FILMED in 145 locations with 96 species captured on film, it took the Wild Isles documentary crew 1,631 days to film just five episodes.

The third episode aired on Sunday, March 26 and was partly filmed on Salisbury Plain.

The grassland episode is introduced by Sir David Attenborough from a hay meadow in Dorset.  

In the episode, viewers will be invited to take a closer look at grassland habitats and the behaviour of the mason bee which was referred to by the film crew as the ‘witch bee’ as it can look as if riding a miniature broomstick as it flies with grass stalks to make a nest.

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Producer Nicolas Gates said: “The two-coloured mason bee, our ‘witch bee’, whizzes around chalk grasslands looking for empty snail shells of the exact right size.

“Like Goldilocks with her porridge testing, the female two-coloured mason bee will check lots of empty shells in the grassland, some are too big, some are too small or damaged until she finds just the right one within which to lay her egg.”

The two-coloured mason bee nests in disused snail shells and these are concealed with dry grass stalks.  A macro lens was used to capture the bee’s behaviour as up to 100 grass stalks were collected.

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Sir David also looks at a killer caterpillar that uses methods of deception to find its food before emerging as a large blue butterfly.

The butterfly was once extinct in the UK but it is now home to one of the largest concentrations of large blue butterflies anywhere in the world.

It is the first time a species' lifestyle has ever been captured on video in full and the filming took over three years.

Other significant moments include boxing hares filmed in Suffolk, mating adders in Northumberland and wild horses in Cambridgeshire and on Salisbury Plain.

Grasslands is available on iPlayer.