 from Nature Northwest. It joins me in the studio now to talk about a different number of different subjects. Angus, thanks for coming in first of all. Thanks a mil John good to be here. Let's talk first of all about things getting warmer and we had a great spell there for what was it nearly four weeks and it was glorious. We're back to normal today but it's it's not just out and about that's the warm our oceans as we know are getting warmer as well and recent figures support that and that the oceans the waters around Ireland are getting warmer as well. They are yeah they're breaking records at the moment and that there's ocean heat waves happening in in many of our oceans around the world. Temperatures are spiking both north and south which is interesting because of course it's winter down south and south of the globe but they're also seeing temperature spikes but the the highest spike of all is just off our coast it's off Ireland it's off Britain and it's also the other side of Britain going into the North Sea that the waters off our coast the moment are four to five degrees warmer than they should be at this time of year four to five degrees warmer. Which is great if you're out for a wee swim in the last few weeks you might have noticed that the water was lovely but not not good for you know wildlife. It's not and the problem with a lot of this kind of warming is it's so fast it happens so quickly so wildlife doesn't have time to adjust. We can adjust a lot better of course but the fish in the ocean and all the other characters in the ocean the plankton in the ocean which is the backbone of all life for us and for everything else that lives in the ocean. It suffers severe stress because of that and some places you'll get big algal blooms which will be bad and they will take up oxygen which depletes oxygen for other things and other places then it just gets too hot for fish perhaps too hot for them they can head north and so then those fishing stocks are affected and their predators are affected and whatnot but one of the big effects is on plankton plankton itself and of course half of our oxygen comes from plankton half our oxygen comes from tiny microscopic plants that are in the oceans every second breath you take I am so looking after oceans is a very important thing and at the moment they're absorbing a huge amount of heat and it has the scientists worries. So already fish around our coast have been overfished for years and stocks are depleted but now with the oceans warming that's not going to help either. It's not because it pushes a lot of our fish of course are cold water species and it pushes them further north and that puts our fishermen under pressure it puts that whole industry under pressure and they're under enough pressure as we know so it makes it very difficult. All right from a fish too of all things moths because it was a moth one particular type of moth in the news last week and it's called the oak processionary moth and it was in the news because we've been worried about it to look out for it. Is it it was not around here there were some cases now but not up here. Not up here it's that we know of that we know of exactly and it's another symptom of just our global way of living. Oak processionary moths they like to eat oak trees and their larvae every moth of course starts off as a very hungry caterpillar and they eat leaves of some kind and this type of moth eats oak leaves and they were discovered in Ireland in 2020 in Dublin for the first time and the nest was quickly destroyed and we'll talk about why in a minute but they were discovered then again a couple of weeks ago a few days ago on four trees and the trees had been brought in from Europe they've been imported in and the builder the developer didn't know they're doing anything wrong they brought in these trees and planted the trees on the estate which seems like a right thing to do but those trees were carrying the moth they'd picked up the moth in Europe or picked up the little caterpillar I should say and when they start off initially the caterpillar are very very small with their little eggs initially over the wintertime and then they hatch out into a very small caterpillar so they'd be a hard thing to see but at this time of year May June July they grow very very quickly. Okay and that's the reason why you know we're always checked at airports and ferries for you know for carrying in any livestock or plants that you know something like this can and does happen. A very long time ago I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand and I remember arriving in New Zealand and they asked I do you have anything to declare and I was looking at the the declaration the pictures of the various different things and one of them was shoes and boots I am so I asked people in the queue and they said oh no no you better you better go and produce your boots so I did I produced my hiking boots and I remember they washed them there was clean when they came out the other side and I took a metro security as the day I bought them. Yes you were carrying something in the grooves at the bottom. Yeah because you can carry seeds you can carry all sorts of different things but you can carry say up to 30 species of seeds for up to 10 kilometers walking they've done experiments on this and so we've been moving things around the globe for a very long time and some countries like New Zealand have been very aware of this and they've been protecting what they have and we are a little bit slower to catch up on that but it's a very difficult thing to try and protect from from the likes of oak processionary moths which are so small tucked up into imported trees or the same kind of thing for the ash dieback disease and that is a fungal disease that is blowing across Europe how do you can stop that but it was initially brought in by trees that were affected from Europe planted here the people who did it did it perfectly instantly they weren't breaking any rules thought they were doing the right thing and but it's just part of that whole global trade. What's the problem with these moths why do they want to get rid of them? They're bad for the trees so bad for nature and of course oak trees will support more and more life more insect species than any other type of native tree so they're a threat to the trees because they can really strip the foliage but more worryingly again is their threat to ourselves and because they have very very fine hairs and those very very fine hairs if you touch them if you come into contact or if they feel threatened they'll sometimes shed those hairs they'll blow in the wind and they can cause nasty reactions and for some people they they can cause an asthmatic type reactions and but a lot of it would be a skin irritant. Now you got to remember that these there was four of them and four of these nests were found and they were all destroyed and they were all in Dublin in a park in Dublin. So it's not an issue that we have here as yet and that we know of but it's a very interesting story and it's something that's worth being aware of. Is it just oak trees that they like? Pretty much they do go to a few other species but mostly it's just oak trees and they'll they'll munch true everything but the biggest threat and the biggest worry that they have is is these fine little hairs. They turned up in England in 2012 same thing trees brought in and nobody knew these these little characters were on them and they said that was in London and now they spread around Kent and some of these other places around London over the last few years they're slowly slowly spreading there and they thought they were on top of it but they seem to be able to get away and hopefully our own department of agriculture has managed to get on top of those ones and spotted them all and they're certainly watching out for them. Now this is the time of the year for the the cuckoo and I see there's a project now trying to track the cuckoo it's a cross-channel project and the idea is to try to find out where Irish cuckoos actually spend their winter months. It's a fantastic project it's a fascinating project I've put a piece on it or a link to it up on my Facebook page and it's well worth looking at there's brilliant interactive maps on it and so cuckoos they come here around about April time and they come up from Africa and we've known that we've known that for a very long time and they lay the eggs famously into the metal pipette's nest and their egg looks just like the metal pipette's egg has those same little brown speckledy patterns the metal pipette has and then mom well dad has bred and mom once she's laid enough eggs up to 30 eggs and 30 different nests and they abandon chip and they start heading back so already at this time of year they're starting to migrate south it's amazing we haven't even got to the longest day yet. So they lay their eggs in the metal pipette's nest and they lead the rearing of three young men to these other birds? Yes and those little eggs they emerge and the the chick emerge after only 12 days which is very very quick and then that chick will out compete and effectively kill off the metal pipette's chicks metal pipette's own offspring. Now the metal pipette is a little bit bigger than a robin not much bigger than a robin smaller than a blackbird bigger than a robin whereas the cuckoo will eventually grow into something the size of a pigeon. So we have this romantic notion about the cuckoo because you know they're a distinctive call but there's a sneaky bird and not a bit nice when you realize that the other the metal pipette's then are killed off and it's only the cuckoo that survives in a nest. That's exactly it it's funny we as humans place our own kind of emotional boundaries on things and we think cuckoos are wonderful we love to hear the sound we think it's brilliant these characters back from Africa and whereas we vilify magpies and magpies are much better parents rear their young they they put a roof on their on their own nest they look after the young so well the very clever bird and so on whereas the cuckoo yet so it lays an egg in the metal pipette's nest and then goes and it's an amazing relationship really and the poor metal pipette doesn't figure it out and keeps just trying to feed this oversized chick and eventually that chick is able to make its way back to Africa with no map no mobile phone no GPS and no parent to guide us it's not like the Swallows where it's where it's forming big flocks and it's heading off with birds that have done the trip before and it's able to make its way back to Africa all on its own and that's what they're trying to figure out with this project where do they go how do they get there do they stop that kind of thing okay so I would wear an Africa they go how long it takes them there how often they stop that they just want to work out precisely they want to try and figure that out and they've so this project has been going on by the the British bird situation the the BTO from since 2011 and they have tracked over a hundred birds they amazing the technology they're able to get tiny little satellite trackers and put them onto the bird and these things are so small and way so little that they don't bother the bird at all and they're able to turn them very precisely where they go some of the birds head off to Italy for instance some of the birds head off to Spain and they're able to fly a thousand kilometers without stopping or across oceans they're able to fly straight across the Sahara desert without stopping because of course there's no food from there and eventually they end up kind of down in the bottom middle of Africa and the Congo basin and that's why they spend the winter until about January and they start mooching the way back up so they've tagged a few Irish birds and they want to see what happens to them and what's the numbers of the cuckoo like here in Ireland so our numbers sadly are going down and they've dropped by as a 25% 27% in the last couple of census that was between when when there was a big count down in the 60s and another big count and done about 10 years ago so that data is over 10 years old and they were down by 27% I would say it's a very safe bet to say that those numbers have gone down even more and a lot of that habitat loss the birds that they lay their egg into the the meadow paper and that is a bird that's on the threat as well there's an awful lot more of them but they're also on the threat again because of habitat loss but this this project will give so much more information and if you have a look at the link that we spread around and and I'll send it to your own Facebook page as well and it has a map that you can look at the Irish birds and if you press play on the top of the map it will show you its progress those those birds that they've tagged and where they've got to and very wise Irish birds because the survival rate seems to be higher if you go down towards Italy for the birds that go down towards Italy and then head down south into Africa as opposed to the ones that go down in Spain because climate change much as we touched on a few minutes ago is causing huge droughts in Spain and that puts pressures on the insects which put pressures on the birds and the Irish ones so far have found themselves somewhere between Marseille and Monaco nice parts of the world to go to so that's that's where the Irish cookers are right now it's amazing so it a lot depends on what road they take their survival rate yeah completely and and they found that they have the ability to be able to double track so if they get to an area that they they believed was going to be good for refuelling and there isn't food they have the smartness to be able to go back again another amazing thing with bird migration that they found through this tracking project is and that the chick that will leave Ireland in the next few weeks once it once it's fully grown it will take a much more direct route and it won't have many stopovers that's hard wired into its brain it's able to find out most likely but they're not definitive in this but most likely true following the magnetic curvature that they can they believe they can see they can actually visualize the magnetic field around the world in a way of course we can't do that at all so they're able to follow that and that helps guide them where they are but then they find the same bird the next year and the following year they will divert their course to places that have better food so they're able to learn from visual landscapes and visual clues in the landscape and figure out where the food was best and where it might be best to hang a left or hang a right to get get more moths hopefully some of those processionary moths and whatnot because it's the caterpillars that the cookies like to eat okay okay amazing because there's so much as you say hardwired and then they they learn as they go as well every year yeah yeah it's a fascinating project yeah okay finally I mentioned for a nature walk that's on this coming weekend yeah so there's a nature walk on the 25th the 25th is World San June Day so there's all sorts of events happening all over the place celebrating San Junes and there is a wonderful program and that has just started it is one of these EU life programs and the EU life programs there's quite a few running at the moment in Dunigoland and the West Coast of Ireland they're supporting farmers to restore habitats and their long-term programs they've got good grants behind them they're very positive thing and they've been signed up to and there's one just started called Life on Machr and Machr is a unique type of San June habitat that only exists on the West Coast of Ireland and the West Coast Scotland doesn't exist anywhere else in the world and so there's a couple of sites that they're looking at restoring those those habitats and one of them is around it's in Guidor and around that area and they are having a walk on the 25th this Saturday at 3 p.m. meeting at Bald Eddie and there'll be various different talkers country contributors I am telling you about the project telling about all the good things that are happening and explaining some of the wonders of beautiful matter habitat and what time does that start at 3 p.m. 3 p.m. this Saturday meeting at Bald Eddie okay thank you super thanks John we love summer at Dunstores saving the aisles when you