 Let's talk nature because the Angus Kennedy of nature in Northwest has joined us in studio. We're streaming live as well. If you want to look in on YouTube or Facebook Angus. Thanks for coming in for a chat. Hi, John. Good afternoon. It's good to be here. Now let's talk first of all about the spectacle that is the rotting season. Red Deer Glen Bay, a great place to see this and appreciate it. Not just see it but hear it as well because the sounds, the sounds are very unique. The sounds are unique and they're unforgettable really if you hear the rotting deer and if you get reasonably close to them so if you can hear them and if you can get to see them as well, you'll never forget it. There's something primal about the sound. It makes the hairs in the back of your neck stand up and this time of year is peak rotting season. So let's use Glen Bay as an example. Where is a good place? What is a good time and where would be a good place? Where are you most likely to see it? The earlier you can go, the better. So early in the morning and I try and go in myself into Glen Bay at least once every October. I've been trying to do it for years now and I get up before while it's still dark and get in there really early as early as you possibly can just as it's dawn and you don't need to go far. You can just walk along the road, walk along the path up towards the castle and walk up towards the lake if you can because the deer come quite low at night time and you'll hear their calls and you might get to see them but the calls will echo around the valley. It's quite amazing whereas then as the day goes on and as the tourists and the visitors start coming, the deer's head up into the mountains and they'll be further away. Okay, when the activity starts they get a scatter. They scatter, yeah, they're already going. So if you know you're hill walking and you're competent with your maps and the rest of it get up into those mountains and then you'll see them as well. So that big, big section between Glen Bay and Aragill between Glen Bay and Poison Glen holds a big number of deer and there's quite a few areas that they'll do the rotting. But even a walk down from the bridal path and it's a very good chance to be rewarded this time of year because the males, of course, they're not shy. Normally the rest of the year they're trying to stay away from us. This time of year they're trying to tell everybody where they are and they're showing off they're trying to tell everybody how fantastic they look. They're wonderful big mains that have them that have grown over the over the last few months. They're huge big antlers that have grown. They're really trying to show all that off. And really it is, it's a show rather than rather than sort of looking to take on other deer. They just they they're happy enough to show because they they're aware that if it becomes physical that you know there'll be injury or death. Yeah as males can be sometimes known to be done in many species they can be a bit showy at this time of year in particular. So the hormones start to kick in late summer, early autumn when the first time when the first cool weather starts coming and the light and those hormones they literally cause the throat to swell and the hair to grow all the more on their necks. They get this kind of dark shaggy mane. The antlers have been growing all year. They replace their antlers every year. But those breeding hormones really take over from end of September and they get very territorial. And normally male deers are either a singular that they're on their own or they're with other males throughout the rest of the year and they're trying to avoid us they're trying to avoid the predators and just get their food and keep their head down. But this time of year they split apart and they bellow and they bellow and they trash the trees and they trash the vegetation. Sometimes they'll trash the vegetation and have a load of bracken or old leaves and things branches stuck onto their antlers which makes them look even bigger and more impressive. And that's the trick for them to try and look bigger bolder brave or stronger than everybody else. Making a fuss really. They're making a fuss and they're hoping that the rest of the deer will look and say I'm not going to take that character on. Okay and have deer become more used to humans now. We mentioned there that they sort of scatter when people would go into Glen Bay. But I mean deer are not confined just to Glen Bay. You could find them in all sorts of places. Over the years have they become a bit more used to human contact. Should we be a bit more weary off them now during the rutton season? Well you should always stay away from them during the rutton season. It's wonderful to go to an area that they might be likes at Glen Bay but you don't approach them because the males in particular have gonna lost their senses and they're trying to do that showing off. Do that posturing and sometimes when they meet their match with posturing they'll fight, they'll clash but they'll chase off anything else that they think is trying to intimidate them in any way and they're trying to gather up as many females which are called Heinz. Heinz is the name for the female red deer and trying to gather up as many of them as possible. But they have got a little bolder and you've got to remember their natural predator the wolf hasn't been in Ireland since the 1700s and the wolves make them nervous and where there's populations of wolves, deer tend not to linger very long and they hear any little crack of a branch or any kind of sound at all and they move on whereas for generation after generation now of course there hasn't been any wolves so if they find somewhere that's safe they find a bit of forestry or whatever where there's good food for them they'll just stay put and they'll eat everything around them and you're right they were brought back into Glen Bay for sport really for hunting and then when Glen Bay was taken over as a national park at that stage a lot of them had escaped through the fences so now there's breeding populations all over the county anywhere there's a bit of forestry anywhere there's hills which is so much of Donegal you'll get red deer. So now is the time it's quite a spectacle and it's absolutely free it's a wilderness spectacle if you like and it's absolutely free wherever there's deer whether that's Glen Bay or elsewhere and this is the time of the year. Yeah this is the time here because it's a time here when the evenings are getting shorter and we're lamenting the summer past but it's well worth getting out and about wrapping up getting the coats out there's so much to see but those deer if you do get into get into somewhere like Glen Bay or get anywhere up into the mountains and get strolling along some of the mountain paths you'll never forget it when you hear the red deer roaring and it's it's a wonderful thing. Mostly around Dawn what about dusk? Dusk can be quite active as well dawn time is one of the best times to see them but they can be roaring at any time they can roar right through the night those hormones completely take over the males they can lose up to 20 percent of their body weight which they've been building up all somewhere because they pretty much stop eating they do eat a little bit but they're just concentrating on keeping the other rivals away and gathering as many of those hinds as possible to breed with as many as possible and so it's it's it's hard on the male deers and they can lose an awful lot of weight they can lose an awful lot of body mass and and they just bellow and bellow and let the presence known all day. Okay from deer to our native oak trees and this is as you've probably seen if you've been out and about a great time for acorns there seem to be more acorns this year than recent years is there any any particular reason for that? There is indeed yeah it's well spotted it's a mast year as they call it and mast is just an old English word for seed so it's a year of year of seed and if you think of say willow trees they have little uh little tiny seeds that have little fluffy fluffy bits attached to them and the wind distributes them in springtime when they come out late spring or you think of rowan trees or holly trees and they have bright red berries to attract birds and the birds spit out or pass out the seeds so all of the different plants have some kind of strategy for spreading their seeds for survival yeah but trees like an oak tree with their big heavy acorns those heavy acorns they're not going to blow in the wind and if the birds eat them they're gone they're destroyed so the tactic that they use or at least this is the theory is that every few years they have a mast year they produce a vast amount of crop and then the squirrels will stash some of those the mice will stash some of them and they'll eat plenty of course as well and there's a crow called the j and the j will stash a whole load of those around the place over 3000 acorns and 3000 little hidey places and if the tree was producing lots of acorns every year you'd have a few enormous jays and a few enormous squirrels rolling around the place whereas if they just produce a small number each year and then once every four five six years seven years perhaps produce a huge dump of seed the animals can't keep up so a lot of the seeds that are spread around the forest are spread around our hedgerows they're left there yeah and of course if you stick a little acorn in a little hidey hole in a bit of mud it's going to grow into an oak tree if it's not eaten and we have two native oak trees here is that right we do yes so there's pendunculate oak and sesail oak and the funny thing is common it's a well for around here sesail sesail oak sesail oak is a bit tougher it's a bit like the downy birch we've two birches as well the downy birch and the sesail oak are such common trees around dunigul and all the way along the north and the west coast and the way to tell the sesail oak apart from the pendunculate it's easy this year in particular because there's so many acorns and after some of these windy days if you see a little branch that's fallen down if the acorns have a stalk on them well then they're the pendunculate oak and most the pendunculate oak really grow their native area is kind of middle of the country and south but we do have have plenty of them scattered around here two people have planted them but if the little acorns have no stalk if they're just going directly onto the little branch kind of popping out of the branch um well then they're the sesail oak and that's the native one kind of this area which which will be the tougher one the one that'll survive slightly damper whether uh slightly more acidic soils that kind of thing it's known as the king of the forest and the the acorns that's that's the seeds but it takes a very long time for an oak tree to grow it does the um uh the the sad thing with them is that it's hard to replace a tree instantly if a tree comes down in a storm and we're currently losing a huge amount of ash trees through our ash dieback the ash dieback disease it's a fungal disease that's attacking the common ash tree the common ash tree is a very common tree it's the most common tree in our hedgerows and a lot of the big big trees that we have lined up on the sides of the roads in people's gardens and people's farms are common ash trees and a lot of them are succumbing to this disease so it's more important now than ever to plant trees and replace them and preferably replace them with something native so I would urge people to collect as many acorns as you can they're really really easy to grow even though they're a slow growing tree they're a very easy tree to plant very easy tree to propagate so if we were to like if you got a hold of an acorn how would you go about planting it and nurturing it for a while yeah as as simple as get a little pot and get some mud from the garden as long as it's not completely saturated as long as a bit damp you don't need any fancy compost or any fancy feeds and just put the acorn straight in there because if you look at acorns I was collecting some acorns for a for a school that I'm going out to just two nights ago in in Ballyard Woods the lovely Ballyard Woods near Remelton there and a lot of the acorns are already starting to germinate you'll see a little a little root popping out of them already just as they're lying on the damp ground so you can collect those up keep them in a bag with a few leaves keep them damp and and they'll keep for two or three maybe four weeks but after that they'll have either dried out or they'll have started to sprout um so you need to plant them fairly quickly but get yourself a small little pot any kind of little pot fill it up with mud from your garden stick the acorn make sure the acorn is down good and deep covered up with mud good and deep and then a trick that the gardeners in Glen Bay showed me years ago and I thought it was fantastic because they used to spread chili powder on top of the pot and that might keep the mice away because the mice will love those acorns of course not the little chili powder I like the the image of the poor mouse getting a itchy nose and sneezing and that'll hopefully keep it away from from your acorns you just keep them outside and it'll be a brilliant thing to see one or maybe more than one a oak tree growing and you know that you planted it you know it could be years ago and we'd just be a little bit you know something absolutely totally unique it's it's a fantastic thing to do and especially if you can get some of those native ones those sessa look but any of them we need more trees there's um there's of course a huge amount to talk about climate change at the moment and there's more and more discussions about what we can all do individually what we need to do as a nation what we need to do as a society and we need to do an awful lot about climate change it is a very very serious issue it's the most serious issue on the long term tackling all of us or that all of us are going to have to tackle but one really simple thing that any of us can do is plant a tree and the likes of oak trees they will keep a huge amount of carbon they filter the air they drink a lot of water and they're also a lovely thing for if you have children either in a school or if you have nieces and nephews or your own children or your grandchildren collect some acorns with them plant them and then the following year they'll most likely pop up around about maytime or so and then they can give them out as presents to their their mommies and daddies or their friends or their neighbors or whatever and it's a wonderful little gift to give brilliant idea this is also a great time of the year for saying some birds that are coming back here or coming here for the first time and coming generally speaking from the north is that right from the the Arctic from the colder places to spend the winter here that's exactly it it's such a time of change the deer funnily enough are going through their their whole breeding process the moment the trees distributing their seeds and dropping their leaves but meanwhile over our heads and quite a few people have been on to me saying that they've heard the first swans the whooper swans which have a very distinctive call and they're not to be mixed up with the mute swans the mute swans have an orange and black beak and you'll see them in the likes of say New Lake near Dunfanahy and some of the lakes around Garten all sorts of different places and they're here all year round but the whooper swans are the ones with the yellow and black beak and they come in their thousands and they come from Iceland where they're breeding and they'll arrive down in the first place they see as dunny gull and these are some of the heaviest flying birds on the plant on the plant earth so for them quite a spectacle when you see them overhead it's an amazing spectacle just yesterday I was coming back from from Moff and I was driving along that road just before Newton a whole little flock a little family about six of the whooper swans they flew over the over the trees coming from inch wildfell area heading off to some of the fields to get some food so they were probably only about 20 30 feet above the car and you could see everybody slowing down and looking up at the just fantastic spectacle massive wingspan big noise out of them and the most beautiful brightest white you'll see and where are you most likely to see is there anywhere in particular or could you see the many where birds like this yeah a lot of our birds that come for the winter time we do have some birds that come to the land but an awful lot of them are shorebirds so if you go into your estuaries anywhere along the locks willy you'll see all sorts of different ones all the various different bays that we have in dunny gull bay Mulroy bay these kind of places but the likes of inch wildfell reserve has huge numbers of them they come there in the evening time and they they're safe there at night time and then they distribute around about the place but you'll often see them in farmers fields you'll see them usually near the coast to keep an eye out wherever you are in your travels and not just the swans we get thousands of geese quite a few different species but thousands of them when you put them all together and then thousands and thousands of ducks as well the teals the widgins all these characters are they all coming down from the north or do any come in over the Atlantic as well you get occasional birds that come over the Atlantic so autumn time if you if you like your bird watching and you like going out and trying to find new species and there's a whole community of people out there that that spend a huge amount of time looking for different types of birds and they have amazing knowledge amazing amazing skill and they add to our our record and our knowledge of birds and and how birds are doing if they're declining or if the numbers are holding but they're always looking out for rarities birds that might not come here so you do occasionally get birds if the weather conditions are right being blown across the Atlantic or sometimes if the weather conditions are doing something different you might get birds coming that should only migrate in the centre of Europe but they can get blown over this way but you know most of our birds are coming from as far north as inside the Arctic Circle from in Canada and the Brent geese come from there you get a lovely little bird a tiny little character with a long black beak and called a dunlin about the size of a black bird but it's kind of grayish and white underneath and you'll see them on the right down the beach in the sandy places and the muddy places in the estuaries and some of those come from as far as Siberia so from Siberia all the way across to Canada flowing down across Britain and across Ireland and we're the first place they see they stop here they'll eat their food some of them will stay some of them will keep on moving and they're not all returning birds I mean these are birds they're maybe as you say passing by some will stay will some have been born here so uh no well sometimes some of those species do still breed here unfortunately in Ireland we haven't been very good at looking after the nature that we have which is tragic and other countries further north of us have been considerably better at this so there's birds like red shank there's birds like curlew birds like that dunlin that I just mentioned or the golden plovers they all breed in either wetlands or up in the mountains and they're virtually all gone as breeding birds they're disappearing which is tragic now there are schemes that are starting to address this and we know exactly what to do and we know how to manage the land to look after these so we need to support landowners and we need to get behind schemes like the wild Atlantic nature scheme which has just started it's going to be going on for a few years now and these are brilliant schemes because they pay people appropriately they'll pay landowners appropriately and work with them in a good kind of way to help them enhance their habitat but sadly most of our breeding waders are gone so most of the ones that we see are coming from countries where they do look after them and I think with that knowledge it's really important it's incumbent on us on all of us in Ireland to look after the habitats these birds come to because they come to Ireland and they're relying on us to either stop as a feeding station or as a place to shelter for the whole winter before they go back off and breed further north and if we don't look after our own patch well those birds they won't have a chance okay but look after them here for a good reason to try to see to see get through the winter and you mentioned earlier just before we came on here about some new videos that you've put up on your website oh yeah thanks yeah so thanks to the creative Ireland grants that they were issuing and Donegal County council have been administering myself and Charlie Joe Charlie Joe Galler a very talented filmmaker we've been making some short movies and I have them up on naturenorthwest.ie we've 10 movies now that we made six last year we did a further four this year all on native trees they're short five, six, seven minutes one is on the oak one is on the willow and so on and we cover 10 different species just easy bite size hopefully easy to understand to help you identify them and figure out why they're why they're important to our nature okay thanks Angus thanks very much