Original subtitles

The west coast of Ireland for millennia was really, I guess,

the edge of the known world.

Our ancestors had no idea what lay beyond the horizon.

The vast Atlantic was a place of complete mystery.

My name is Colin Stafford-Johnson.

I've spent 30 years working as a wildlife cameraman around the world

and I've seen some of the most beautiful places on Earth,

but somehow I'm always drawn back to the west coast of Ireland.

This is where I now call home.

Once you've lived by the sea for part of your life,

it's very hard to leave it behind.

I love its isolation and its wildness.

I've always wanted to travel the length of Ireland's Atlantic coast,

seeking out its secret places and wild creatures.

SEALS SNARL

So much of life is, sort of, timetabled

and when you don't have a timetable, you can't be late.

When you don't have a destination, you can't get lost.

I suppose, in ways, I'll be wandering up the west coast...

..and if my journey has any direction,

I guess it's roughly north.

And I think it's going to change my view

of the island that I've lived on for much of my life.

PUFFINS SQUAWK

Up till now I've spent most of my life very much really a land-lover,

but travel 100 metres from the shore

and the soundscape changes completely.

You leave the world behind.

When you think about going on a journey,

you've got to think of a place to begin

and when I thought of what it would be like to paddle up the west coast,

where will I begin, there was really only one place.

For me, the Skelligs, it's such an icon for the west of Ireland,

I guess.

Isolated, wild, desolate place.

Two jagged pyramids of sandstone,

one of them home to the second largest colony of gannets

in the world.

Come spring, some 70,000 individuals arrive on Little Skellig.

GANNETS SQUAWK

They're constantly scouring the ocean looking for food

and any fish that's within their range has very little chance.

They're doing really well here.

Year on year, this colony is getting bigger.

There's no place for another nest, it seems to be now.

This rock is now full.

There's really nowhere in the world quite like Skellig Michael.

No wonder it's a World Heritage Site, because it's truly unique.

It was a monastic settlement 1,500 years ago.

How they survived, it's just hard to imagine.

With an extraordinary decision to make,

to sail off in a boat from the west coast of Ireland to come here.

We may only be 12 miles offshore

but they can be 12 very dangerous miles.

It's just hard to imagine the effort to construct these beehive homes

and churches.

They must have been a special kind of people though,

because this wouldn't have been everyone's cup of tea.

And the monks who chose to build this monastery here

thought this place was the very edge of the world.

It was the edge of the known world for European man at that time.

The ocean, to them, was just vast and endless.

This endless void.

And the people who came here

came here to contemplate life...

..and I can't think of a better place to do it.

Tough place to do it - physically hard and challenging.

All they had to keep them company were the elements.

And the sea birds in summer.

Every year, puffins just arrive out of the blue.

They've spent the winter out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

being tossed around in storms and it always amazes me

how they actually arrive unscathed.

They look perfect, extraordinary little birds, constantly busy,

constantly moaning and groaning and chatting to each other.

Every place you go on this island in summer,

little puffins waddling all over the place.

When they start bill tapping, a way of reaffirming the bond

is to do this little bill tapping ceremony,

and it's just something that you never tire of.

Some of the younger non-breeding birds,

they literally loaf around over these rocks, called loafing rocks,

where the young, non-breeding birds gather.

And they will just arrive and, sort of, strut around the place,

maybe with fish in their mouths

as if showing to potential future partners,

"Look, I can fish. I know this place."

One thing puffins can do, which is remarkable,

the bill is designed to catch and hold multiple fish.

While on the bill, it's got these little grooves, so as soon as

they catch the first one between the bill and their tongue

they can just, kind of, store it there and then open their bill

and catch a second one, so it's all pretty clever.

There's just one single puffling born every season

and for three months their parents' only goal

is to keep them safe and well fed.

It's only when you look at them closely you realise

that they're not just comical little guys

but they're actually constantly looking out for predators.

Here, the biggest predators are the black-backed gulls

and the herring gulls.

There are thousands of burrows on this island.

The puffins, they find sanctuary underground.

It doesn't seem it on the surface,

but it really is a jungle out here, you know?

The gulls are responsible for the puffins being pretty much

on tenterhooks all day long,

even though a puffin never really looks like it's on tenterhooks.

At night, then everything changes completely.

The day birds have now pretty much stopped calling

and the island goes strangely quiet just after sunset.

But out at sea there are birds gathering

and they're waiting to come ashore.

It's only safe for them to come ashore

under cover of darkness - complete darkness.

LOUD SQUAWKING

This is really a very Irish sound

because Manx shearwaters breed on the west coast of Ireland

in really big numbers.

There are thousands of burrows on this island

and there's great competition for those burrows,

so much so that some of the shearwaters have actually started

nesting above ground in these old beehive huts.

SHEARWATERS SQUAWK

They're calling to let their mates know that they're on their way.

You will also then hear the response coming from underground.

It's as if their mate underground has said, "Look, I'm here,

"you're in the right area,

"and I'm going to lure you into this very spot."

SHEARWATER CALLS

It's incubation time.

The partners of these birds have been sitting patiently underground,

waiting for their mates to return from the sea.

They love the darkness.

This is what protects them from predators like gulls.

They are so poor on land.

Their feet are set very far back on their bodies

and they really are very ungainly.

If you're a shearwater, you really want to land

as close to your nest as possible.

Sometimes, if there are bright nights,

the poor old bird sitting on the egg will be there for days on end,

waiting for their mate to relieve them of duty.

And they'll spend some time in each other's company, you know?

Other birds, I've often found,

they will just literally swap over without making any contact.

As soon as one arrives, the other one leaves.

Not the case with shearwaters.

SHEARWATER SQUAWKS

They start preening each other and bill tapping

and it seems like they're delighted to see each other.

Perhaps romance is not just confined to the human world.

LOUD SQUAWKING

The shearwaters spend all winter travelling around the Atlantic,

flying over as far as Brazil in search of food

and then they make their way back and find the very same burrow

that they nested in last year.

And they'll do that for possibly decades

because they're a very long-lived bird.

And this is where they find sanctuary,

like the monks did long ago.

Ireland looks really like an island from out here.

I think that's the thing about the coastal journey.

It makes you see a country in a whole new light.

The land has changed.

Human influence tends to mould the land

but that doesn't change the surface of the ocean.

That just, sort of, defines itself in some way.

It can't be tamed, as such.

Even when you set out for a day at sea by yourself,

you're never alone for long, not on the west coast of Ireland.

Even when you stop, it's not long before the common dolphins find you.

They seem to just love company.

And I love theirs.

There's something very reassuring about seeing

such a concentration of mammals along this coast

because it means there must be plenty of life left in the sea.

My favourite places in Ireland have got to be these offshore islands.

And when you come to these places, that's where you get a real sense

of wildness and a real sense of what the whole coast must have been like

once upon a time.

You really feel like you're on the very edge of Europe.

Nothing to stop the waves between here and America.

The Blasket Islands may be only 20 miles north of the Skelligs

but they feel like a totally different world.

These west coast islands would once have been intensively farmed.

The old ruins of the houses are still here

but they won't last forever.

I'm sure in another hundred years or so

there will hardly be a sign that man was ever here.

So many of the islands off the west coast have been deserted by people

in the last, you know, 60, 70, 80 years

and wildlife has moved in.

FIRE CRACKLES

If you come to the Great Blasket at the right time of year,

you'll see a sight that few people have ever witnessed.

Certainly, the islanders who lived here once

would have been very familiar with these creatures

but they never would have seen them in numbers like this.

These animals are only here now because man has left this place.

This was the main beach in front of what would have been

a bustling village once upon a time.

It's lovely to see them all lying side-by-side.

It's more like a sight you'd see on a...

A Subantarctic island or something like that.

SEALS GRUNT AND GROWL

This must be the greatest gathering of mammals in Ireland.

Some days you can see over a thousand grey seals

all hauled out on the beach.

It's their island now.

For centuries they were hunted and harassed

and the numbers have plummeted.

But grey seals, in fact, were the first protected animal in the world.

The numbers have come back but we still have a duty

and responsibility to look after them here.

They're not built for land, that's for sure.

You've got to feel sorry for them because there's nothing worse

than having an itch you can't scratch,

and if your arms are only a foot long, it's not easy getting to

all the bits of the body that you've got to get to.

Sometimes you need a neighbour to lend a hand.

They're supreme swimmers. They can dive to depths of 600 feet.

And snoozing underwater?

Not a problem.

At breeding time there's loads of aggression.

Females are barking at females

and the bulls have come to mate

so they're very aggressive towards each other.

Everyone's, sort of, trying to protect their patch.

SEAL GROWLS

The entire year is spent building up to this time.

They're doing all this on an empty stomach too.

They're being driven by hormones.

And this fighting can be difficult to watch.

It can be extremely aggressive

and they can inflict serious damage on each other.

If you become the dominant male of a patch of beach,

that means you will have access to all the females that lie therein.

Mating, for grey seals, is not a very elegant process.

The male's got to keep away other males at this time

and he's also thinking that as soon as he's finished with one female

he's got to get on to the next one.

When they leave here they will spend the next six months or so

just wandering, on their own,

because they can travel from here all the way up as far as Scotland

or down to the Bay of Biscay, wandering around foraging.

So much of Europe's coastline has been developed

and undisturbed places like this are becoming rarer and rarer

in the world now.

For great stretches of the west coast,

mountains drop straight into the ocean

and travelling just a few miles inland

can transport you to a completely different world.

These are the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, Ireland's greatest mountain range.

There's somehow always like a dull roar coming from the sea,

but that's absent here.

The lake doesn't have that same kind of energy.

Still waters like this, such a different experience.

Last night was a perfectly clear night

and as a result this seems like the coldest morning of the year so far.

There's a real chill the air.

DEERS CALL

These mountains and these valleys have borne witness to this sound

for thousands of years.

These are the calls of male red deer...

..proclaiming their territories.

The rut has begun.

And that voice...

..it's telling the other males to stay away.

Don't mess with me.

Some of them have been rolling in the mud.

Sometimes you'll get them with grass attached to their antlers

and that's all about making themselves look bigger.

The only thing that these guys have on their mind right now

is fatherhood.

It's fatherhood or failure.

It's all they live for

and if you're not strong enough and powerful enough,

then you will never become...

a father.

Biggest land animal in Ireland.

And there are several big stags displaying this morning,

but there's one of them who is just...

..bigger and more powerful than all the rest

and he's the one that's got all the females.

Once a stag has gathered a harem,

he's got to keep a very close eye on them.

Sometimes one of them will slip away,

perhaps attracted by other calls,

and as soon as he spots her

he goes back and retrieves her in no uncertain manner.

He's gone to all that trouble gathering them.

LOUD CALL

He's not for sharing.

Now, stags will do whatever they can to avoid conflict

because it's dangerous for both parties.

Those calls and that posturing is normally enough

to keep rivals apart.

But when you have two males of similar size,

sometimes neither of them will back down.

LOUD CALL

The loser looks utterly exhausted.

Everyone has seen that he's been beaten.

The females have seen it, the males have seen it,

and so he will not be feared again.

It's the sole purpose of their lives, I guess, is to...

..become fathers, and they will put all their energies into doing that.

And there are some winners but more losers.

And it seems like Stone Age man

brought this herd here 5,000 years ago,

and they've been here ever since.

They've been hunted and harassed for millennia.

But it's something very reassuring that they're still here.

They are such powerful animals and somehow

a real symbol of ancient Ireland.

Just 20 miles north as the crow flies is the Dingle Peninsula.

When you wander the dunes here by day

you have this wonderful soundscape

of skylarks and stonechats and linnets

and those sounds slowly disappear with the setting sun.

TOADS CROAK

This is a sound that you only hear in this part of the country.

Wonderful sound.

Almost seems otherworldly to me, or certainly...

..it's hard to believe sometimes that you're in Ireland.

Here in Ireland we've only got three different kinds of amphibians.

We've got a newt, we've got a frog and one toad.

For some reason the natterjack toads ended up here

and no-one quite knows how.

Some funny anomaly from the Ice Age, maybe,

and a little population got left here.

Right now there are lots of male natterjack toads

in the ponds, hidden.

And they're calling for one purpose and one purpose only

and that is to lure the females in from the surrounding dunes.

They've been waking up from their winter slumber and they're...

..listening to these calls now and I wonder what they're thinking.

But the females could be well spread out.

They could be several hundred metres away,

which doesn't sound that far but if you're only a couple of inches long

it's quite a long journey.

TOADS CROAK

LOUD CROAKS

These little males have been waiting for this event all winter long.

It's probably the loudest natural sound in Ireland

when they all get going.

You can hear them, I reckon, a mile away on a calm night.

And those little females that are stirring on the dunes right now,

they're going to become crawling laden with eggs.

As soon as a female arrives on the edge of this pond and is spotted...

..there's going to be a little bit of a frenzy

to see who can get to her first.

Once he actually gets into what's known as amplexus,

when he tucks his arms under her,

he will not let go for love or money.

He'll stay with her right through the spawning process.

They lay these long strings of eggs and the male fertilises them

as they emerge.

And that's it done.

CROAKING

This is what this little corner of Ireland has sounded like

for thousands of years.

You could almost be by a water hole in Africa or something like that.

That's what it sort of reminds me of.

Just to be in a place with natural sounds.

You somehow feel that this is what the world should be like.

You feel very small out here sometimes.

My boat is a currach.

It's a traditional boat that would have been used

right along this coast for hundreds of years.

They were often made just from scrap wood and canvas.

It's the perfect way for exploring this coast

because it was designed here.

It was designed for these conditions.

There's a wonderful story from these parts.

It's said that there were a group of men

rowing their currach back to their home on the Blasket Islands.

And as they rowed, they heard this very strange sound -

sounds that they had never heard before in their lives,

that seemed to come from the very ocean itself,

through the skin of their boat.

Now, one of the fellows on the boat was a musician

and when he got home that night, he started composing a piece of music

based on the strange sounds that he had heard.

Now, that piece of music became a very famous Irish tune.

MUSIC: Port Na Bpucai

In the Irish language it was known as Port na bPucai.

The Song of the Fairies.

And years later, someone was listening to it

and when they thought about it, they realised

that it reminded them of the song of the humpback whale.

People said there was no way they could have heard a humpback singing.

You just didn't find humpback whales in these waters.

Amongst the dolphins, we have a visitor

and it's wonderful to see them back.

I love the sounds of their breathing.

When I was growing up, I remember I had that sort of iconic photograph

of a humpback fluke on my bedroom wall and I remember thinking,

I'd love to see one of those one day.

Well, never in a million years did I think

I'd be watching sights like this here.

This is now a relatively common sight off the west coast of Ireland.

These are almost resident humpback whales.

And the locals recognise one male humpback

that's been coming here for years.

He comes back so often, they call him Boomerang.

It seems that once one creature finds a bowl of food, a big bowl,

all the other creatures are, sort of, called in.

They could be anywhere in the whole ocean but they choose to be here.

It makes you feel a bit special.

Humpbacks have developed their own unique hunting method.

They blow circles of bubbles to frighten and corral

a shoal of the fish.

And then swallow the lot.

They're the only whale that has developed this particular

hunting technique and it seems to work incredibly effectively.

When they've had a good day's foraging,

what better way to end the day

than to lie on your back and just flail your limbs around?

Sure, why not?

Hello.

There's something youthful about them.

It's almost as if they're just enjoying themselves.

I'd like to think that other animals can be happy.

So many whale species just briefly visit the surface when they have to

to literally pick up air and disappear into the depths again

but humpbacks seem to, sort of, enjoy that transition

between sea and air, between those two dimensions.

It seems like cessation of whaling

has been a massive conservation success story

and it's taken a few decades for the numbers to come back

but the whole coast of Ireland is a whale sanctuary now,

so they're safe here.

So isn't it a wonderful thought that maybe...

..just maybe, all those years ago,

as this group of men were paddling themselves out to their island home,

there was a humpback hanging in the water

and that there was actually, somehow their craft,

the skin of their currach,

had somehow managed to pick up these calls of the humpback.

50 miles north of Kerry,

County Clare is home to one of the most unique landscapes in Ireland.

BIRDS SING

A dawn chorus.

At this time of year, it seems to hardly stop all day sometimes.

It's at its strongest early in the morning but...

..it seems to keep going for hours.

The weather is nice.

The birds just seem to sing all day long.

What a beautiful place to raise a family.

There are five chicks here this year.

That's a lot of chicks for ravens.

It just shows how productive the whole area must be.

Over here in the Burren,

there's such a variety of, sort of, habitats for them to...

to find food.

There's the seashore and there's little woodlands

and then the open limestone landscape as well.

There's no end of food

and I guess that's why they're so successful here.

Ravens will stay together for life

and then every individual raven is different.

They're amazing birds. They're so smart.

They probably know me.

They come here a few times, then they go up, back to your mam.

"Yeah, that's the short little fellow in the blue shirt again.

"He's harmless."

The people who built this place

obviously needed security.

And they built it here because they could obviously feed their community

and the raven family has chosen this site for that very same reason.

They are the kings of the castle now.

When you sit in a place like this on the Burren,

you can't help but think about change and how...

..the very landscape and nature just changes and adapts all the time.

All that exposed limestone was once at the bottom of an ocean.

This seabed moved up here from the equator,

got pushed up into mountains

and now...

you've got this extraordinary landscape.

A place that, from a distance, may look sort of barren

and lifeless and almost like a moonscape

but it's far from it.

This place is full of life

but it's life that's not always immediately obvious.

Reptiles really don't want to live in Ireland.

We only have one native species here.

That's the common lizard.

But the females, in summer, have young developing inside them

and they can be really big at this time of year.

Most lizards in the world lay eggs

but for these ones it's not an option.

It's too cold here so the females give birth to live young.

I guess it's an adaptation to northern climes.

Her job as a mother is at an end.

She looks literally deflated.

But as soon as she's given birth, that's it.

She pays no attention to the youngsters she's left behind at all.

They are completely on their own.

Some transition.

They're born within a membrane and their first job in life

is to fight their way out of that membrane.

They've got to learn to hunt and to feed themselves from day one.

They've got to find places to get warm. That's really important.

They're going to have to learn the geography

of the territory that they take up.

But they do well here.

There's no competition from other lizards, I guess,

and the land is still in good condition.

There's a lack of pesticides so there's lots of little insect food.

It's amazing what instinct can do.

Looking down on the...

beautiful old abbey,

it must have been such a hive of human activity once upon a time.

The people who built it could never foresee the day

when it would be abandoned and just overtaken by birds.

Great foraging to be had in this landscape.

Good place to be a kestrel.

They'll deliver all sorts of things back to the nest.

Little mice, birds.

Even reptiles.

They're a regular on the dinner table for kestrels.

You'd wonder how the kestrels managed to gain a foothold here

this year at all.

But my guess is there must have been a pretty determined female involved.

Not easy to nest amongst these jackdaws. Not easy to find a space.

She must have just been lucky to be in before the jackdaws arrived

and got too territorial.

Somehow, she managed to...

hold her ground, because there's big competition for space here.

JACKDAWS SQUAWK

Noisy neighbours.

But still a good place to be a kestrel.

They fix the ground with such a gaze.

Kestrels perceive the world in a very different way than we do.

When they're scanning a patch of ground

they can actually sometimes see little urine trails

that have been left by rodents.

A lot of the rodents leave trails and that can be their undoing.

Because then kestrels are not just looking at a patch of grass,

they're actually looking at a system of little, sort of, rodent highways.

They follow them and look for movement.

It looks like this family are going to do pretty well now this year.

So what more would anyone want but a family, security...

and food.

That's what we have in common with all creatures, I guess.

There's something about rowing.

It's just so gentle on the water, gentle on the planet.

And you're much more connected with the ocean

when you're in a rowing boat.

You really, sort of, appreciate and you can imagine

what's going on underneath.

All the creatures drifting in the tide.

The west of Ireland has always, sort of, attracted

these lone individual dolphins.

Some of them have lived for 30 years or more on their own.

This is Dusty and she lives her life off the coast of Clare.

She's a bottlenose dolphin and it's always bottlenose dolphins

that become these, sort of, lone individuals.

No-one quite knows why.

They're probably misfits in some way.

Don't know if they get lost or maybe they were thrown out of the pod.

For some reason they didn't fit in in some way, but they don't like

being on their own and they soon seek out human company.

Dolphins make such great travelling companions...

..and they've such an aura of real intelligence and almost compassion.

But soon she leaves me behind.

She's got her home and I've got mine.

This is where I now call home.

I first discovered Clew Bay, I guess, about 12 years ago or so.

I was moving up and down the west coast of Ireland

and, sort of, looking for a place to settle

after years of travelling.

I remember just thinking there was something very restful

and peaceful about this place.

This is really my halfway point.

I see Clew Bay as the halfway point along the west coast of Ireland.

Everything changes north of here now.

North of here is somehow, sort of, wilder, less tame, less visited.

Lots of little islands. I don't know it well.

I'm looking forward to getting to know it better.

Look at this.

What an extraordinary beautiful creature that is.

It feels like I've, sort of, landed on some tropical paradise.