 Alright Dan, it is March the 4th, so let's talk a little bit of nature as spring has sprung and Ingus Kennedy from Nature Northwest has joined us now in the studio. Great time of the year, time for us all to get a wee bit more excited, a wee bit of sunshine and the evenings are getting longer and even winter behind us. It's a great time here. I love three minutes a day, that's what we're getting at the moment. An extra three minutes of daylight every single day. Each day. So this day next week, the day will be 20 minutes longer, you know, that kind of way. So it's at its maximum now that we're getting close to the equinox, which is 21st of March or so. Which of course means more sunlight, more energy, more energy availability, so things are responding to that. The soil is starting to warm, buds are starting to burst, birds are starting to sing, the holler. Nature is coming alive for another year. And this is actually National Tree Week a week, which is organised by Quiltia and it's, well, it's the Tree Council of Ireland actually with Quiltia. But it's a celebration of trees and all that they do for us and how we should be planting more of them, I suppose. Yeah, that's it. And when the weather is a bit better, it's a lovely time of year to get out to plant a tree, but the trees are still in their dormant phrase or most of them are at least. You'll see some of the non-native trees have started to wake and the willows have started to put out their catkins in the hazel. But an awful lot of our trees, there's no leaves, the buds haven't even started to swell and their mind burst. And as the, as the soil warms, all the root system will send out these tiny, tiny extra little roots like hairs, which are the ones that suck up the water and take the nutrients and whatnot. So the idea is to plant a tree before that happens when the trees still in the dormant state. And now the next few weeks is still the time to do that before they start to, start to grow and need energy. Okay, okay. And on National Tree Week, if you reach out, is it to the council, you can, they provide small trees to plant? Yeah, they do indeed. Yeah. So Tree Council of Ireland, that's the thing, or else go on to Quilch's website, either or, and they will, will direct you to the right place. And you can apply for a few trees. I was in a school this morning, and they got 10 trees for free. And we're delighted with themselves, school in Netter County here. And they put those trees in. I suppose we added all up schools and, you know, and ourselves and Swan. And if a lot of us were planting a tree here in a tree there, it all adds up. Well, a lot of what we do with biodiversity action plants, for instance, there's lots of different towns and communities are looking to get small biodiversity action plants. Councils have their own big ones. So in other words, plans for nature, how can we bolster nature? Ireland has its own national one, just republished, actually revised one. But there's lots of mini ones for communities as well. And maybe it was just announced there the other day. Ah, very good. Okay. Well, and more often than not, they're normally what they're trying to do is that they're looking at what nature they have. And they're saying, how can we bolster that? And really, it's about having lots of little mini pockets. Because the bumblebee can only fly so far before it needs a flower to get sustenance. The squirrel needs trees to get around the bird needs its seeds or its nuts or whatever it is. So if we can create all these mini habitats, it's hugely important. It doesn't mean turn the whole place into wilderness. But if each and every one of us had a little bit of a refuge, planted a few trees, had some long grass areas and whatnot, all of that connects together as a big habitat. So it's just to help nature along? Just to help nature along? Yeah. Okay. And the first of March as well was the start of hedge cutting season or sorry, the end of hedge cutting season and then the start of the prohibition. So we're just not supposed to be cutting this against the law now to be cutting the hedges for now until August. Yeah, it's against the law. And in the past, we could be accused of having laws on Ireland that we don't always enforce. And I'm sure some of the listeners can think of some of those right now. But they're really trying to push on the enforcement of this because we're starting to realise just how much trouble a lot of our nature is. And our hedgerows are little linear lines connecting upward, we're lucky in Ireland, our farmers are very good at leaving hedgerows in place to a large extent, at least, and keeping them intact in other countries, they rip out the lot and replace them with fences. And nature needs those hedgerows to connect from one little patch of woodland or wetland or whatever it is to the next. But those hedgerows, they need to let them flourish. The birds are already starting to investigate them. Insects are already starting to to emerge. And if we are trimming them later on in the year, now, there's exceptions for road safety, obviously, there has to be and that's fine. But the rest of the time that there's no reason whatsoever to be cutting a hedge from now, right up until the end of August. And because nature really needs it. And when you think about it, it's kind of obviously look around at our fields, our beautiful green fields, but there's not many places for nature outside of those hedgerows. These are hiding places. It's places where we can nurture these wee creatures. They're hugely important as hiding places if they're reasonably rich. Now, if you can see through a hedgerow, and the odd gap is okay, but if you if you can see right through the whole hedgerow, it is very little nature value. I am so one of the things that farm owners and home owners, any landowners are asked to do councils as well is plug any gaps with various different native trees and try and bolster your hedges that way. But they're important for shelter for birds. They're important for shelter for so many of the animals. You think of the hedgehogs that have been hibernating, they'll be following those hedge lines, the bats as they appear soon, they'll be following those lines. And then for creatures just to get from one place to another, as well as having a shelter along the way, they're massively. And you know, healthy, healthy nature around the countryside and abundant wildlife, it's good for landowners and it's good for farmers because everything circular, everything's there for a reason. And and and we're there for a reason originally. hugely important. And for so many reasons. And we're starting to realize that with our land management as well, we're starting to realize that if we have what they call nature based solutions, nbs nature based solutions, and you'll hear that term more and more now that it's it's in the brain. And nature based solutions are doing things like trying to slow down water before when there's a flood before it comes barreling downhill down to typically the town, which will be at the end of the river, or having our hedgerows in place, which will encourage more birds and spiders and the rest of it, which will help act as pest control, then we don't need as much pesticide. And one really interesting fact that that stood out when I was looking at hedgerows there recently, is a one acre field. If it has a healthy hedgerow around it, 48% of the water that falls in that field trickles down through the roots into the root system or is sucked up by the hedgerow 40 or so half of the water that falls in 50 lead nest, you need less drainage, you need less drainage and causes less flooding, etc. Whereas if you and then there's less runoff and that all helps that water quality. Whereas if you remove that and replace it with a fence or if you've got an unhealthy hedge, and there's a 2% of the water is absorbed by the grass itself. And by the by the soil itself, most of it just runs right off into the next field or the town or the whatever, whatever it's that stands for. There's a there's a walk that we do quite a bit actually, not far from here over Boerhurl and it's a circular walk and we were going around it a couple of weeks ago and there was one section on the road where there's stagnant water, particularly on one side, but on both sides. And the road was alive with frogs. So this is this is spawning season, I take it. This is spawning season and the last few weeks people might have noticed absolutely the frogs have been coming out and you'll still see them in your local pools and your local ditches. And this is something that has been going on for thousands upon thousands of years. I am around about February, when the temperature starts changing a little bit, but when the light becomes more abundant, that daylight stretching from two minutes in January or late January to three minutes a day from middle of February onwards, the day is getting longer and longer. The hibernating frogs wake up. The males are the first. They will head off to whatever pool they were born in. They go back to the back to the same pool. And so, of course, if in the meantime, we've built a road or we've put in some kind of barrier playground or whatever it is, they will hop over that and they will try. So hence we suddenly see so many on roads because these are our little pathways that frogs have been using for a vast amount of time before. For we were here before we knew what roads were. And now, of course, we're splitting up their habitats. They're crossing these barriers. The males then will call in the pool and they'll croak and they'll croak and they'll call and they'll call. And they are trying to attract the females. The females also make their way back to the same pools and then lay their eggs spawn. So what's the time span from frog spawn to tadpoles to frog? Many frogs. Yeah, so it takes a couple of months. It takes a couple of months. So they let each female will lay up to 2000 eggs, which is phenomenal really. And if you're, if you look in a pool right now, this time of year and it'll only be for the next few days to get out to your local woodland or get out to your local walk and have a look in them. If you stay still beside the pool, they'll disappear. But after a couple of minutes, you'll see the little heads popping up again. And each poor female will have a whole load of males vying for attention. Quite often all piling up on top. And as the female lays the eggs, the male then fertilizes those. And those frog spawn when the conditions are right and the weather starts to warm a little bit, within a few days, they will start to wriggle the tiny tadpoles. They'll eat the food that's inside and then within a week to two weeks, they'll be independent little tadpoles bombing around the pool, eating all the various different little bugs, eating little bits of plants, that kind of thing. Then they start to develop their little back legs first, and their little front legs start to come along. And eventually after about eight weeks or so, eight to ten weeks, the tails disappear and a tiny little frog, the size of your thumbnail, will hop out. And then they spend most of their time outside of pools, actually, in wet grass, in damp places, but not actually in the pool. Because they can live on a dry land as well as in water. Yeah. They breathe on both. Very much so, yeah. And that's the thing with the amphibians. They're amazing. So they have lungs, but they're also able to take in oxygen out of the water. And they're able to do that through their skin, so they can do both. And when they're out of the water, they don't breathe through their skin. They breathe... No, that's them using their lungs then, yeah. Unless, of course, they're in a very damp place and they can still absorb oxygen in that way. But they're amazingly important little creatures, because they will spend about two years. So if you find a frog that's maybe a bit bigger than a two-year-old coin or so, it's probably last year's frogs. They will get a little bit of half-sized frogs over winter, hibernate for the winter, wake up. And then in their third... Then in their second year, develop into a full-sized frog. And the third year they start breeding, they're old enough to breed. So they need to have a safe habitat, a damp place, food availability for three years effectively before they can start to kind of replace themselves and spread their genes. But each and every frog from now on right through until the end of summer, until the end of autumn, really, when they start to hibernate, is eating dozens of bugs. And we have a huge amount of frogs. So again, as pest control, they're doing a lot. If we don't think about it or know about it, but if all the frogs disappear tomorrow, we'd be wondering why is there so many bugs annoying us when we're playing football or having a barbecue or eating our crops or whatever. Is it true that they can change their color? They can. Amazingly. And not like a chameleon. It's not that instant color change. But frogs can look very different in Ireland. And we've only one species, only one species. But if a frog is in a very dark part of the pool or a muddy part of the pool and you see a hop out, it'll be nearly black. So it'll change to suit its surroundings? It'll change and it'll take it 20 minutes or so to slowly, slowly change the pigments in its skin. Whereas if you come across a frog that's been sitting on some, that lovely vibrant green sphagnum mass in the bog and it hops off onto a piece of heather. It'll really jump out because it's quite a green color. But then in time, it'll start to merge with them. How often have we been surprised by frogs? Never notice them until they hop. And that's why they blend in with their surroundings. And that's it because they're the masters of disguise. Their hop is phenomenal. It's amazing what they can do. However, they're still quite easy to catch. So they're very vulnerable to prey because everybody and everything, even humans, eat frogs. So they're on the diet for an awful lot of our carnivorous mammals and for an awful lot of the birds as well. As mad as a March hair. Where did that saying come from? Why are March hair so mad mad as a March? Well, this is the breeding season is well and truly underway right now. Right. Yeah. And that's it. And the Irish hair, or often called the mountain hair in other parts of the world, but with the Irish hair is one of our oldest known mammals. So there's very few mammals that have been here way, way before humans. And hairs are one of them. And they're here so long that we have our own subspecies now or at least it. Well, it has its own traits. It's a little bit different, a little bit smaller and doesn't change color of its fur as much as other mountain hairs. And they also have slightly different habitats. They will live right down at sea level. They will live in grasslands. They live in bog. They live high up in the mountains or amazing little creatures. But the mad as a March hair bit comes because suddenly they're not as shy at this time of year and because the males are fighting each other to become the dominant male and the dominant male will get to breed with lots. And then of course, lots of females that don't want to breed right now. They're fighting off the males and they will fight by standing up on their back legs and boxing. Oh, like kangaroo style like kangaroo style. And it's it's quite amazing thing. I'm lucky where I am living in outside Remelton and the farms around me, they leave lots of little areas for for the wild creatures for nature and lots of good hedgerows connecting and whatnot. So the hairs come in and out of my garden and wander through the fields. But you'll see them quite quickly zooming by at any other time of year. This time of year, they could be on the gravel beside the car. Two of them or three of them boxing away, maybe a female trying to keep off the attentions of two males who are busy vying for the territory, you know, and we'll we'll know they're not rabbits because of the size. The size is the biggest thing. But when something's far away, is it bigger or how far away is it? So size is one of the big things. But the other big thing is just the shape of them, the length of their legs, rabbits legs, of course, are strong and longer than their front legs, the back legs are whereas the hair is a whole different size again. Proportionately, the legs are much bigger, much stronger. They still have a white tail. They've got bigger ears. Size is the big thing. And speed, of course, they're the fastest of our land creatures can read speeds of up to up to 70 kilometers an hour. And the red deer is very fast. These characters are even faster again. Okay. But they don't go underground. And maybe that is the reason they like to get away from from prey. And they don't borrow underground the way rabbits do. They don't. And so you won't often see as many as you do as you will with rabbits, because rabbits, well, they breed like rabbits. So you can have big, big numbers of rabbits in an area if everything is usual. They of course make the warrens, the burrows down under the ground. And there are some places that likes to double an airport where there's big concentrations of hairs if conditions are just so. But normally you wouldn't see nearly as many. So that can be one of the giveaways too. If there's lots and lots in the field, chances are you're looking at rabbits. But they will, if anybody has a dog and you think the last thing the dog might do at nighttime is spin round and round and round. And even if that's the dog's going to sleep on the rug in your sitting room, it'll spin round and round and round. And that's it answering its ancestral kind of need or its instinctive need going right back to when they were originally wolves. They form what's called a form. And a form is literally spinning in the grasses, in the vegetation to flatten down an area. And of course, if you duck down into the grass and I often do this in an out of school group, so out of the school group in Cardona last week, it was cold and windy. We crouched down in amongst the heathers and grasses and the kids were delighted all the all the wind had disappeared. It was quite cosy down there. And those creatures are doing the same thing for camouflage, for safety. And they will, the hair would just like your dog will spin round and round and round. And when it's flattened out a little grassy area, that's that's where it goes. And during the day that they have a they have a different area they have a resting area and then they have an area where they forage where they go looking for Yeah, completely. So they'll have their safe area where they'll know they can rest you on the day. And they do tend to move around daytime now more so than any other time of year. But dusk early dawn is the time when they're happiest they're out and about and they're feeling that wee bit safer when there's not as many humans move around really. And and they'll have a completely different area. They can they can roam quite a big territory. If they're living up in the bogs and up in the up in the high lands up in the mountains there won't be as much good food for them. There won't be as much rich grasses. So they can have a quite a big territory quite a few kilometres. Whereas if they're down in the the richer habitats where there's lots of good grasses and lots of wild flowers for them. Well, then they can be quite quite a few in the one area. And females are slightly bigger than males. Females are slightly bigger again and they have to be because those those crazy males are vying for their attention right now. And not always in the most pleasant way they're literally trying to dominate them with their strength. So the females have to be able. So if you see two hairs boxing in a field and you'll see it literally looks like they're in it. They should be in a boxing ring and one is slightly bigger. That's the female saying I'm not ready for breeding quite now because they can breed pretty much right through the year. But right up until kind of October time it doesn't have to be much. And not just one litter. And not just one litter. So they're one of these creatures that they're numbers. They're a hard one to study because the numbers tend to spike and then tend to crash depending on what's happening in their habitat. So they have lots and lots of babies to get over over those issues and they can have up to three litters in a year. And each one can have up to four, four young ones. And they call their young ones leverettes. Leverettes is the name of the baby. It's open a table quiz now and again. Yeah. Yeah. It's a funny kind of word. Not a word to come across very often, but the little lever. It's one of the reasons if you see hairs in your area just be mindful of your pets, be mindful of your dogs and mindful of your cats because the the the mommy will put the lever underneath a little bush and we'll feed her one time. One time with very, very rich milk during the nighttime and won't come back again for another 24 hours. And it's relying on that lever being there and that same spot. And if you or me or the or the animal or whatever is chasing it off, well, then mom will look for a while, but eventually can't find it. Can't find. So not disturbing them for that first three weeks or so is crucial, crucial. And then after about three weeks, they're independent. They're born with their eyes open. They're born, born with fur and they're quite fast, even in that tiny, tiny stage. Is it true that some mountain hairs, female mountain hairs can get pregnant with a second litter while they're pregnant with the first? They can, yeah. And some creatures can do amazing things like that. Bats can get pregnant, but they can delay gestation. So bats breed in September, but they don't start developing the features until until March, April or so the next few weeks when they start waking up, which is quite amazing. Hairs then have a different kind of trick as they are still, well, nearly, quite close to giving birth or getting to that stage, that last kind of term, I suppose, they're able to breed again and they're able to hold that inside themselves and before the next eggs are fertilized. Quite amazing, really. And all the strategy, because they've evolved to, they don't consciously know it, but subconsciously they know that their numbers will go up, their numbers will go down. They need to breed as much as possible to keep themselves going. Yeah, to keep themselves going because what is this, like some areas, 80% of newborns won't survive the first year? With their under pressure, of course, in humans, is the biggest thing. They don't like going into areas where there's cattle and sheep and you think, well, what's left? They were all over all of Ireland, but they're still holding their own reasonably well. You're still allowed hunt them for hair coursing. You're still allowed to catch them and chase them with dogs, which it's a very strange kind of becoming a more stranger and stranger sport. But unfortunately, the government this year, they nearly banned it, but then they got cold feet at the end. And I think the days of that kind of carry on are probably numbered. But they're under pressure from all sorts of things. And then our golden eagles, our white-tailed eagles, will occasionally take them. They're very important food for the fox, for so many, for stoats, for so many other characters. Now, finally a question. I was really surprised when several huge bumblebees flew out off the azalea bushes. Not too, haven't seen them this early, or as early as February before. I saw my first couple of bumblebees. I think it was mid-February. And that's certainly pretty early, all right? But I've heard other reports of this quite a few around. And yet those really big ones are the queens. They've hibernated all winter. And they are looking for as much food as they can. They will make a little nest down underneath in the undergrowth in the ditches of the hedges. Another reason to keep our hedges and the scruffy places going. And then they will lay up to 3,000 worker bees and then eventually new queens. So something happens to that queen right now. And they don't, they aren't able to get enough food from the azaleas. So good on that person for providing a bit of food and shelter for them. Or if we decide to mow everything and kill off all the dandelions in all our lawns, dandelions crucially important because they're one of the first flowers to pop up. Well, then those bees won't have enough sustenance and then potentially 3 or 400 bees that pollinate our crops, pollinate our wildflowers won't appear and next year as queens. So the knock on effect is huge. Leave little wild areas. There's a lovely scheme run by the Heritage Council and the Burr and Biotrust down the country. But they're starting to spread around the country now called the Hare's Corner. And it's such a simple concept. It's to find a little corner of your garden, of your park, of your field, stick in a couple of small native trees, crab apples or something nice like that and leave the grass to grow, leave the flowers to grow. And then you can still have your football pitch. You can still have your farming or your garden, whatever it is that you need to have. But the bum will be has its sustenance. The hare has a place to be safe and so on. Got a bad idea. And Angus, thank you very much. As always, Nature Northwest. Nature Northwest. So for Tree Week, a couple of years ago, Creative Ireland sponsored the excellent filmmaker Charlie Joe Doherty and myself to make a few little short movies on native trees. So I'm going to post one up every day on Facebook of a different native tree. Short little movie, five, six, seven minutes. Learn about your oak tree today is the asp and I posted up naturenorthwest.ie. OK, thank you.