Tonight’s (3rd December) Natural World on BBC 2, filmed by Fergus Beeley and with the RSPB’s Mull Officer, Dave Sexton, as an adviser,  was one of the most inspirational tributes to Scotland imaginable.

Shot at Loch Maree by a film-maker whose love of this place is in every frame of the film and in every word spoken, it quietly found and revealed the wealth of wildlife present in the three worlds and lived with them in their mythic negotiations to survive.

It showed the points of benevolent intervention by man. Wardens in the area, for good reason, create floating rafts of living vegetation that rise and fall with the waters of Loch Maree. These create a safe nesting habitat for the rare Black-throated Divers – so graceful afloat but so laboriously unable on land that they have to lay and nest within feet of the shoreline. Loch Maree’s capacity to rise fast in sudden rain storms, not by feet but by metres, threatens the survival of chicks in such circumstances.

Anyone who has seen swans struggle with their long take-offs from and landings on the water has seen nothing until they witness the footage in this film of a Black-throated Diver chick taking off for its first flight. After a couple of exhausting failures, it finally makes it – as it must – but its landing back on the water is a spectacle we would not wish to sell short. See it on iPlayer.

A pair of white tailed Sea Eagles see their two chicks through to fledging and, in one case, a breathtakingly dangerous first flight. This, of course, is Dave Sexton’s area of expertise, evident in his responsibilities at Mull’s Loch Frisa Eagle Hide. Watching these huge birds effortlessly ride the thermals in the hills and above the woodlands around Loch Maree is an object lesson in the affinity being living beings and elemental forces.

Red deer stags roared in their rut and stomped the ground with almost dressage precision in their displays of warrior power. The few salmon left to return to Loch Maree waited for the rains to create the routes way upstream for them to lay their eggs.

The weather was sometimes miraculous, usually bone-strippingly wet and windy, always at one with the landscape of this proud, wild place.

Death and life became indistinguishable in a continuum of uncertain conclusion.

In every sense this programme was the essence of Scotland, given the room to speak for itself with a gently non-invasive commentary. It was impeccable film-making and if you missed it, this is where the iPlayer will increase its fan base.

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