengdu Research Base in central China is at the heart of a project to breed 300 pandas, and then start introducing them back into the wild. It is the most ambitious and controversial conservation effort ever mounted.
Shot over two years, this film follows the pandas and keepers as, through visionary science and round-the-clock care, they edge closer to the magic number of 300.
Episode 9: Miracle in the Marshes of Iraq
It's the largest and most ambitious habitat recreation project ever known: to bring back to life one of the world's greatest marshlands. And it's happening in Iraq.
Considered to be the original Garden of Eden, the marshes were once Iraq's wildlife jewel, where man and nature thrived for 5,000 years. But in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein drained these gigantic wetlands and turned them into a desert, destroying a home to thousands of people and millions of birds.
Donning his body armour, filmmaker David Johnson travels to the Mesopotamian Marshes to follow the work of Azzam Alwash, the visionary Iraqi engineer at the centre of this extraordinary scheme to re-flood hundreds of miles of desert and bring back life to the sands. This is a view of Iraq the world never sees, a world of huge reed beds and vast flocks of birds that fill the sky. But nothing ever quite goes to plan in Iraq.
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Episode 2: Echo - An Unforgettable Elephant
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