 Hello and welcome to tonight's event from the British Library presented in partnership with Penguin Live. I'm Brett Walsh of the Cultural Events Department and I'm delighted to welcome you to this conversation on the wonder of birds. Now we've got a stellar panel for you tonight but before I hand over to them I have a few points of housekeeping. Below the video you will find a form where you can submit questions. We'll be running a Q&A session towards the end of the event. You can also find links to buy all of the books that we'll be discussing tonight and those links are also below the video. Now chairing tonight's discussion is Kitty Corrigan. She is a freelance writer and journalist living in the Welsh Borders. Before moving to Hay on Why she was based in London where she was the deputy editor of Country Living Magazine for 16 years. She has a special interest in climate and environmental issues and I've no doubt she'll be an excellent chair for tonight's event. So without further ado I'll hand over to Kitty. Thank you. Hello and welcome and we're going to start tonight's session with a reading by Bill Bailey from his book and I should just explain that his book is designed in a slightly unconventional way. It's in the form of a scrap book written with a vintage typewriter with all sorts of different coloured ribbons and bits and bobs stuck in with paperclips and yellow sticky tape. So it's not like your average book and it's also got all his own illustrations. So here he is to read from the introduction. Hello everyone. Bill Bailey here. I'll be reading a few extracts from my book Remarkable Guides of British Birds and a bit later I'll be taking a couple of questions from the other speakers. This is the actual introduction from my book. So here we go. Once during a walking holiday in the jungles of Indonesia I asked an old friend Victor who has lived in the tropics for 40 years if there was anything he missed about Britain. The colours he said, everything in the tropics is exotic, vivid, in your face. I miss the muted shades of Britain, the autumn and mostly the delicate subtle colours of British birds. It's true in those latitudes there is a profusion of colour to the point of gaudiness where the exotic becomes commonplace. Vicks hankering for drabness stuck in my mind and when I got home I found myself taking another look at the birds I've grown up watching in my back garden. Every shade of brown, every heathery hue sparked off a renewed appreciation of our own more dowdy avian companions. And yet the iridescence of a starling, the bright jewel that is a goldfinch, the tiny flash of electric blue on a jay's wing, our native birds still dazzle, albeit in an understated way. Not as spectacular as a bird of paradise perhaps, but just as beautiful and a lot easier to see. So this is my scrapbook, 51 of my favourite British birds, most of them are fairly common, some less so, but they all have something remarkable about them. Birds are all around and the more you discover them the more they will entertain and delight you. Thank you and we're going to hear more from Bill later on, but I'm going to start the questions with Helen McDonald, author of Vesper Flights. Helen, Bill in his book he dedicates it to his parents who instilled in him a love of the natural world and it sounds as if you had a similar experience. You grew up in a large walled estate, a parkland, where you were able to roam free and explore, but you were also bullied at school and so nature was one way of seeking refuge. Can you tell us a little bit more about your childhood and how you became so involved with the natural world? Yeah, I had this really bonkers childhood. My parents were both kind of hard-bitten journalists, wonderful people, and they bought this tiny little house on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society, this sort of really quite esoteric 19th century spiritual society and it was very safe, it was kind of crumbling, crumbling ruin of a place and I spent a lot of time out on my own watching birds and looking for animals and it was a real kind of, I don't know, a hunt for companionship, you know, it's the turnover rocks, my parents would get cross with me, I used to destroy the rockery every morning looking for bugs, you know, and I think it's like really lovely, you know, we so often think of nature as something we should test ourselves against or compare ourselves against or sort of conquer, but it was very much like, you know, me, I wanted to learn the names of all these animals the same way I wanted to learn the names of my friends at school, they were kind of family to me and that really got me into being a naturalist, that just constant exposure to the natural world, it was, it was a refuge but it was also a place of safety, yeah, it was really great. So your previous book, H is for Hulk, it won so many awards, how was it, how did it feel to then sit down and start another book, did you give yourself time to reflect or did you start right away? Yeah, I know right, the difficult second album syndrome, I didn't expect the first book to do well at all, it was an extraordinary surprise, so a lot of the things in this book, a lot of them were commissions for newspapers and magazines like the New York Times magazine, so I already had some written and a lot of those are written sort of late at night in hotels while I was on tour, you know, I used to joke with my publishers about, you know, maybe the subtitle could be, you know, 3am weeping in hotel rooms, but my tour took me to many different parts of the world and I got to see nature and particularly birds all over the place and I thought to myself there's something about the essay form that I really love, they always feel to me a bit like a conversation with a reader rather than sort of a lesson, you know, that they're me finding things out about the natural world and I'll place in it and I just thought it would be really lovely to kind of collect them together and make this thing that was like a kind of a cabinet of wonders, I think what I'm trying to do is just get across the astonishing diversity and wonder of the natural world to readers and I hope that I've done that in its pages. I expected the book Vesper Flights to be all about birds but in fact there's lots of different animals and also different subjects, I mean there's one essay about a Syrian refugee and one about having migraines, you travel to Chile, Hungary, Turkey, you talk about volcanoes and deserts, so how did you decide to pick which topics for that collection and in what order you should place them? Yeah, there is a whole bunch of different stuff in there, I mean there was a few that didn't go in, there was a big essay on Star Wars that I was told didn't really fit, I was quite grumpy about that, it's like I really like Star Wars. Putting them all in together though, what ended up happening was a dear friend of mine, Christina, who's in the book as a wonderful Australian philosopher was visiting and we just printed out all the essays and put them on this big table I've got in the kitchen and spent a day just sort of swearing and drinking coffee and putting them in order and I hope that the book has a kind of a story to it, it takes you from my very early childhood right the way through my life and then back to my childhood again, so there's a kind of story there which I hope is is followable but also I don't know it's been such a grim year and my concentration is absolutely shot so I'm kind of quite pleased that it's a collection of quite short pieces that you can pick up and put down whenever you want, you know it's not a it's not a giant haul through a book, it's taken piecemeal. And I think there are lots of positives in it and lots of hope and humour, the story about the goat for example which I'll leave readers to discover that one. I also discovered that you're allergic to a lot of animals, deer, horses, dogs, foxes and the latter you discovered when you were skinning a roadkill fox to make a rug and you also kept a dead swift in your fridge for a time. Are there any other animals that you or birds that you've preserved after death? Yeah yeah I'm a very gothic naturalist I'm sorry I think I got inspired when I was a when I was a tiny kid my parents used to drop me off at the Natural History Museum in London I think they'd probably be arrested now for doing this and I used to just wander around the halls and there was this giant display of bits of birds so lots of different bird feet and different bird beaks and I was obsessed with the with the sort of amazing kind of shapes and and meanings of these different objects so I just assumed that if you were a naturalist you just collected dead things and I still sort of do that I've got you know skulls on my mantelpiece and feathers and stuff so yeah I'm afraid that's that's the tradition I sit in yeah absolutely. I think in the old days a naturalist used to sometimes kill a bird to bring it back to the lab to investigate it so thankfully that's not done now but you're going to give us a short reading and I think it's the essay called Rescue. Yeah so yes let's have that. Yeah this is about a dear friend of mine called Judith who is perhaps Britain's greatest rarer of orphaned swifts and swifts are a bird that's very important in this book and when you release a baby swift you know they they're these very cuddly amazing things incredibly long wings and they're very aerial creatures they live in the sky a bit like herring live in the sea and you basically hold one on your palm and hold it up into the wind and wait for it to and it's never flown before and you just have to wait for it to take off it's an incredibly emotional moment and this is what it's like. In the bright air the swift looks a weird unearthly creature a delicate construction of scalloped feathers and ungainly wings hunched into itself its miniature claws grip my fingers its deep eyes like reflective astronaut visors I wonder what it can see lines of magnetic force perhaps rising air and flying insects and the suspicion of summer storms the flat green grass beneath it has nothing to do with it at all I lift my hand higher all I can do now is wait it stares into the wind for a while then starts shivering anticipation I think functional explanations this bird is warming up its pectoral muscles ready for flight emotional explanations anticipation wonder joy terror nothing has visibly changed but something is happening like an aircraft avionics system coming online as it powers up blinking lights engine check check but that doesn't work though not quite as an analogy because what I am watching is a new thing making itself out of something else there is no doubt in my mind that this is as much a transformation as a dragonfly larva crawling from water and tearing itself out into a thing with wings on my open palm a creature whose home has been paper towels and plastic boxes is turning into a different creature whose home is thousands of miles of air then the swift decides it tilts the pug sharp tiny tip of its beak upwards arches its back and drops from my flattened palm making an aching series of stiff and creaky wingbeats for five or six seconds everything feels wrong the bird is a mere foot above the grass and my heart is beating fast up up up calls Judith but nothing is broken we're just watching a bird learning to fly hitching as if pulling into gear the swift starts to ascend flickering up and up into a sky street with evening cirrus it describes one careful circle above our heads then lifts even higher and straight lines it to the south I look down at my palm there's a little scratch on the meat of my thumb where its claws had gripped tight before letting me go grip tight to the hand that was the last solid thing the bird would touch for years they don't land they spend two years approximately in constant flight it's an astonishing thing it was a very emotional moment yes they fly thousands of miles don't they and feed on the wing and mate on the wing and that reading fits in very well with the title essay of the book best for flights because that's about swifts so is the swift one of your favorite birds yeah they're just so strange and also they're just when I was a kid I used to get really grumpy because I couldn't see them too up close they were too fast and too mysterious they seemed almost sort of like angels and I think they represent to me everything that kind of that sense of sort of longing to connect to the natural world that you know we can never really know what it's like to be a bird or to really know what their lives are like and the world of a swift is so unlike ours they just seem magical to me I love them to bits what as much as the goss hawk as in H is for hawk yeah goss hawks are very different things so this goss hawk I trained I mean they have this reputation in falconry as being a bit like kind of that kind of avian Christopher walkins these kind of murderous killers and of course animals are always more than you think they are so I discovered quite rapidly that goss hawks are actually quite playful and quite cute as well as being murderous so I used to actually play with my goss hawk I used to throw her bits of paper scrunched into balls and she'd catch them and have you can throw them back to me and I told some of my friends who keep goss hawks about this and they were all blokes and they're all horrified you know you don't play with goss hawks they're kind of like feathered shotguns and I discovered later they all do play with their goss hawks they just don't like to admit it so that that tells us something about people and animals I think more than the animals in the sim themselves but that goss hawk is no longer with us is that right? Alas no yeah she died very suddenly of a fungal an airborne fungal infection called as burgelosis it killed her very quickly and you know it's a very deep and simple sadness she was really the you know the hawk of my life people talk about the dogs of their lives and Mabel was really the hawk of my life I still miss her I've got to have her feathers in a jar on my mantelpiece and I quite often sort of you know have a bit of a bit of a sad moment looking at them I miss her a lot but you do have a parrot? I don't anymore this is the saddest thing of all so I've had the parrot for 18 years and the parrot died a couple of months ago and that's been a proper grief actually I think you know a hawk is a companion in the sense you know but a parrot is like a person and I've really been struggling with the loss of this bird you know I keep looking up and expecting him to be sitting on the door swearing at me you know sort of throwing things around the kitchen but he was an astonishing creature and I'm really honoured to have spent so many years with him and he was a very happy happy creature too so you know I don't think I regret anything about the way his life was lived and after a period of mourning are you going to acquire another bird because you said that the parrot kept you from being lonely it would sit by your keyboard and help you when you were writing yeah he helped me by helping me quite often by being very quite often you then take possession of the keyboard and insist that I wasn't allowed to type and then he'd wrench your keys and fly off with them laughing and drop them in places so that was a pretty conflict there may be another parrot at some point yeah but not for a while I think I have to honour bird all as he was called first so one day yeah so you live in the fence what kind of birds do you see on your regular walks there's a whole bunch of stuff around here now and in fact um you know lockdown's been really interesting in that I've you know I've not been going out far from home looking for birds I've been looking at the birds in my garden the commoner birds and that's been an extraordinary solace you know I've got to know individual birds there's a pheasant who comes and taps on my window in the morning demanding food he's trained me beautifully um there's something about the the ordinariness and the you know the ubiquity of these creatures that has been um a real joy um you know I think quite often we expect with nature we have to go out a long way to find it and there's something about watching a pigeon having a prenor lifting one wing to the rain and enjoying the rain that is it's a very very simple um and yet quite a complicated way of feeling that you're part of a natural world and I value it much more now during the pandemic than I used to that that familiarity and that closeness was there a particular reason why you moved to Suffolk um I've almost kind of lost Suffolk it's a bit of a joke actually Suffolk seems to be sort of collecting writers they're everywhere you know you walk down the road and there's just nature right it's everywhere um it's a great place it's it's um it's super friendly I moved further and further from Cambridge I can just said that there's a clothesmort I have this constant battle with them you know I love the natural world except clothesmorts um but it's a super friendly village it's it's and it's you know it's uh it's on the end of sort of a ridge of chalk so it's quite high up with the second village second highest village in Suffolk and rather amusingly my village is called Hawketon well I was going to ask was that did that sway you into buying your cottage almost the opposite when I found out it was called Hawketon I rolled my eyes I was like really you know so yeah no it's good and um you know what I am looking forward to to venturing out and visiting you know different habitats you know I miss sort of deep forests I miss the coast and they're a part of the natural world that I really have been mourning the loss of through the pandemic and you know I mean not to try and set that against the terrible things that have the loss and and horror of the of the pandemic but in a very personal sense I miss some of the things that have been closed to me and I'm looking forward to getting back out there. Thank you okay I'm going to um talk to to Sam now uh so Sam Lee uh you're a conservationist a musician folk expert and you've written a book called The Nightingale which I must say has got some beautiful illustrations um in between each chapter and The Nightingale being because it's 200 years and say the death of John Keats we we've been hearing about his portrait and of course one of his most famous was owned to a nightingale and in that poem it represents anguish and mortality because the poet's brother has just died and you say in the book there there are lots of different symbols lots of different representations connected with nightingales could you tell us a bit about that? Well indeed I mean the the Nightingale extends both laterally geographically in its uh in its importance and iconography but also through time as well and for the poets and the writers every generation took it upon themselves to to to approach and to to question and interpret The Nightingale and um create their own their own experience into words but also also fascinating as how The Nightingale takes on so many personalities within particularly within folklore and folk song um across the northern hemisphere the the boundary of the nightingale heads all the way out to sort of western mongolia and within the music the musicality the the instrumentation throughout um the the far the near east and throughout Europe there's an extraordinary array of different personalities the bird takes on from the melancholic to the jovial to the highly sexed to the the quizzical um so it's a bird that means so many things to so many different people which is a fascinating thing are many species that can do that really and in the UK um we only hear it in England is that correct it's not fine to Scotland Wales or Northern Ireland which I wonder why that is well I mean that is the territory we we're quite extreme for how far out west the nightingales appear um that their their range is definitely much more shrunk today uh and in terms of their um they were once bursting over the borders they have been heard in Herefordshire and Hale and why on the Welsh borders where you are um and occasional sightings of them further north and which became real kind of cultural events actually with a wonderful um uh historical records of entire villages turning out to go in here a nightingale that had blown off course there were tellings of them having landed in Ireland as well but um really that they their heartland is down in the southeast um and you know the expectation with climate change was that their their range would would open up a little bit unfortunately it's not the case and still their their distribution is shrinking um annually and we're losing them from a lot of those marginal areas particularly based like Gloucestershire and the Midlands where they're you know dipping away quite fast and is that because of destruction of woodlands or depletion of insects or development generally it's all of the above um uh the in terrible impact of deer uh over population of deer of course loss of habitat we can't take away the the terrible destruction and cutting down of woodland a rate of deforestation in great in Britain that's higher than Brazil relative to how much ancient woodland woodland we have here um also the the you know collapse of insects for all sorts of reasons particularly chemical pesticides and our farming practices are all having their dent but there's also so many mystical things and ways that populations just can't sustain themselves at certain certain critical levels when they reach too small they're a very particular bird um in what they what they need and what they like and actually the thing that you know is is that they love messy scrubby neglected land with overgrown blisters of black thorn and um and it's a sort of landscape that our country looks down upon as though it's unused and unloved uh and I think we've misinterpreted often so much of what nature likes or needs to sort of uh to to put it like that so the nightingale thrives in those the kind of the marginal habitats that the kind of the the edge lands and and the and the kind of the industrial as we were talking about early on this kind of sometimes it's the most unlikely places you know Berlin is famous for having birds that sit on the traffic lights in the tear garden outside some kind of throbbing nightclub singing away they love these unusual place and they do love human habitation but obviously not if there's no dense ticket to live in well let's hear a little from the book you're going to give us a reading yeah with pleasure um so this is a this is a part that comes at the end of the book looking at kind of visions of hope and um and success stories as well for the nightingale it's not all doom and gloom but this is this is my vision of a one day um and it's a sort of an impassioned plea of how we may bring the nightingale back into our lives in this very kind of dare I say ceremonial sort of way I have long dreamed there to be one utterly fanciful and romantic way that this call to bond further with nature and the nightingales and all their legacy of appreciation might take hold among friendship groups and families I like to imagine that one day in a not too distant future a ritual will exist annually every spring England having as many nightingales as it did before the 1960s that is in the hundreds of thousands experiences come early May an exodus of people from their homes to go and do a nightingale families and friends couples and singletons grandparents and grandchildren community groups work colleagues whoever it pleases will gather on gentle dry nights with flasks of hot tea snacks made even a bottle of port or whiskey blankets and at around 9pm or leave their homes or the pub or drive many hundreds of miles even to head out to a nightingale hotspot on the journey there are stories told of when each person first heard his song and how wonderful it will be to hear this bird again after a long cold winter how much the spring has come on this year and how early or late it was and other such seasonal reminiscences and observations when the destination is reached a silence will fall upon the group like when the lights go down at a concert and a hush will rain intrepid steps are made into the brush to get close to a bird as quietly as possible and when he's reached blankets are spread and everyone cozes up to one another to start listening I imagine this scene like an English equivalent of a burns night but informally arranged on the leafy floor amongst the higher synthine scent of bluebells there are kids curled up on parents laps friends resting their heads on each other's bellies or leaning back to back and then after a while of just listening to the nightingale sing out of someone's pocket comes an old tattered notebook with scraps of paper maybe it's a handed down from a late parent or gifted from a godmother when they were young a phone light is discreetly turned on and in hushed reverential voices poems and songs and rounds and pros are recited or sung up towards our nightingale every offering is an heirloom received found or chosen a long life's way saved as being perfect for this annual moment the opportunity to share something is passed around for anyone who wants to give a sonnet or a recitation an improvised sharing evolves unique to those present into each year's moon some sharings are somber and mournful others are comical and muted sniggers and full of irreverences some are people are more formal others are casual some are drunk others are stoned some are erotic some are lonely some are romantic some are in remembrance and some are in prayer but all are in celebration of this bird and of ourselves the sentient sensitive beings grateful for what might not have survived as the night ends and we drowsily make our way home drunk on nightingale song and a bit musy i like to think that the resounding feeling that everyone goes exclaiming to one another is not as i hear all the time today gosh why don't we do this more often but more of a wow thank you everyone i'm so pleased we did this every year beautiful to hear the the nightingale thing there one of the fascinating facts in the book is that um the nightingale has two voice boxes so it sings with one while it breathes in with the other is that is that unique to that species no not to that species that's a common that's a that's how birds are they have the we have the larynx and they have their syrinxes and it's this um essentially two voice boxes on each branch down to their air sacs um and the nightingale isn't necessarily the the finest display of the the brilliance of what that can achieve i'd say that probably the skylark is exemplaring that ability to almost circular breathe to be reciting with one side while taking air in somehow i'm not entirely sure of the the the the biology of that but there is the ability to to pass one note of one side onto another and certainly there are moments with the nightingale particularly when i'm out with them as just heard there um doing the singing with nightingale's work and bringing audiences and concert making a concert with the bird because they are very collaborative that you will hear them hold a note for so long it is impossible that that's all coming out of one lung so there is a point of that seamless uh dovetailing of from one side to the other which is just phenomenal because there's this bit where you're listening to me and you think he's going to fall out the tree he's just going to run out of puff and he just keeps going and going and going and then going and going amazing um at this point i'd just like to um ask the audience to send in their questions there's a form that you can fill in at the bottom of the screen and uh in the last 10 minutes we'll um put as many as we can to sam and to helen um so sam um that leads on quite nicely to the song we're all familiar with the nightingale sang in barkley square although apparently it might not have been a nightingale it might have been a ren because it was the wrong time of year but um you held an unusual event uh in barkley square with um extinction rebellion and i'm wondering why you chose that in particular and what was the reaction of residents passersby and perhaps the police well the police absolutely loved it i'll tell you that um the um 2019 during the spring uprising which was really the birth of that organization uh the great coming of age of it uh during that two weeks of activism to draw attention to the impacts of ecosystem collapse and extinction um there was a great uh emphasis throughout the organization and a lot of the the actions in um in governmental you know policy and fossil fuels and all the contributing factors but i wanted to create an event that drew attention to the species that were actually at the heart of the matter and um essentially crater a gathering that paid respect to both species lost species endangered and our interconnectedness with these uh wonderful beings our brothers and sisters and um i'd long wanted to run event a nightingale event as i do with uh in barkley square but they charge 15 000 pounds an hour to hire which is slightly out of my budget so um so taking inspiration from extinction's reverence just turn up and do what you want to do and their very wonderful display of creativity and community i i invited people to come and join together in barkley square to sing a rewriting of that song um uh the idea that we could bring the nightingale back and to rewild the bird rewild ourselves in many ways and we spent an evening where everybody if all 1500 people that turned up uh live streamed out of their mobile phones the song of the nightingale and we filled the square up with the nightingale song and musicians hundreds of musicians were there and played and poems were recited a little bit like this bit i was talking about and for a brief moment on that warm april night we dreamt what it would be like to really have nature in the heart of our city quite like like that although we are very privileged in London in that respect but how nature could be more integrated in our lives and and in our hearts in that respect um and it was it was the closing of that two weeks was the end of the the april rebellion and it was a very special and moment i'll never forget Helen have you ever um taken part in any kind of action like that or yeah yeah absolutely i i know people i'm not very good at writing campaigning pros um other people are much better than that than i am so i um you know i think what i tried to do with the book is to open up a space for uh wandering and marvel at the natural world and open up a space for hope to the sense that not everything is fixed and that that takes some work to try and maintain hope in in today's world but yeah i mean you know i say it in the book i mean we have to march and fight and sing we have to do that you know we can't just sit around with your if you're too optimistic about the fate of the natural world then you don't do anything because you think it's going to be fine and if you're too pessimistic then you don't do anything because you think it's it's there's no point so you need to open up that space for possibility and i think yeah we need we need to get together we need to to to fight and make our voices loud i think there are a lot of positives in in the book uh as i say we don't want doom and gloom all the times otherwise you would just give up but you give one example with your irish background of going to Dublin and finding peregrine falcons in an industrial wasteland they were perfectly happy there yeah they're everywhere now in fact last time i saw a peregrine you know it wasn't in the Scottish mountains it was on St Pancras you know i i heard a this is obviously a year ago now i hadn't really been traveling very much but you know there was a there was a male of falcons sort of sitting on one of them roof just sort of making these wonderful kind of courtship sort of chopping noises and it was just like you know it was just marvelous you know the Dublin one they they they're in the city i went there with my friends Hilary and and Ayman and Ayman talks about how in the city you know you can look up he can look up during the day you can be caught up in the kind of everyday sort of turmoil of trying to make a living and you know the sort of everyday human kind of stresses and you look up and you see a peregrine of a temple bar and suddenly he said it's like a a bit of eternity you know it doesn't just make you feel excited to have seen a peregrine it it can change the way you look at your city because it's home to a creature that you so would normally you know you'd expect them to be in these you know barren wilderness and cliffs and and sea cliffs and mountains but there they are as happy as anything feasting on pigeons you know tearing heads off pigeons and it's really very very very okay so now we're going to go back to Bill Bailey and before we take questions from the audience but keep sending them in and we sent some questions to Bill in advance so here we're going to hear his answers okay here's a few questions i have received here's one are you a twitcher or a birder well i can say with a degree of certainty i am a birder i'm not a twitcher um i think as far as i understand it that indicates a level of commitment that perhaps i'm i'm not at yet i might well become one i suppose over the years but at the moment i would say i'm a birder for me a twitcher is someone who is has got a pager on them at all times and they might be in the middle of something you know of like a family event or something or some kind of other activity and then and it's like spoonbill teen on the river tour i gotta go you know and and they just leave whatever they're doing he goes do you take the battery as your lawful when it hang on spoonbill you know see that to me that's a twitcher that's someone for whom spotting a bird seeing a rare bird these they're usually rare birds it it it takes presidents over there everything in their lives and and while there's something sort of quaintly i suppose quite british about that i'm not quite that level yet um i tell you why i mean it's not just that i mean i'm being quite facetious there but the the serious point is that i think twitchers tend to focus on the rarities and the exotics and these are the birds that they only focus on you know the the birds that you hardly ever see in britain that are blown in by storm or by some sort of strange confluence of circumstance and so therefore they are some you know it's a bit of a sort of you know an event it's a it's an excitement in the in the twitching world but for me you know i get as much pleasure from seeing common everyday birds to me birding is about getting pleasure from seeing birds out and about being in the countryside and so it doesn't really it doesn't follow that i would have to see an exotic of course if you see one that's great it's always be more exciting but i'm just as happy you know watching cormorants on the Thames or watching herons i'm just as happy you know watching the jay at the bottom of my garden listening to the wren you know having a conversation listening to the robins you know just watching even pigeons even just the most common bird probably that you can imagine seeing it certainly in a city in context just their aero dynamism their skill at flying and the sudden burst of activity all of that just kind of it it softens the urban landscape in a way that i just find them to be as as marvellous and as as as sort of nourishing to the soul as you know seeing a rare warbler where do you think the nightingale gets its song oh it's an interesting one i mean the nightingales is often sort of lauded as one of the great songs of all birds certainly in britain i was i was listening to the nightingales song actually because i was i was i wrote a piece of music which was based around the song of the wren and i got to say this a lot of similarities there you know there's this kind of it's almost this sort of mechanical mixed with the tune force there's a you know there's a sort of almost jerky random combination combination of sort of mechanical sounds tuneful sounds and it sounds like to me it's like a bird doing another impression of another bird it's like you know it's like the bird's going here's one for you right this is a wren all right listen to this and it does an impression of it and that's what it sounds like to me it sounds like it's actually ripped off its song from the wren if you listen to the wren very similar and i think the the wren is you know deserves royalties some of your drawings reminded me of illustrations in the library's collections why do you think birds are such a source of inspiration for artists is it something to do with all the different characters um well yes i've been i think it is i think that birds have been a huge inspiration for artists going back you know since people started to draw i mean if you look at some of the early coinage of you know the very first coins have been minted and a lot of them we've got bird design on them you know it features on clothing and sort of in in artworks and and tapestries you know it's it's sort of it's like goes back centuries and and i think we love to imbue you know animals with characters and i saw one of the things that's become a kind of feature of my um dvd covers was a kind of animal and human sort of crossover like i you know i like the idea of of mythical beasts you know i go one of the my shows was called part troll and the dvd cover featured me in a sort of suit and a bowler hat like a sort of traditional british commuter but i had a troll's tail and ears and it was like it came from the idea of the old norse myth that trolls were able to um you know sort of they were able to invigorate their way into human society and pass themselves off as normal humans but the the tail was the thing that gave them away and for me always feeling slightly a bit out of the mainstream of society that sort of resonated for me very much like i've always tried to invigorate myself and appear normal amongst other humans so that was a a good fit for me and then another one of them was a tinsel worm where i sort of had a kind of um of my hair turned into sort of the kind of gossamer wings of a dragonfly it was quite a fanciful thing so the idea of some kind of human bird hybrid was something that is a feature of the illustrations in my book in fact one of them is a bill goose which is a goose but it has my face on my head sort of padding around the room with slippers on which uh which i really liked and i have this sort of there's another one where i have this sort of vision this strange dream where these these um crows have got you know hugely grotesquely elongated legs and tiny bodies in there that these figures of almost like nightmarish figures so all of these i mean i absolutely love them and um i noticed that one of them here is is that these are examples from uh bestiary with extracts from gerald of wales and bestiary with extracts from geraldus cambrensis now geraldus cambrensis was a quite i'm quite a fascinating character i'm quite intrigued by him because he's the guy that came up with this complete sort of myth this nonsense that barnacle geese came from barnacles and that's why they're called barnacle geese because of this guy geraldus cambrensis and i've actually got a quote of his which is one of the bonus facts in my book which accompanies the section on barnacle geese and and this is this is the bonus fact from that that section and it is the first recorded instance of goose from a shell which is what um geraldus claimed to have seen this cobblers was from a bloke called geraldus cambrensis who made this who made this unlikely claim in 1186 and this is a quote he said i have seen with my own eyes more than a thousand of these small birds hanging from one piece of timber enclosed in their shells he lied why he wrote this i don't know maybe he dreamt it or perhaps he was a bit of a loner just trying to get a girlfriend fair lady these geese they um um come from barnacles and she would reply wow i am impressed with your implausible yet amazing goose wisdom we don't hear many children going bird watching one exception might be dara mcganalty how can we encourage more young people to get off their devices and out into nature yeah well that's a really good question and i think it's a general problem isn't it about trying to encourage people to go outside more and step away from the phone and maybe just switch off a little bit and just enjoy nature and i think that you know certainly um during these strange times i think people have actually done exactly that i think you know people listen to birdsong because of the the reduced amount of noise people were aware of birdsong law um and i think that people have had to get out and about and be creative in in you know exploring outside space i hope hope that that will be one of the one of the things that we retain after we get through all of this um but specifically about birds i mean i gotta say i think that the term bird watching might just have to be quietly sort of retired you know i just think it doesn't really do justice to what i get from when i go out to see birds it's not just bird watching it's not just sort of a kind of the sort of a passive kind of look at that like you're just sitting in a cafe watching people you know like people watching you just sit there with coffee and go oh look at it you know you know it seems for me it's much more than that you know i think we should make maybe not say that i think that might put people off i think you know the idea of bird watchers or twitters has sort of got this kind of slightly you know strange nerdy connotations and actually it should be more about exploration it should be about an adventure of which birds are just apart and i think that that's the way you do it you know when when i'm when our son was younger we would go on trips out about and we would say we're going on a bit of an adventure and we're going for a walk in the woods and oh look and listen to that and then you know and so the bird was a kind of a bonus like a it was not the sole focus of the trip it was like well we're going to look at the plants a bit of the trees i'm going to be outdoors and we're going to have a little picnic we're going to be in the outdoors and and while we're outdoors let's listen to that what is that what is that sound what is that bird what is it you know and make that part of the experience and i'm i'm here in new zealand luckily i've been touring here and i've just i spent some time on the south island of new zealand and we were lucky enough to go to stewart island which is a stewart island has another little island off it called olva and olva is one of these islands that new zealand is sort of specializing in these predator-free zones where because of the nature of the birds here they're very fragile and they're you know prone to all kinds of predators as stoats and weasels and cats and rats they've sort of set aside these areas where there are none of these things so there's traps out and so pretty much they're predator-free so these birds have a chance to kind of thrive and you know it was just we just walked around through native bush listening to the sounds of these birds and it just reminded me what it is about birds that i that i find so extraordinary and so it's sort of it speaks to me on many levels it's not just about trying to tick off species it's not just about sort of trying to get a photograph of them capture them put them in a book it's about it's a it's a way into lots of other things it's about well why are they here why is this beautiful parrot the kaka why does that live here why has it got these kinds of colors how has it got here why is it that it's here and look at this bird and what the rifleman why is it called that how because it it rifles up the tree and a spiral way all right and why has it done that and how has it got to that point and it's sort of like for me all of the the experience of seeing birds is are lots of doors into other avenues of curiosity and i think that's to me that would be what i would say to try and get more children involved and getting outdoors there is there are all manner of doorways and opportunities to explore that are not just about seeing the bird hearing the bird finding out about why it is where it is the trees that it live in why is it lived here the history of the woodland why do these trees grow here and not somewhere else how long these birds been here can you imagine people hundreds of years ago listening to that exact bird that's the thing i find fascinating you know you you listen to the sound you know like a great tit or something in in in britain you know you'll hear it in in the in the back garden maybe you know you might hear a great tit and then you realize but this this was the this was Anton Bruckner you know the Austrian composer heard that and he incorporated into into into his full symphony you know so it's it's almost like a a doorway into the past as well you know the birds don't change the birds i mean they obviously there's a lot of minor changes and minor little sort of tweaks of subspecies and so on but pretty much he would have heard the same bird that i'm hearing right now and to me that's like it connects us to the past it's like a living connection to the past it's like the modern day representation of a timeline which exists and goes back millennia and so by experiencing the birds you're experiencing history and geography and culture and art and our own place in the world you know there's there's so much more you can gather from just one song thank you that was great right we've got questions coming in here's one for sam from mike who says sam has your singing been somehow influenced do you think by the singing of the nightingale or other birds oh yes without question i mean i've always considered him to be the master singer and a great teacher and i think one of the greatest aspects of the nightingale song is is the is the decoration of silence and this ability for the for the the males to really be able to kind of craft that amazing sense of the space the quietness of the night and as a folk singer who's learnt my craft from some of the the old singers the old way of singing particularly you know and native local styles of singers from across the british isles and island as well there's a lot of similarity in that with the unaccompanied voice about how you use the silence to create suspense and tension and invite the listener to bring their own ideas orchestration their own arrangements into the space so i find that the nightingale has taught me a lot about the invitational aspect of singing to to lure the listener into the experience to in some ways to co-create the song together the next question i'm going to put to helen it's from audrey jarvis and she talks about the 2021 rspb garden bird watch report which says that over the last 50 years 40 million birds have vanished from the uk do you think there's any chance of recovery from such a loss or at least a way to halt further losses yeah it's a terrifying statistic i mean it's pretty much my lifetime and that's that's what's disappeared and and you know it's you know i used to sort of you know giggle about grown-ups talking about you know in my day it was all fields and now i look back and i you know try and tell younger people about what it was like to see vast flocks of lap wings you know when i was a kid they were everywhere and they've gone i mean it's it's hard to try and communicate what's lost i think there's hope um there are a whole bunch of examples of what happens if you if you let nature do its thing it's extraordinarily resilient um the nephus estate in in sussex for example has nightingales and breeding in places that you know one wouldn't expect nightingales to be um if you if you're careful um and you manage to maintain corridors between good habitats there's all sorts of good things that that can happen and i know at the moment there's a big drive to um not only preserve uh really kind of ecologically rich habitats but also like you know purchasing land that can be turned back to rewild into habitats and bring stuff back but it's it's it's tough i mean you know we're competing against um a lot of other interests you know agricultural is is hard uh there are some very enlightened farmers but generally agribusiness is really slucky for the natural world and climate change is terrifying too you know that a lot of the insect loss that we've we've suffered is you know the magnitude of that is is phenomenally frightening and a lot of that is is to do with chemical pesticides but also climate change you know the temperature changing is is a is uh is a great obstacle for for the continued love of those populations so you know we have to work really hard on an enormous number of fronts and it's hard it's quite easy to get discouraged but there are so many passionate people um doing extraordinary things that i think it's i think we have to we owe it to everyone everyone and everything to to maintain hope and keep going this is another one for sam from harry armfield um he says your description of a nightingale get together captured mine and my wife's romantic imagination where can we enjoy such a gathering oh i think that leads on to your is it the nest collective that's well yes indeed that i run uh gatherings throughout april and may the singing with nightingales experiences which bring musicians and an audience into into the forest as and if you can reach sussex where we do them down just outside of louis uh please do um there are nightingales all over the southeast and i implore people to to not need me to be their guide but if you want to come and have time around the fire and hear more of the stories and uh and hear some of the folk songs particularly in some guest musicians um it really is a wonderful way of creating a sort of ritual for the bird and uh falling under the nightingales spell um so the nest collective run these events uh you can find on their website and there are just a few places around the campfire left for this year right so sign up quick uh this one is from helen and it's to both of you she wants to know how you write about nature do you write as you walk for example or immerse yourself in the moment and then relive that experience when writing later helen do you want to say first it varies um so sometimes i'll be doing something and something will just snag on my attention you know something will kind of come out of the background gray and green and really i'll think what is that it's often curiosity it's often something that happens that i'm like why is why is that why why is why do i have an emotional response to that why is that particular kind of um animal or kind of combination of weather and and light why does that draw me and i'll come back and it's writing an essay i think it's a little bit like uh it's like a kind of crossword puzzle or some kind of you know it's it's something you have to solve and and what i try and do is take that that emotional charge that something has given me and i try and unroll it and try and work out where those emotions come from what their historical and social meanings are i think it's really important for us to try and understand why we value some some things in nature more than others and why you know what those valuations where they come from there's a lot of class and you know race and stuff tied up in the way we look at the natural world so part of my job i think is to try and unpack those hidden meanings and and see where that takes us but mostly just do it with joy you know um a lot of the time you go out there looking for inspiration you just get rained on and you get covered in mud and you come home swearing because that happens quite a lot sam do you want to tell us about your process of writing oh i i mean i'm sitting here with a next to a master with you helen and i you know i this is my first book and it came about really through the the hard work of the penguin team who helped put tonight on with a series of whips and thumb screws that um forced me into doing doing this quite against my will of course i loved it and um and for the book it was an incredible moment where all the the worlds that i had sort of dipped my my sort of my eyes and ears and ideas into and the experiences of the 90s suddenly was like oh this is material for a a whole different way of storytelling i'm a i'm a singer i must i i write i do write songs while i sing folk songs but um nature has been my greatest inspiration for my for my songs very much so and uh often find that i may if i can speak of the songs that spending extended amounts of time and really taking my um my inquisitiveness into nature that's that's for me when my muse is i do most of my writing for songs out in out in the field um often in trees actually i find myself climbing beaches and uh and field dogs quite to to really kind of separate myself from the kind of the ground and um and and certain species will often come and and help me out i certainly the ones the lead one song on my last album came that the title album came from a buzzard coming and really kind of saving my life at one point uh when taking a really a real problem life kind of crisis moment about my relationship with nature and a buzzard just appeared dropped out of the sky and started singing to me crying out right above my head swirling around just a few meters above and uh and you know those are the moments where sometimes that you know you you kind of the muse comes to you uh and and nature has got such a a a responsiveness if you if you're there ready and listening and waiting with sometimes with pen in hand sometimes not sometimes you have to write it in your head and remember it till you get back to the pen and ink well i think that's a good note to end on we're going to have to wrap up um but i'd like to thank um all our three panelists and also to thank penguin live and the British library and just to remind you that you can buy all of the books of these authors you'll see the details at the bottom of the screen and um i hope you enjoyed this evening's event