NCEO and UCL’s Dr Mat Disney and Dr Phil Wilkes used scanners to produce content for this evening’s BBC4 TV programme “The British Garden: life and death on your lawn”, to be shown at 9pm.

Chris Packham and a group of experts spent 12 months scrutinising the wildlife in eight gardens on a suburban street in Welwyn Garden City. Throughout the seasons they find male crickets that bribe females with food during sex, spiders that change colour to help catch prey, and ferocious life-and-death battles in the compost heap. They also shows a different side to familiar garden residents, revealing how a robin’s red breast is actually war paint, and a single litter of foxes can have up to five different fathers.