This week's programme in the series on Man and Science today.
Counting caterpillars on five oak trees for 20 years; walking a thousand miles around weasel traps; weighing shrews at 11 o'clock at night in December: all are part of the normal habits of the zoologists of Wytham Wood.
The wood is 1,000 beautiful undisturbed acres, largely oaks and beeches, on a hill above the Thames near Oxford. It's probably the most studied and best understood wood in the world. The people who work there are trying to unravel the web of controls and checks that keep all the 4,000 different kinds of creature in the wood in balance.
The Wood was filmed between February 1970 and February 1971, and so takes you round with these people for a year, a short time in studies that may take 20 or even 50 years to finish.
Introduced by Dr Malcolm Coe.
(Colour)