 to protect.ie for more information. You're listening to John Breslin on Around the Northwest every weekday from 12 on Highland Radio. Yeah, and here we are for this Tuesday afternoon and it's from the environment now to, well, in a way more about the environment but more about nature and the wildlife because Angus Kennedy from Nature Northwest has joined me in studio. Angus, thanks for coming in. John, how are you doing? Yeah, very good. Let us just pull it back down a little bit towards you. There we go. Now, if we could start with geese because Brent geese, they're quite the spectacle and especially in the numbers that we were lucky enough to get here and they're still with us, but just about. Just about, yeah. I saw some yesterday. I was out walking up in Fannity yesterday and saw six of them poking away amongst the seaweed. They're amazing creatures. They're the smallest of our geese. So a bit bigger than a mallard, maybe kind of two kilos or a little over two kilos in weight or so. I am very dark, dark neck. I am dark back and then a light front. But they're incredible birds. They come and visit us for the winter like so many birds do and look for protection and safety here in the wintertime and very shortly they'll be taking a massive journey back to where they migrate. OK. And they'll be heading off, I presume, well rested and well fed. Well, that's the idea, yeah. So that's where it's so important for us to protect our habitats, to make sure that there's enough food for them, enough shelter for them. They arrive down here to escape the cold and they tend to come into Donegal around about autumn time, October, November or so, and they eat the eel grass. So they go to the salt marshes. So if you think of the places in the estuaries or the little corners and the beaches where the waves don't get to too much that are a bit muddier and they're very specific types of grasses and then the green algae, not always the green seaweeds, and that grow there, they'll eat up on that and then once they've depleted all of that and eaten all of that food stock, they then tend to spread around the countryside. And I get a text normally around about mid-December every year from my brothers who say that they've arrived in Dublin. Ah, so they spread around the country and they go in a clockwise direction. Is that right when they start to? Yeah, so they come via Iceland. So Iceland's their last resting point before they make their jump down to us in autumn time. And the first place they see, of course, is the northwest coast. So they hit all along the north coast, Stranford Loch has big, big numbers of them. Loch Foyle has big numbers of them. Loch Swilly has good numbers too. And then they spread all around the coastal areas. So coast is what they like, but they've been known to go into towns too. All right. And then they head off round about this time of the year very shortly to go back to their breeding grounds. Yeah, so they've been fattening up. They've eaten a whole load of grass on football pitches in Finglas and Fairview and all over the country and all over our cities. And then come back up and they start building up again on the coastline, eating the very last reserves that they can or building up as much reserves they can. So eating the last of the food that's there before they make the hop to Iceland first, then eventually to Greenland around about May or so. And then from May they will head off right into the islands inside the Arctic Circle in Canada. If you're near a computer right now, open up Google Maps and Google Ellismere Island. Ellismere Island in Canada. And it's deep, deep inside the Arctic Circle across from the north of Greenland. And these birds that you can see right now, Rapmullin and Fanon, Duckmore, any of these places, that's where they'll be in a few weeks time. And in comparison to other birds, they have a long life expectancy. Yeah, they do. They can live for a very long time. They don't start breeding for a couple of years, but Brent geese can easily live for 20 years. And they'll stay together as partners. Now, occasionally the females have been known to breed with some of the other males as well, but in general the pairs will stay together and look after their brood and raise their brood. And the whole family actually stays together when they come on their migration down to Donegal. And in fact, the geese I was looking at over the last couple of days up along some of the beaches and fanat, you could see some of the geese swimming towards a little bit aggressively towards some of the other ones. And you can see them sticking out their head and kind of swimming towards them, making little rushes at them. They weren't actually fighting, but that's them starting to try and push their offspring away and say, it's time you started to find in your own way. Just like people might be gently thinking how are they going to remove the teenager from their house. That's what's happening. Or the early adult, what way can we facilitate that? And that's what the Brent geese do. Okay, Brent, where's the name Brent come from? The Brent is, it's a Viking or a Norman kind of word. And it comes from Brant, which means burnt. And in fact, quite a lot of our language comes off, comes from the Vikings or comes from the Norwegians of that kind of age. But Brant means burnt and they're a very dark looking as if they've been covered in a bit of salt, a bit of ash. And if you think of the spring tides that we've just had there recently, the big, big tides. And we think now, this time of year, spring tides. So we get spring tides every two years. Or sorry, every two weeks for every new moon and every full moon, we get a spring tide. And that's from the word sprung and also an Norwegian word or a Viking word, sprung and to rise for the big tides. Yeah, so we take a lot of our language from there. All right, so I checked them out. Still here at the moment, but heading off very shortly, Brent geese from, from birds to bees. And in this case, bumblebees because we're going to start seeing more and more of bumblebees now. And there's, there's any number of different species of bumblebees here now, isn't there? Yeah, we've just over a hundred species of bee. And there's one honey bee. So an awful lot of people think bee and they think honey, but there's actually only one that, that, pretty much the whole colony survives all year round and makes honey to, to aid in its winter time, winter survival, but all the rest of them. And they're either sultry bees and bumblebees. And we've 21 species of bumblebee. And some of them are out on the wing right now. Okay. So bumblebees aren't honey producing, are they? They're not honey producing. So they, the honey bee produces its store of, of honey from the nectar that it collects. And that gets the whole colony through the winter time when there's very little flowers, of course. Whereas the bumblebees, what they do is they will collect some nectar, right? For when the weather is tough and they'll make little wax pots and they'll put the nectar into the wax pots for days where we get a whole load of prolonged rain or if the conditions are very, very cold. But they're relying on, on those few days of store. They can't build up more than a few days store. So they're relying on the weather turning very quickly as it usually does in Ireland, yeah. So they're only really a hop and a skip away from, you know, really running, running out of three weeks on the streets as they say. Yeah. They're, they're very close to, to not surviving yet because they need to visit literally thousands of flowers every single day. And they come out, of course, the timing of the big queens that have been sleeping all winter long. The timing is just as the first of the spring flowers come out and they're, they're relying on that. You'll see them desperately going to anything. Could be an Escalonia hedge in your garden. Could be dandelions, could be prim roses underneath a few trees. But they're looking for flower for hard fire. And they're trying to bring home those stocks into their new hives, start to build up those stocks for the, for the eggs that they'll be laying very soon. And of course for themselves. Some of them have similar colouring to wasps, but they don't, they don't sting like wasps. They don't, they can sting, the females can sting. Now the males will emerge a little bit later in the year and they can sting, but females can sting and the honeybee can sting you and it leaves the sting behind and then that's the bee and it dies. So if the honeybee stings, it's a huge sacrifice. Whereas the bumblebees can sting you a few times before they need to take a break and build up their little, little stock of venom. However, they rarely do. The bumblebee will only sting you if it gets caught in your toes of your open-toed sandal. Or if they pick them up and squish them or something, not aggressive, absolutely not. No, I've often had school groups and if people know what they're doing and they're being careful, but young children catching them in little jars they can figure out which species is which and they're quite easy to tell apart if you get a close look at them. Okay, okay. And there's, they, how far, I mean, if they, if they're around and busy from plant to plant now how far away from the nest would they go? Yeah, so it's one of the, not terribly far is the thing and it's one of the optimistic things about restoring nature and looking after nature. We know and we've talked about so many times that so much of our biodiversity or our nature is in trouble and one of the efforts that needs to be done is each and every one of us needs to provide a little bit of a safe haven for nature. And the bumblebees, they can go up to five kilometers but often they'll go no more than a kilometer or so from wherever their hive is in your garden, in the ditch nearby you. And they can, on average, now I've been very sweeping but on average a bumblebee will fly about 500 meters before it'll collapse at starvation. So it needs to get flowers in between that. And if you look around wherever, when you're out in your walk now for the next few days look around the countryside and see how many flowers there are. We've a lot of beautiful countryside but an awful lot of it doesn't have much color and it's a lot of green, it doesn't have much color. So we're looking to the ditches, to the hedges and to the little wild corners of our fields and our gardens for the dandelions, for the primroses, for the cellentines that are all right right now. And these wee creatures are vital for pollination. So it is important that we look after them and give them maybe a wee bit of an area if we can to... Hugely important, hugely important. And they pollinate an awful lot of our wild crops or an awful lot of our wild flowers and they pollinate a lot of our trees, so the willow at the moment. If you have a few willow sally bushes in your garden leave them be because they're full of their big fluffy catkins which are full of food for those bees. And they pollinate a lot of our food as well. One third of the foods that we'll all consume is pollinated by some species of bee somewhere along the line. So we need our bees, they're hugely important for our food. 086, 60, 25,000 is our text number if you'd like to put a question to Angus. Someone says that I saw a badger recently and it was still daylight, is this unusual? Well, a little bit earlier, now you'd expect to see them coming out because they're going to have their cubs now very soon and they're going to be foraging a bit more for food for that. And of course in the wintertime they can be quite desperate looking for food. So if it's a quiet area, if it's a non-disturbed area you can see them during the daytime, all right, yeah. Around about this time of year now they'll start to get a bit more nervous with their young. However, they have that desperate hunt for food all the time. Anytime I've seen them during the day has been winter and late winter typically as well. So much of a wildlife, it really is all about food. I mean, they have to survive and they have to go out and get their own food. They don't go down to the supermarket. Completely, and we've detached ourselves from that in process. We have our wonderful farmers out there producing our food and then we've all the other steps before we go and get it ourselves. Whereas that's exactly it. And an awful lot of the animals all they're looking for is a little bit, a little patch. And those little few dandelions, those little bits of willow shrubs, but connectivity is the thing. As long as your garden has a bit and my garden has a bit and the farmer next door has a bit, well then they have a chance. They don't have to go long distances. Yeah, and the badger's the exact same. The badger's looking for healthy soil so we can dig up its worms, its snails, its beetles and whatnot. And again, it needs a little bit in everybody's patch. And that's what it lives on. And that's what it lives on. Yeah, the badger will eat a dinner plate of worms, grubs, leather jackets, all those things that live in the soil every single night, which is an awful lot of food. So you'll often see little patches of the garden dug up. And that's a good sign for the badger presence. Yeah. There's an ornithologist who's coming to Greenland Theatre in Amonstown actually at the start of May and is on quite an unusual mission really and a fairly exhaustive one at that. And that is to record the sound of every bird in Ireland. Every bird species. Every bird species in Ireland. Every bird species, yeah, yeah. Phenomenal thing, because if you think of how many birds there are and then think to yourself, how many birds can I list? And when I go into schools, students will often list maybe 12, 15, maybe up to 20 of them between the whole lot. Well, we've about 450 bird species. Actually, it's 475 is the latest figure from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. But that's a few years old, so there'll be more than that again. 475 birds have been recorded in Ireland, passing through Ireland at some stage. And there's over 200 birds breed in Ireland. So come here to have their families here. And he's trying to record every single one of these. So which of the breeding birds and to pick up as many of the others that he can as well. So an amazing thing to do. We all hear the birds singing at the moment. They're all proclaiming their territorial rights. They're all trying to attract a mate. And of course, they've got very loud in the last few weeks early in the morning, which is a wonderful thing. But to try. For the most part. For the most part. Well, and we get very used to it. And if you are lying in bed and they've woken you up, try and pick out the different species. It's a little bit like listening to an orchestra and somebody might say, right, try and pick out what the trumpet is playing or what the oboe was playing. And to try and pick out different species and different sounds. If you do lie there for a little while, think about it or sit in your garden, think about it. You will be able to start picking out the robin sound is very distinctive. The wren is very shrill and very different. The song choices are much deeper sound. What this guy is trying to do, what Sean is trying to do and it's a very difficult thing to do is to record each one in its habitat and be able to differentiate it from all the others. So be able to record it without the clamour of all the other birds there as well. So it's not a matter of sticking a microphone up into each of the different habitats we haven't seen. There we go, that's great. It's getting them at the right time. Each one individually. And of course, a lot of that has taken a huge amount of journey, a huge amount exploring across the country, being in contact with all sorts of different bird experts. So there's a wonderful bird illustrator and bird artist called Robert Vaughan and he lives in Donegal. And Robert and Sean have worked together a lot. And Robert will have taken them to some place where some of the rare birds are in Donegal and we're lucky up here. We have some species like the ring-usel that don't exist tragically anywhere else or the red-throated diver that don't breed anywhere else in Ireland. And Rob would have been able to work with Sean and help them record these, you know. So what Sean's doing with this is it's actually a film and then there's sort of a question and answer session after the film. Yeah, so the RCC, Regional Cultural Centre, have been very good. They have a festival of sound in May, May-Bank holiday weekend and they've included this. So one o'clock on Saturday the 4th. It'll be there and they have to book tickets. And the movie is around about, it's just shy of an hour, it's about 50 minutes or so. We'll do a very quick introduction to it and then myself and Rob are going to do a little questions and answers session afterwards. So it'll be the journey of Sean around the country of how we recorded and why we recorded these different birds. And there's a good bit of footage for Donegal as well because of course a lot of it was recorded up here, which is wonderful. And then the questions and answers session afterwards. So anybody, be it families, be it anybody interested in birds that wants to come along, book one of your tickets for this because it'll be an amazing opportunity to pick the amazing brain of Robert Vaughan and start getting some of your bird questions answered. Okay, brilliant. So that's happening on Saturday the 4th of May, at one o'clock at the regional cultural centre. Regional cultural centre, yeah. After book tickets, I'll pop up a link to the event right thing. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Brilliant, thanks Mildred.