Scenes Alastair was involved in filming

• Episode 1: Our Precious Isles – Lords and Ladies & Arum lilies pollination story | banded demoiselles, courtship and egg laying underwater | bumble bee pollination | butterfly meadows
• Episode 2: Woodland – wood ants | ash black slugs | fungi releasing spores | fungi time lapses
• Episode 3: Grassland - bee and snail shells | large blue butterfly | field voles
• Episode 4: Freshwater - raft spider

What was the most interesting macro sequence that you filmed?

Filming the large blue butterfly was the most interesting for many reasons. Its life history and its relationship with the ant is totally fascinating and we felt it had to be recorded to be shared with a television audience. This butterfly went extinct in the UK because of changes to its habitat, a familiar and sad tale of our times. However, the making of Wild Isles has coincided with remarkable conservation success. Through careful scientific management, the butterfly has been brought back and can be seen once more in British meadows, giving us a glimmer of hope for the future. The filming was a challenge in so many ways. It is always necessary to film specific key moments of behaviour to tell any story about animal behaviour - miss just one of them and you have failed. With this project every one of these moments involved behaviour so complex and so sensitive to disturbance that the task frequently seemed beyond reach.

Can you tell us about the kit you needed to film this type of animal behaviour?

We filmed in two different meadows using the sloping terrain and short camera supports to get the lens as low as possible. To show the details of the ant behaviour as clearly as possible, it was necessary to get lenses low enough and into hidden places to see what was happening. It was practically the last minute of the last hour of filming when, finally, we got the last essential moment - when an ant brought the caterpillar into the nest.

Why did you want to be involved in a series about wildlife in the British Isles?

I have been involved in many shoots and one or two programmes made in Britain and Ireland. We have stories here equal to some of the strangest found in the tropics, but our climate is a perennial problem. It’s hard to predict how long field work will take especially if sun is needed for behaviour or beauty. When Wild Isles was planned it seemed a great opportunity to try and do the nature of Britain and Ireland justice.

Can you tell us more about how you filmed the “witch bee” nesting inside old snail shells?

This engaging and entertaining little bee, its broomstick behaviour and its quest for snail shells led us to try and tell its story as fully as possible. We worked closely with a field biologist who could help us find our subjects and knew the timings of the different behaviours we needed to film. To film inside the shell, the first and most obvious thing to do was to film through the front aperture to get shots where the bee or jaws of the bee were visible. I also cut a window in an old shell to allow camera access to the back. The shell was just translucent enough for lighting and I placed it, attached to the front of the scope, in the meadow in a place the bee was looking for shells and camouflaged the scope with grass. By great fortune the bee checked my shell and entered it. At the right time I carefully cut a window in a shell with egg and pollen inside, sealed the window with a coverslip to keep the egg at the right humidity and filmed close-ups of the egg and larva.