When we saw this place, it was ten years now we've been here and you just liv...
It's quite nice garden there but we saw this place and it's got a few acres and it was an
opportunity for me to plan out a real wildlife garden. I had time and I had space. I could, you know, really sit down and plan out what I wanted and where I made a lot of mistakes, you know, all of the years. We all do as well. I mean, in garden. You know, I kind of get your coming coming right now and that was one of the attractions. I've got a nice house but it's that it's this out here that fascinates me and I would come makes in the pleasure of gardening
and the beauty of gardening but also remembering that this creatures and insects and birds around it can enhance that and give you a great deal of joy, great peace of mind, sure. I'm sure I'm being and this is get-bearding collaboration with forest holidays. In this episode, we're exploring Bird Friendly Gardening. I've got a lot of nettles burn, you know, the towards the back which is fine, you know, I'm not running through it and how to make
the most of your local batch. Plants that will eventually produce foods or attract insects that birds eat and stuff like that are like basically just being more nature friendly is
always going to create a space where birds are more likely to survive. We'll be talking
about why less than things get messy. It can be good for the birds. We've got some big veteran oak trees. It's also non-intervention woodland so there's lots of dead wood here,
“standing dead wood and fallen dead wood and we know how important that is for a healthy”
woodland ecosystem and for our own heads to. It's the new rock and roll, sure. These things make us so happy. So good. You're here from returning guests, soyball and jaw wily. Alongside our resident bird is Dr. Mayaroas Craig and Jason Singh. Events like Memorations inspire us to experience or wonder on a daily basis. And we'll be spending time with the reigning stars of the winter sky, the starlands. I really like the phrase "the ballet of the skies" to
describe what's going on because you do just have this sort of whirling, swirling 3D mass of birds. You'll know our next guests from the Airwaves and from our episode on Bird Some. Soyball and jaw wily both came to birding later in life and assuring their passion for gardening and wildlife on their own podcast, dig hit. When you get home off of a production, you find the great outdoors and checking out the birds, twitching, looking at the birds,
being a hunt, doors is really therapeutic for you. Do you garden? Do you dig stuff up, do you plant stuff, do you do veg? What are your gardening experiences? I've planted a lot of native trees, just like saplings when they were small and sometimes you only have to make a spit with a spade, put them in and then squash it back in again.
“I think. That's what they told me. The show won't be in gardening since it. I love it,”
dig a whole stick in it. And then they've grown now, you know, five six years later, you know, they're ten foot high and so I'm growing that edge roars and coppsis and stuff like that. Me and my garden. Me and my end. What about the plants and the flowers that you have in the garden? Are there any particular favourites as a colourful garden? Yeah, it is in summer, you know, I've not got a lot of Evergreen's, I love a lot of, I like these things called cracosmis,
and all the orange flowers. And roars has got a lot of roars and I thought I'd never have
any roars. It's cost me, me dad Adam and we went out of a little garden on the front, but it was used to play football and they were always getting smashed open, I felt so sorry for him. And he was always having to take bits off in this and that, you know, and I thought I'll never have roars and spit. But now I've got him, I've got climbing in roars and rambling roars and I've bought quite a few of them and if you, you know, you just got to take time to look after
a man, you know, prune them and you know, all that. So I'm always telling the earth.
“It's just good, it's sort of like, we, you're in Lady Chassellee's lover, weren't you?”
Yeah, it's sort of like that role actually became real life without the draught, without this
Candle at the time.
therapeutic to both Jo and I being out in nature and our gardens and we've both grown roses and we've both learned that some things work and some things don't yeah, it's okay and the benefits of tree mulch who thought we'd be collecting our leaves and and realising it, you know, it's, it's such a gift garden. Yeah, we're going to sort. It is, I don't know, let's take a role, sure. These things, like it's so happening. So good. I was going to ask actually,
Sean, being out in the country side, have you noticed particularly that a lot of people were talking about the mast summer where a lot of the trees all spoke to each other and the hedgeros
and put out a huge amount of fruit and berries that I find it this quite an amazing phenomenon
that this happens. But I have really noticed so many berries on the tree still, which are wonderful because they're going to last that much longer to feed the birds around us and I was just wondering if being out in the country side of you'd noticed this year more, more fruit on the trees and more baby. Yes, definitely. Yeah, fantastic. Still got them on the trees now, you know, a lot of malice
“crab apples and stuff. I think it's something that I'm only appreciating the last few years of my life”
is what happens outdoors in the seasons and in the trees and in the ground and you know, sort of what you would look at as perfection before and now you start to, we're all starting to embrace the wildest stuff and leaving areas of the garden to nature and watching it do its thing.
It's amazing what that gives you back, isn't it? I like it here because you see a lot of the sky,
you know, as you said, I love the seasons and how things change and and what and different birds and you know, there's a lot of red wings we've got here at the moment that come in the winter and the all the berries of the trees and then you get as swallows and house martins in spring and in the summer. So it's just constantly evolving and I'd just love to see the transition of seasons, how the change, what comes up from the earth and you know, I kind of like the prehistoric
look, I've got a lot of ferns and things like that. But it's like they say you feed a plant of firmly on the earth and I think that there's a lot to be said for that. It's so grounding and it's just not like anything you ever do like our jobs and stuff like that is nothing to do with them and I don't like anybody ringing me up and things when I'm at home. You saw you mentioned vegetables,
“I've never been very good at them really, but I've never had the time that you need to be around”
all the time to water and look after them, don't you? That's the only trouble. It is a full-time commitment, isn't it? Veg and when it goes well it's wonderful and then if you take your eye off the ball, things are gone, you turn and you know, all they've turned and I do appreciate that it is a full-time job. Joe is really good. She's got some good veg going on. I'm really lucky we moved into where we are and there's a little wall garden, a wall vegetable garden so it was all set up for me.
So we've done everything from kale, we've got raspberries, tomatoes, potatoes, lots of herbs and the whole gamut of stuff, pumpkins, we also have a pumpkin competition to see who out the kids who can grow the biggest pumpkin at the end of the season. It's just, yeah, I just like it because
that you can grow it and the kids can eat it. That's always been my own. Did you see the pumpkin?
Yeah, well pumpkin seeds, like you toast the seeds and they're really delicious. Yeah, yeah, she'll have to get in. And pumpkin's are easy. They're really easy to do. They just do it themselves, don't they, Joe? They aren't really, and they are so satisfying and then you can freeze them, make soups, curries, you know, there's a lot you can do with them and then of course you can leave them open and the birds will eat them as well and eat the seeds and stuff. So, yeah,
they're a good one. Going to be no time for acting. Oh no, these things you grow and don't
“come in watch. Yeah, that's what you're about in it. You see, this pumpkin watch. Me granddad,”
he was a big garden, that would you stuff to the wall and everybody would grow in their own crops and there are lotments and stuff like that and he just filled these garden. It went to big garden and he was brilliant at growing at little green house where he'd come out and he'd grow everything, just self-sufficient, absolutely self-sufficient. And I learned a lot of things but I weren't that interesting vegetable sort of, but I did learn a lot from him in terms of how we
propagated them and now we've fed them and now we, you know, how he grew strong plants. Me dad was a good gardener but he was very formal in a sense. It was like the
Percy throw a dish, you know, where everything has to be in a line, you know,...
blue libely or white libely, and so everything was, you know, in the kind of 60s. And you know,
and then we started planting stuff that I don't exactly the same here. Now, you know, I started planting native hedges and looking into what's good for nested in the structure of the branches and the hips and the berries and the flowers and stuff like that. And I just crumbled my mom and dad's garden, we're loaded. A lot of stuff, a lot of it's still there. I didn't have it, you know, the 40, 54, I, and it's a cotton download. It's been about this, you can't see all of it in here.
And there was some coming in. Congress of flowers in it. But they were quite encouraged by it and I think they liked it, you know what I mean? I thought, well, you know, you would, you know,
“someone who's taken an interest in your garden, making it look nicer. So I thought that's what we're”
doing anyway. And then my next door neighbor was a guy called Ron Howard and not the film director. He would have a lovely old guy and he'd lived next door to a family, a lovely guy,
I was always very sociable, we always meet, you know. And he taught me a lot about gardening and
birds, especially, you know, he was a good friend. And that's how I picked a lot of it, up as opposed. And it wasn't really till I'd finished drama school and I started working, I managed to get a place, and I'd got a garden again, and a bit more money, got a bigger garden when someone from there. But I did the same thing, I always put a little pond in every garden, I went to put a love pond, I love what they attracted, frogs all the wildlife. So are the
ponds, I've got bigger. The big one over there, a little bit, and now we get my lines and more hands and kingfish and all sorts of stuff out on there. And then I had a bit more time, you know, I'd be working, I'd be working a way, but I'd come back and I'd have gaps and I'd quite
“feel gaped. I'd just been a bit more time in the garden that's important.”
More Tiff Chaffs are choosing to overwinter in our gardens rather than flying to Africa. Does this give them a head start on the best territories, or are they one beast from the east away from disaster? Yes, to both, I suppose, Tiff Chaff's last 20-30 years, especially, more and more are staying here over winter. We know why, climate change mild. And I think we forget that migration has issues of its own, you know, having to fly that far, maybe getting eaten.
So it's not necessarily a bad idea for them to stick around if they're not going to freeze to death. And it does give them a head start on territories, but also we do get cold snaps, you know, we can get quite nasty cold snaps and kind of get very small birds. So I think it's part of this wider pattern. We've got quite a lot of species that are increasingly just staying here in the area, which is as warm. I don't really know what this means, the future of Tiff Chaffs though.
“If there are Tiff Chaffs in your garden, is there anything you should do to help them”
overwinter in the cold? I think I guess the same as you do for any birds that you're trying to help overwinter, which is like having food out, making sure that you have water out that's not frozen over. And I think in general, maybe having a think about how you can make your garden more bird friendly, so kind of having plants that will eventually produce food or attract insects that
birds eat and stuff like that. Like basically just being more nature friendly is always going to create
a space where birds are more likely to survive. Yeah, it's like hord thorns, yeah. I mean we're about pencil a lot of hord thorns and the red wings we're talking about. But I'm more of a strictly big hord thorn tree. You know what I mean? I don't mind loads in the bearish. But I guess it's stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. Like just I guess moving away from kind of very pruned lawns and stuff to kind of places where animals can actually live.
Rewilding your garden for birds doesn't have to be complicated. It's often starts with just letting things get a little bit on tidy. I love my wild area because it means it is less work for me, right? Oh yeah. I don't have to do anything other than let it go. Yeah, it's great. Nobody's on my case about time. Yeah. Like no, that's from a hedgehogs. It's for the butterflies. It's for the caterpillars. He has any chest doctor and RSPB president,
doctor Amir Khan. You know, at the back of our garden, we've got a little pond that we built and then at the back of the pond we've got all the nettles and it's also close to our compost heap.
We get loads of caterpillars.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we see the blue tits coming in and picking them off and then taking them off to there to their best and stuff. It's such a wonderful thing to see. It's so easy for us all to do.
“We've just got to move away from this kind of idea of manicured gardens. Right, where are you going to be perfect?”
No, it's like, it's like me, you know, we've got a lot of nettles burn. You know, the towards the
back, which is fine, you know, I'm not running through everything. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always in that.
You know, whatever I've been, I've always put a pond in, because, you know, you don't have to have a big pond. For what it attracts, you know, if it frogs and y'all said, all sorts of stuff done in. All the insects that ponds bring with it as well are perfect for birds, aren't these people that are red, not kind of hot around our pond picking off things that are flying close by to it. For the little amount of effort, what we can bring, you know, it's an incredible
“you know, a ray of species and insects and birds and animals, isn't it? Just for that one little patch, you know.”
Trees are bare and we can see their movement a lot easier. I've just seen a net hatch on this big old tree behind us. We've got a great tid, calling them the background. Robin. Now we're heading over to one of the forest holiday ranges to see what's happening on their batch. Hi, I'm Jerry Forest Ranger for Forest Holidays, based on the forest of Dean. I've come down to a patch of local woodland today that I really enjoy. And it's nice just to be present,
to be still, to be calm, to be patient and just see what arrives, what comes. Take the time, Lotharie. In every Lotharie, you can see the other and the other. Lotharie, take your time, look at the hand. Spill a number of 18. Glücks Spill can be really good. Help and beat the E. It's also non-intervention woodland, so there's lots of dead wood here, standing dead wood
and falling dead wood. Super, super important for nesting and for feeding. There'll be lots of grubs and little insects in that dead wood that helps to keep the ecosystem vibrant and healthy. It's crazy, everything coming out right. Oh, it's that cool thing. That's what's so exciting about
“springmores, like watching everything you're coming through. I think that's why I love snow drops.”
Yeah, yeah. I'm always looking, you know, animals are only little things that's
moving about. I love it, you know. So, you know, there are these particular things you can do in the wind's time that I think are so special. Like, I went to go see, have you ever seen the styling memories? Because I went to go see the last month down on the summer set levels and they're incredibly, so probably like 100,000 starlings coming together and it's beautiful. And you only see that in the dead of winter, you know? Yeah, I remember being in Birmingham. And
Midlitch, she sent her a Birmingham about 30 years ago and it was snowing, it was winter. And they were just like, it went dark. Well, you know, it went dark. It was massive shadow. There were thousands and thousands of them. I don't know if they're still there in those kind
of numbers, but it was always strange to think of it a big metropolitan city. You know, in
it bosses and traffic going round of this, it's massive, starlings, you know, custom shadows. You just choose like that, don't they? It's so beautiful. I always think of them when people tell me like, oh, there's nothing to see in the winter. Yeah. I'll go and find yourself from Starling. Yeah. Yeah. You just have to find them, don't you? Yeah, sure. I was filming them at Dungeoness and they roost in a, there's some sort of a lady gravel pit, stuff there with readbeds
where they roost. And I went there to film them and they turned up, they first of all, they were all
On the power lines going to the power station.
took off and started memorating near the roost. And down on the nuclear power station there's
“a family of peregrine falcons, and that's about two miles away. So they're buzzing around,”
then they suddenly all bum off down to the power station, wake up the peregrines, clearly deliberately, have a chase around for 20 minutes and then they come back and roost. You know, so their relationship with their nemesis is a complicated one. They actually want to chase, but they're not as, you know, on a stormy day in Brighton, they respond to the sea, they fly down to the waves, they're dare devils. They go so close to the waves and they love it, you can see the joy in them.
"Mermirations can be seen from late autumn into early spring, but February evenings, when flock sizes are at their largest, tend to produce the most consistent displays. Every afternoon, you know, about two o'clock in the afternoon at this time of year, you'll see the starlings, they've often just bathed and they do everything together.
“They're behavior is coordinated before they even hatched out of the eggs, they're already synchronized.”
But that's to do with the singing in the colony, the singing increases so that all the females lay their eggs at the same time, so they all hatch at the same time, they all fled at the same time, and then throughout their lives they feed at the same time, they do everything together. But in the afternoon at this time of year, they'll have a wash and they'll typically perch up on a telegraph wire, and you'll see them all pointing into the wind, preening away, having a blow dry before
them earn. "I'm Steve Geliot, I've been an artist most of my life, I trained in Brighton. I started to get obsessed by it in about 2016. That was a difficult time for us as a family, one of our daughters was seriously ill, and I found that watching the starlings was the thing that kept me from going mad, you know, it was just such a reassuring and inspiring sort of experience.
“People talk about awe, the experience of awe, and it's not just that the velocity is coordinated,”
there's speed and direction, but their actual wingbeats are coordinated. By this stage of the season, anyway, they have this flat, flat glide pattern to their flight. These are creatures that live their life at 40 miles an hour, and you know, you look at them, and their wings are going together,
like, think, and I swimmers, you know, it's just incredible. But what's actually happening in
those moments, and how do thousands of birds move together without colliding? Yeah, there's been quite a lot of work done to try and figure this one out, because there is no lead stalling, there's no conductor, there's no, if you think about something like the red arrows, you've got, you know, person giving the commands as to what happens. To explore more, here's one of our get-bearing expert. I'm Professor Anne Goodenough. I work at the University of Gostyshow, where I'm an applied
ecologist. I teach the next generation of ecologists and conservationists, and I'm passionate about anything in the natural world, but especially birds. There's actually two really simple rules
as far as stallings are concerned to avoid bumping into one another. The first is that every individual
stalling keeps the same distance apart from its neighboring stallings, and that's the stallings in front and behind above and below, left and right. And that's not a set distance. It's just that every individual bird is keeping the same distance apart from all of its neighbors at the same time. What that means is that if one bird goes right, then the next bird will have to go right to keep the same distance, and then the next bird will have to go right to keep the same
distance and so on. So you get effectively a really useful form of self-organization just from one really simple rule. That works for a lot of the murmuration, physics, and dynamics, but at some points, if you're watching murmurations, you might see a murmuration split, and then come back together. And obviously then at some point birds have got to make a decision about where they go,
and you then get a second rule that comes into play, which is to sort of aim for areas where
the density of birds is kind of middleing. You don't want to aim for areas that have got very few birds. In other words, you don't want to go outside of the murmuration, and just aim for sky. Equally, you don't want to just go for great density of birds, because if you take that to extremes, the murmuration will basically implode, and they are much better at keeping equal distance apart than humans are, and awful lot of traffic jams, for example, start, particularly
on motorways, where one person gets too close to the person in front and puts their brakes on, and then the next person does the same thing, and then before you know it, the dynamics of
People driving along the motorway is fundamentally altered, because somebody ...
simple rule of making sure they've got enough space to the person in front. Styling's don't do that,
“styling's are much better than humans when it comes to obeying that rule of sensible and equal”
distance. Why does it happen? Several different ideas, and in all honesty, it's probably a little bit of a combination. One is the idea of warmer together, so as I say, these happen autumn and winter, it's much warmer to roost as part of a large roost of birds, rather than a small roost of birds or on your own, so one concept is that it might be the fact that the murmuration is effectively an advertisement for where the roost is going to be, so the murmuration just sign points the roost,
so you get multiple birds performing this aerial display, this ballet of the skies above a roost site,
usually starting at or around sunset, and going on until it's basically too dark to really see
what they're doing any longer, and you get what I call the down, the plug hole, movement, where one bird goes down, and literally all of the others sort of swirl down and go down over that same point, and that becomes the overnight roost, and some of the research that I've been involved in has found that murmurations are bigger and last longer when it's colder. Probably a bigger driver is around predation, so when birds are going down to roost, they are quite vulnerable, birds of prey
will always hunt by getting focus lock on a bird, so they don't just sort of fly in with
open talons and do the best job they can, they very much try and pinpoint, as you would with shooting a missile, you pinpoint the target and you go in after the target, if birds are moving as part of a 3D swirling massive birds, it's much harder to get focus lock for a bird of prey,
“and therefore starlings are safer, so you've got sort of two competing ideas, and I think it's”
probably a combination of the two either warm it together or safer together. It's fascinating to visually see interconnectedness, like to actually see thousands of individuals coming together as one conscious thing, that to me is it's almost the spiritual act, isn't it's a spiritual experience. Starlings are the great mimics of the bird world, from car alarms to thorn ring tourns, they've got a sound from all around us, here to help us listen more closely
as our resident bird, the composer and nature beatboxer Jason Sink. There was a video that went viral of two starlings, vocalizing, and it's of these two starlings that are creating this whole crazy, almost electronic textures and vocalizations of sounds, and what was interesting was that in the past, the people used to say to me, oh have you seen this beatboxer? Have you seen that beatboxer? Do you know this beatboxer? Have you heard that thing? When I started kind of moving
into the realms of nature and wildlife sort of openly, I started getting people saying, have you heard this bird? Have you heard that bird? Have you heard this bird? And the sounds that the starlings are making, just sound like sort of electronic glitch, percussive music, it's likely to need to apex twin. There songs were quite complex, but it's kind of like, it's those kinds of sounds, like short-sharps, the carto textures, and then there was like sounds of trumpets and
there's so much detail and technicality, and you know it's like a natural R2D2 with that sort of murmuration. We are, you know, living in the modern world of devices and technology and distraction, and you know, consumerism and all of these things that kind of want us to be less aware of
“ourselves and our environment, but I think events like murmurations inspire us to experience or”
wonder on a daily basis. I think one thing that really stuck with me from doing the citizen science aspect of the research was we were asking people to fill in details of what
Memorations they'd seen and on the form we had it that they could fill in any...
sort of start of that particular memoration season which was the start of October 2014 at the time. And I
“had a partial record come in with no date and just some comments in the textbooks saying that the”
person who was filling the survey in couldn't go back far enough in date to fill in the details, but still wanted to tell me about the memoration and the memoration that he saw was in 1944 over in occupied France when he was a soldier in the Second World War in very, very difficult conditions. And that styling memoration had stayed with him that watching that phenomenon had stayed with him all those years later and he was completing this survey to tell me about
a memoration in 1944 and even as I'm saying that to you now, I'm sort of feeling the emotion behind
that because I just think how amazing is that that he's still got all those years later that
“memory of that memoration and what it meant him in very, very difficult circumstances. So I think”
birds really do have an incredible power and immersing yourself in the natural world is amazing whatever your personal situation but if your personal situation is tough at the moment get outside, get in to nature, watch birds.
Starlings in winter by Mary Oliver, chunky and noisy but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire and instantly they are acrobats and the freezing wind
“and now in the theatre of air they swing over buildings, dipping and rising they float like”
one stipple star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented then closes again. And you watch a new try but you simply can't imagine how they do it. With no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing. This wheel of many parts that can rise and spin over and over again full of gorgeous life, other world what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the
Ashley city I'm thinking now of grief and of getting past it. I feel my boots trying to leave the ground. I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and full of some. I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings. Here's a quick tip for the cold. If you're putting water down it's freezing,
don't add salt, it's bad for the birds. Place the bath in a sunny sheltered spot or floor to ping pong ball in the tray to keep the ice from forming. We want them hydrated, not pickled. That's all for this episode. Thanks for coming along with us today and I'll see you in a fortnight birdies. Get birding was produced by Hannah Walker Brown. The executive producer is Jane Gerber. Be sure to subscribe, like, comment and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a get birding production.
It's a new reality.
