 Just now in the studio to talk, of course, Nature Inc. is good afternoon. John, how are you? Happy New Year to you. Haven't been chatting to you in the new year yet. Happy New Year too. It's amazing. It goes by so quickly. It does. It does. And here we are again chatting about, you know, about wildlife I suppose in particular at this time of the year, nature in general, and a perfect day for it because, you know, it's turned cold again and there's a, there's a covering on the ground. And I suppose at this time of the year when we see weather like this, instinctively we think, oh, the birds can't get at the berries and they can't pick around the way they would in their tiny and it's very cold. You know, what can we do to help? Yeah, well, it certainly is cold out there. It was slippy on the on the way here today. And I saw one car in the ditch on one of the back roads. There was nobody hurt or anything, but be careful if you're out and about. And of course, that's very challenging for the for the wildlife as well, for all the wildlife. But the birds that come to your feeders, well, they give us a great reward because that pleasure they give us when we see so many of them. And feed at this time of the year as much as you can and have as much variety in feed as you can. There is little tiny black seeds called Niger seeds, N-Y-G-E-R. And if you go into the the pet food stores or even some of the farm shops will supply it, that they're a little bit more expensive. They come in small bags, but if you get one of those and put just a small bit into your feeder, there's a good chance that gold finches will come. OK, what special about gold finches? Yeah, they're beautiful. Yeah, so beautiful, that little flock of them. And they often travel in flocks too, so not necessarily just ones and twos. And a little flock of them is called a charm. And when you see them, you'll know when they're flapping their wings, they'll fight away with each other over the feeder. And that's part of the beauty of it, because they're able to hover just for a couple of seconds and you see the gold flash of their wings. Then you see this amazing little little bit of gold silhouette hovering away, especially a bit of sunlight on it like right now. And then they've a red face and lots of other beautiful marks. So they're a gorgeous bird to have in your bird feeder. Brilliant, brilliant. OK. And birds that we should, I suppose, keep an eye out for, because there are certain birds that are here at this time of the year, others that are gone and will be returning shortly. But the birds that are around at the moment, apart from the wee garden birds. Yeah, well, just to touch on the garden birds, just for a second, keep an eye or if you have a bird book, look up. There's three birds in particular that's worth looking up as opposed to the gold finches and the chaff inches. There's a bird called a brambling, which is like a chaff inch, but it's like it's like a pimped up chaff inch is the way you call it, or a blinged up chaff inch, I suppose you could say. We're amazing colours, amazingly bright colours compared to the chaff inch. And they come down sometimes in this very harsh weather. And there's two other birds watching out for birds called siscans, a beautiful little kind of yellow bird, yellow, greeny bird. Again, a garden bird, again, a garden bird and another bird called a red paw. They're all different types of finch, so they're all seed loving birds. And the finches are the ones of the tough little beaks that are able to crack open the seeds and eat the peanuts and that kind of thing. And but those birds in particular will quite often come to the feeders at this time of year when it's really, really cold. And they've been driven down from further north and they've been driven out of the woods due to a lack of feed. And later and later as the winter rolls on, there's less and less food availability for them. So it's it's well worth watching out for those on your feeders. OK. And the Niger seeds that you mentioned, you know, you just put them into a regular feeder. Just make sure the mesh is fairly small. So is it on? Yes, you can get feeders that have have a little mesh like like mini chicken wire, I suppose, and they're ideal for the peanuts. But the feeders then, which are transparent, just a transparent plastic tube with the little slot down the bottom. That's the one for the Niger seeds, because the Niger seeds are tiny. They're really, really small. They're only a few mils long. And the birds will be able to pick them out of their out of the little cracks in that, you know. All right. Keep them up high. Keep them away from the cats. Keep them away from the cats. The other thing that's worth doing, I have seen in my own garden near Remelton, I've seen green finches again for the last couple of years. And the green finches were nearly wiped out, or at least their numbers got an awful hammering. And one of the reasons is that bird feeders can spread disease. They can if they're not cleaned on a reasonably regular basis. So if you haven't cleaned your bird feeder in a while, it's worth when it gets empty, just giving it a very, very quick rinse with a tiny drop of fairy liquid and a bit of cold water and a little scrub and then leave it to dry a bit. You can spread disease amongst birds. It can, unfortunately. And the green finch seems to be particularly susceptible to this. Now, their numbers are starting to come back. And I can say that's my own garden and Birdwatch Ireland's excellent garden bird survey, which is a fun survey to be part of. They're starting to record them coming back as well. And, you know, like everything, you need to tidy up from time to time. So once every week or two, if you can just give your feeders a quick rinse doesn't need to be a surgical job. But it's what we're doing. And what about bigger birds then at this time of the year? And, you know, birds were likely to find along our waterways or inlets. Yeah. So there's a huge amount. And we've often talked about them before. There's a huge amount of the bigger, the waterbirds that migrate to us and they spend the winter with us. Some pass through Donegal and keep going from north when they come here in autumn and some then stay here for the winter. And you'll get an awful lot of the swans, the geese and the ducks. Thousands and thousands of ducks right now are in Lux Willy, for instance. When the ducks come from the north and the colder claims in the north and they come down here, why don't they all just sort of stop around this part of the world instead of continuing south? What makes them decide to go on elsewhere? It very much depends on the type of food that they go for and then the food that's available. So, for instance, the Brent goose that comes from inside the Arctic Circle in Canada, which is kind of amazing really because it's a vast journey where there are no people high up in the Arctic Circle. That's where they breed. And then they come down to Donegal and so the young Brent geese that land with us and they're the ones with the black neck, the small goose with a black neck. And it will be the first people they'll encounter and they'll eat away at the food, the algae, the eel grass, things like that. And in the fields as well that are around Donegal. But once the food is getting depleted around about December, January, they start heading off into Dublin. And you'll get the strange sight of flocks of sometimes hundreds of Brent geese on football pitches deep in the suburbs of Dublin. And this is a bird that's come from inside the Arctic Circle where there are no people and then they're in some of the most densely populated parts of the country. So it's all food availability and kind of what they're used to and what they're able to adapt to. So the Brent goose is happy to go out and adapt and go out onto the football field. A lot of the ducks now wouldn't wouldn't be happy with that. So if the food starts running out here, they'll just keep moving further south. Really? It's all about the next meal? It's a well and that's it. It's a thing. It's a really rewarding thing to do to walk along the coast at this time of year and wrap up in the evening time. The sounds you'll hear from all those waterbirds that they're fantastic. And when you get still evenings of this in this cold weather, very, very beautiful. And you'll see the birds flying around you. But they have eaten enough to try and put on enough reserves to allow them to survive for the night. Because, of course, it's incredibly cold. And when you think of us tucked up tonight now, I heard you give a weather warning there for for Northern Ireland and for Donegal, I think there's one for tonight as well. And those birds are trying to survive out there and not freeze solid. So they need to be able to eat enough food. So if you're going walking on the coast with your dog, which so many people do, just put a put a lead on your dog when you're walking along the coast anywhere that there might be birds around, if possible at all. Because by your dog disturbing the birds and it can look look lovely. You see your dog going along. You see all the birds flying around. You think everybody's having a great time. But those birds are using up their energy and particularly in this cold weather that can be enough to tip them over the edge. Make a difference. Yeah. OK, from birds to butterflies and not normally the time of year that we'd associate with butterflies, but some butterflies actually make their way indoors and and can be sort of riding out the winter inside. In fact, there's a few different species that, you know, will be known to do that or around at this time of the year. There is. Yeah. And it's funny to be talking butterflies when there's snow out the window. I think we've got 35 species of butterfly in Ireland. And and we really think of them of those long, lazy summer days, you know. But there's a few species of butterfly that migrate amazingly. And then there's a few others that hibernate, possibly four species that hibernate in Ireland. And a couple of them can tend to go into your house. And there's one butterfly that it emerges. The the the eggs are laid in the springtime on nettles. On early nettles, just they're starting to grow. And then those caterpillars would eat up the nettles for you. So we've often mentioned this before. It's worth having every one of us that has a garden or any little patch of land at all should keep at least a corner where a few nettles can grow or a few with the grasses can grow long to shelter these kind of characters. And then those butterflies, those small tortoise shell butterflies and kind of an orangey and black butterfly. And they've these amazing little bright, bright blue dots all the way along the bottom of their wings. And they will emerge then as adults for around about August, September time and they'll eat as much food as they can. And then they will go in to hibernate somewhere. And quite often they'll go into your house, into your bathroom, into a cold room, into the attic. And suddenly if the heat is going on, that'll disturb them and could wake them up. OK. So and what happens then when they wake up? I mean, what do you do if you this time of the year you find a butterfly? Yes. So it's a strange solution that you do. But if the butterflies wake up much like that bird that is trying to eat enough to survive through the night, the butterfly has put on enough fat reserves to be able to survive through the winter. But if it keeps waking up and going to sleep again, it'll deplete those fat reserves. So if you do find a butterfly in your house, first of all, get a little bit of water and a bit of sugar, put a hot water in sugar and melt the sugar into the water and leave it cool down and put it onto a cotton pad. And then if you can catch the butterfly as gently as you can possibly manage it and pop it and it'll probably be quite lazy. It'll probably be quite docile. And if you can put it onto the little cotton pad or pop it into a little box and put the cotton pad in water, which has the sugary solution, that'll give it enough enough energy to be able to survive for the wintertime. And then what you can do is leave a couple of options. You can keep it in a little box, like a little lunchbox with a bit of tissue paper so it doesn't hurt itself. And you can pop it into the fridge and not the freezer now, but the fridge. And you can leave it in the fridge for the wintertime and then release it in the spring when the weather gets good and the flowers are out. Now, if your fridge is, if there's a chance of it getting raided late at night by people coming in and that kind of thing and stumbling around for food. Leave a note, hey, don't leave the butterfly. Leave a strong note that they don't want the butterfly. Or of course you could leave it in a cold shed somewhere where you might be keeping the logs or something like that. But really they need somewhere where it's cold, kind of fridge-like type temperature and reasonably stable temperature, where the temperature isn't gonna go up. The instinct would be to put it somewhere cosy to keep it comfortable or whatever, but that wouldn't be the right thing. That's not the right thing. And of course you'll see them flying sometimes quite vigorously actually when they wake up and they'll be bashing away against the window. And if you can get a bit of tissue paper or a really soft cloth and try and catch it that way, try not to handle the wings at all. And they'll calm down then once they're brought into a darker place because they react very much to life. And then you can give them that extra little bit of food. And if you do save a butterfly, you haven't just saved that butterfly, there's a good chance especially if it's female, you've potentially saved dozens and dozens of potential butterfly families for next year. So it's quite amazing that these things are able to survive out in the cold. And of course sometimes some of these butterflies, there's a butterfly called the peacock butterfly and they don't come into the house as much. They tend to also be outside but they'll be in under-old logs or in holes and trees. And those butterflies, they might freeze numerous times over the winter time but they have a little bit of anti-freeze in their system which stops their inner core from freezing completely. But the whole rest of them, their wings, the whole ash will freeze solid. And then come March time, they'll get their energy when the sun is out and you'll see them taken to the wing again. Amazing stuff. A texture says it's a lot of wild bird activity on our lawn yesterday afternoon. It's very possible that they sense that snow was on the way. Absolutely, they're very sensitive to weather changes and it's believed they're sensitive to the pressure. The pressure changes that your barometer will pick up but our brains don't seem to be able to pick up. For instance, the swifts that come here in the summertime, they, because they sleep on the wing and they do everything, catch all their food on the wing, they don't land on the ground, those swifts will fly around a storm when a storm is here in the summer. So they can sense that, they can sense the pressure change and sense what the edge of the pressure is. So if you think of when you see Metairin's weather forecast and the big low pressure, those swifts are able to figure that out for themselves with no TV or no smartphone and literally fly around that weather system and then come back when the weather's calm here again. So it's a good chance other birds can do something similar or at least sense it. We were chatting earlier about if we do decide to, if we come across a butterfly, do you decide to keep it in the fridge until it's until different weather and to let others know that it's in the fridge. Someone says, perhaps a new meaning of butterflies in your stomach. Huh? Yeah. Very good, yeah. That's what you don't want. Finally, the new scientist exhibition, it's a young scientist of the year, I should say. It is on. It just finished. Just finished. I was down on Saturday and I was part of the Heritage Council stand. They invited me to come along and join the stand. There's a whole exhibition space outside of the projects and I've got to say, it's one of the most inspiring days I've had in a long time and stick it into your diaries. If you're interested in science, if you have young people in the house, it's well worth the trip down to Dublin and because you get to, and it doesn't cost very much, you get to see, I think there's 550 different projects that young people have done, both primary and secondary and they're amazing projects. Some of them are incredibly complicated. Some of them you're really struggling to read the titles so the talent that these young people have and then some of them are terribly simple ideas, very simple ideas, but they're brilliant and to see the enthusiasm these students have and the energy they put in and of course the teachers and parents that helped them. I think it was 13 schools in, or 13 prizes were won by Donegal schools and quite a lot of Donegal schools were representing Donegal down there. St. Columbus won a first prize in one of the categories for a comparison between different types of honeys and what bees have been foraging on. I came across a project by a young man from Abbey Vocational School in Donegal looking at school bags and he had invented this little system for these little inflatable airbags that you can put on the straps of your school bags which helps your posture. So there's an amazing variety of stuff. Loretto Milford were there and they had been doing a brilliant project. They won a prize for it as well on water quality in Mulroy and comparing it to other places in the future and whatnot. So, and that's just a couple of the projects but there was a huge amount of different projects, 13 different prizes for Donegal alone. It's well worth going up and you'd be really inspired. We were shooting them over with. Okay, great, great to hear about and great to talk in this and we will chat again. And in the meantime, your website just remind people it's naturenorthwest.ie And you'll find me on Facebook and Twitter as well if you like it. On socials. Okay, thanks a lot. Around the north.