 this Monday afternoon now it's time to get out into the wilds out into the great outdoors and spring is a great time obviously for those that are interested in those of us who have a passion for or just a passing interest in what is it around us because you know you have the wee lambs jumping about in the fields and leaves are sprouting on trees and of course wild flowers are starting to bloom and birds are coming back so it's a it's a it's a great time and Ingus Kennedy from Nature Northwest is here in studio to enlighten us a little bit and and sort of to flesh out some some of the stuff that we are seeing around us. Ingus, you're welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Good to be here. Now let's talk about flowers first of all and at this time of the year I suppose when we're looking around we well we think about daffodils and snow drops and so on but there's there's a lot of flowers and you mentioned off air there a second ago a lot of yellow flowers to look out for that are coming into bloom now this time. Yeah some people even call this time of year yellow season this little period around about the equinox or just after the equinox now which is that equal period of day and night and every day the day is getting a bit longer and there's more energy and our flowers are responding and a lot of the very first flowers to come out are the flowers that will attract the bumblebees and bumblebees love yellow so a lot of the flowers that are coming out now are yellow flowers. This is all a part of the cycle and the bumblebees are coming out and they're going to need food and so we need them to look for food and pollinate is that it works? That's exactly it and all of these crucial links that are happening and help us and help our farmers grow our crops and help you grow your your plants and your vegetables in your garden your plants in your garden your flowers your wildflowers that we have one third of the food that we all eat comes from pollinated crops so crops that have had bumblebees and butterflies and what's not visiting them and this time year the new bumblebees have emerged they've been sleeping the Queens last year's Queens that were born late in the summer and they went and they hibernated effectively for the for the wintertime and they've emerged now very very hungry and they need food and they're on the lookout especially for yellow flowers. And they fly low is that right? Yes you can see them well you'll see them in all sorts of different places they can be as big as as half a year at home so they're big some of them can not far off an inch or certain three quarters of an inch big round hairy and bumbling bumblebees the wonderful things make a great sound and they'll be up high in the likes of the willow trees they'll be at anywhere that they will find some some flowers but if you see them low and cruising across your lawn or cruising across the ditches and underneath the hedges that's them sending with their feet because they have scent lands in their little feet and they're trying to pick up little traces of old nests of maybe mouse nests and they're looking for a place to start a nest themselves to lay some eggs and start their own colony for the summer so that's what they're at when you see them flying low on that. Scanning around and you'll often see them then stop for a little break because they work pretty hard they're feeding as much as they can themselves and they're looking for that new nest place and they're full of eggs so you'll often see them stopping if you do see them stopping leave them alone if they're still there after an hour or two maybe you could give them a little bit of them. Well yeah a little bit of water with sugar diluted and it's a good thing to give them a little feed if there isn't enough flowers about but this time of year you'll see them stopping take a little break and then cruising around exploring those ditches. Why are they called bumblebees? Because they look like the the bumble from flower to flower. Yeah well I suppose it's their flight pattern and the flight of the bumblebee and if you've never heard the flight of the bumblebee Google that and it's just the most amazing piece of music and it's fantastic thing and it really encapsulates their pattern they do seem to fly all over the place but they're remarkably strong remarkably resilient little characters really they're out now which is a little bit early for a lot of the insects a lot of the insects would be too cold the frosty nights be too cold but bumblebees have an ability to be able to buzz on the ground or underneath the ground in their nest if that's what they are to effectively like shivering like we do which builds up their body heat because their body heat needs to be fairly close to what ours is their internal body temperature and then once they've built up that temperature their hairy little body helps insulate them and off they go and they fly off in their in their bumbling way and then when they find a place to nest what's what's the process in what starts in yeah so then they'll go in and they'll create little chambers and they'll start to out of out of a wax that they're able to create and then they lay their eggs into that and then they keep flying out to flowers and they will visit potentially thousands of flowers in a day and they're looking for the nectar which is at the bottom of the flower themselves that's for their own fuel but they're also looking for the pollen and if you have a little look at a bumblebee in your garden or in the ditch or next time you're walking stop and watch them and often you'll see a little orange or a little yellow sticky deposit on their legs and that's the pollen that they're collecting and they're sticking it on to their legs because they bring that back to the nest and they feed that to the babies so the the the next generation of them the worker bees which are little clones of that queen they will all eat that pollen to start off and then they'll start collecting pollen themselves once that once they form into adults and at that stage the queen doesn't leave again stays in the nest keeps laying eggs keeps laying eggs but she'll never leave that nest again now into home okay if you've got a question for Angus then feel free to get in touch you at six sixty twenty five thousand that is by text message or also on whatsapp now just going back to a flowers common flowers that we see a lot of yellow flowers suppose we mentioned yellow flowers have to think of buttercups yeah so buttercups are are starting off now and there's a few there's actually four different buttercups that we have in Ireland and the creeping buttercup which is very common in the lawn they'll be coming up quite soon and then there's a taller one that we'll see if we don't go cutting all of our our roadside verges and the little wild corners and our fields and our gardens and you'll get this beautiful flower called the meadow buttercup and it'll grow up as tall as your knee and then there's another one that's very like the buttercup it's part of the buttercup family called selendine and it's really abundant now and a lot of people will know the selendines they've got eight petals and they've got a little heart shape leaf and they start appearing around about valentine's day and i remember when i was learning that's how i remember the name because it sounds a bit like valentine that's how my my head works and that association that little association yeah and the selendine with its heart shape leaf appears around valentine's day and it'll keep flowering now for the next few weeks and crucial as as a pollen source for those early bumble bees and for some of the other species that come out now as well plus very beautiful for us to look at you know what about the cow slip when does it cow slip is now as well and cow slip is part of the primrose family the primula family and prime of course meaning number one so the prime rose the very first of the roses that comes out so the primrose the cow slip they start appearing now from well even in march and certainly april onwards and and they've an amazing story the amazing distribution pattern if you think of the primroses in particular the cow slips which is like a tall primrose and we don't get as many of those unfortunately we need our wildflower meadows they would have been something that would have been very common 30 40 50 years ago i am but there's not as many places the many more primroses are hardier as in they're able to survive in little ditches and damp places so they're still clinging on to the edges that we haven't them and they're beautiful we haven't they look very delicate but they're beautiful very beautiful looking thing and they have that light light yellow and that's what lures in the pollinating insect the pollinating insects can see in a uv spectrum that we can't see at all so those yellows that you see all around us at the moment they're shining out as if they were lit up with little leds and to the to the pollinators and the pollinator sees that bright bright yellow and that light bright yellow and then it lands and if you look closely at a primrose and stop beside one today now over the next few days if you're walking out and about over the east to break and you'll see the deeper yellow on the inside and that's like the like the runway lights i suppose for the bumble bee and it knows where to go in and it goes down into that into that hole that that that deep yellow guides it into gets the nectar for itself gets the pollen for its babies pollinates the flowers while they're at it and the flower gets fertilized but their story doesn't end there because how do the seeds then spread once those flowers are are fertilized or pollinated they'll of course turn into seeds and or fertilize the seeds the seeds will develop and then those seeds need to spread around the place and how that's done is is quite an amazing thing really speaking of pollinators birds are not the or and bumble bees not the only pollinators because there's ants can pollinate as well now i didn't know that but and there's a special a certain name for it there is yeah it's a word of the day today merma coquery merma coquery is is ant farming and the the fancy term for ant farming is merma coquery and that doesn't mean humans going off and farming ants it means ants farming themselves just like we collect seeds and we collect seeds to eat yourselves for later on to turn into bread or to grow more crops well the some species of ant do the same thing with seeds as well and it's such a common thing it's it's it's got its own word known as merma coquery um and next time you see a primrose next time you walk past you drive past a primrose um there's a good chance if a human didn't put it there it was planted by merma coquery by ants because primroses and quite a range of flowers do this the dog violets do this the wood anemones do this um so a lot of flowers that'll be familiar to to people out and about um the the little seeds have a tiny packet of nutrition onto them and built onto them as an extra piece jutting out and the ants use that like a little handle and they're able to carry it off to their nest site um and then they store that and they feed that to their babies or feed it to themselves later on they eat that little package of nutrition and then they discard the seed the seed might be thrown out of the ant hive or it might be put into a kind of rubbish pile type place that they have ants are a very organized little creature um and then that seed will be able to germinate and grow it'll be completely unharmed so it's a wonderful relationship the primrose uh or the wood anemone is providing food for the ants and the ants are providing um seed distribution for those creatures we've we've all seen the david attenborough shows with the ants carrying leaves across the jungle in panama or wherever it is well this same kind of thing is going on just on the smaller scale in your garden or in your woodland and the the crucial thing for us to make sure we still have primrose is is to make sure we have little corridors for these creatures to go and that's where our ditches are wonderful ditches that we haven't done at all our wonderful hedgerows that we haven't done at all are so important to keep those little corridors safe and keep them full of different plants because it's not just the birds that we often talk about that use those corridors and use those little mini habitats it's creatures like ants as well planting primrose for our uh our our entertainment around easter i just before we move on from uh plants that are in bloom or coming into bloom the the the black thorn black thorn is one of my very favorites and it's an amazing plant of contrast uh black thorn is invisible to most of us most of the year it's fairly common as a hedgerow plant again i am not nearly as common as as the better known hawthorn i'm and the hawthorn its leaves are coming out now that bright bright um green that lovely light green leaf is out now it'll darken now over the next few weeks but um right now you see it popping out the its flowers the hawthorn's flowers won't come out until may it's often called the may bush whereas black thorn is a little different the black thorn the flowers are out now and the the thorns and the branches on it are um are very dark hence the name but they really pop out so if you're out and about right now or later on today look around you because they won't last much longer black thorn only lasts for it for a couple of weeks really and it's it's been flowering for the last two weeks um and you'll see these beautiful little five petaled bright bright white flowers and oftentimes when the weather is still you'll see lots of hoverflies and bees and other characters they love that are using but they love them and then once those flowers fall off in the next few days and the next good good bit of wind and bit of cold weather and the rest um the black thorn fades back into the hedge and we don't really notice it again until autumn time um when we see it's it's lovely slows lovely colorful purple berries now birds are coming here in greater numbers at this time of the year and coming here for well milder weather in some cases it's not that it's very mild out there today but also for food for the abundance of food that we have in this country so the the more popular ones now to to look out for would include what swallow is that the swallow will come back quite soon um there hasn't been any swallows well actually there was a sighting of one last week in Donegal um one swallow but really it's another few weeks it's the end of this month before they come back sometimes even into May um but they're on the way um there's plenty of sightings of them in France the sightings of them in Britain um they will spread up um throughout throughout Ireland very soon but already some of the warblers which are small little birds but the size of a robin quite often um kind of olivey browny type colors quite often hide quite well but going by their name the warblers they love to sing and they've amazing song so the chif chafe warblers already arrived um there's another little warbler called the black cap little gray bird but it would have black cap on its head or the female has a bright orange cap on its head and they have a beautiful song I and I saw my first one of those in Milford just yesterday well I heard it first and then spotted so those birds are coming back up from Africa um another one to watch out for that that is a lovely thing is along the coast you'll hear the scratchy sound of the uh sandwich turns and there's a few different species of turns and turns look very like seagulls like seagulls with very sharp wings I suppose very stiff sharp wings but the turns they dive down for their food so they won't land onto the water and pop their head in they'll dive from a height they'll hover and dive and that's how you know them and it's a real sign of of the changing of season if you're walking on a beach anywhere around on a gul I think a lot of us would have seen them in action maybe even and you know assumed that there were there were gulls but there well maybe gulls is the generic term for it with it they're a little bit different a little bit different so the gull family and some of them are with us all year some come and visit us in the winter and others then come up um this way for the summer to breed um but the turns are different again and some of the turns have the Arctic turn for instance one of the longest migrations of any bird I am in the world they're amazing things really there's quite a few different species of term the sandwich turn the most common of them so the most likely one that you're going to come across and you'll hear it's screeching sound if you hear a sound you've got to tune in the ears but you hear sound that's a little bit different to just the normal call of the gulls look up and look around you and you'll see these characters diving down and then coming up with tiny little sound deals or or little sprouts that we have all along our estuaries I am there they're a beautiful sight and another reminder of how we need to look after our water what goes into our water courses what goes into our sea because these characters have been coming before ever we decided to pitch up and build our towns and villages and the rest and whether it's slightly bigger birds like terns or the smaller birds like challenges and swallows and so on where where is the best place to see them should it be along the coast or do do birds go back to where they were the previous year or they go in some go inland some stay near the coast yeah so so very much depends and in the um in the winter time is all about the coastal birds so in the winter time we got all the swans and the geese and the waiters the ones the big long beaks and of course all the different types of ducks and they're still here in the likes of the Brent geese I saw some of those just yesterday and they will be heading back up to their breeding grounds inside the Arctic Circle in Canada the Brent goose and they'll be heading back up there very soon the next couple of weeks they'll suddenly be gone and so we do get a certain amount of coastal birds like those terns that come and visit and those others as well um but really uh the dawn chorus that we think of around this time of year that's woodland you need woodland you need trees you need scrub and the more density you have the more layers in a woodland the more um is the likes of the willow orbiter that's going to come back one of our most common um migratory species over a million willow orbiters are going to land now in the next few weeks more hiding places that they have more hiding places and they nest low down they nest below your knee height so they need really dense vegetation to make sure the cat can find them and the and all the other characters um whereas some of the other birds then the chif chaff which looks very like a willow orbiter but has a different sound it'll nest a bit higher up or the black cap a bit higher up so um anywhere where you can get a good vegetation mix but go into those woods go into those native woods um that have lots of shrubs lots of native trees go to Glen Bay go to aards I was um we did a walk last weekend or last friday in aards friary and the the birdsong was just fantastic I'm walking all the way around there true into aards forest park is it's sensational all right uh finally Angus and staying on the subject of birds you're giving a talk later this month in letter kenny about just ordinary garden birds yes so this is something that is um organized by letter kenny tidytowns and letter kenny is lucky it's a very active very engaged tidytown group and and they're not just about tidying they they get the idea of the environment and looking after the environment and they they run some some pretty interesting talks so they did a couple of great talks on bees last year so I'll have to um I'll have to be on my game because they've set a high standard uh we're going to be doing a talk on the 19th of april in the station house um and it's at 8 p.m but now you have to book so letter kenny tidytowns on their facebook page they will have up in the next few days an event bright link and I'll share that in my own social media channels too um and then you'll book through there um and we're going to be talking about birds garden birds what they drew through the four seasons and we're going to talk a little bit about some lost sounds as well birds like the uh like the curlew um and like the lapwing that used to be really common in the fields around us but now are nearly gone um so we'll touch on that too okay anchors until next time thank you brilliant thanks John