The Radio 4 Blog Feed 3j3m6l

2014-08-21T14:02:12+00:00

Editor’s note - There are 10,530 known species of bird in the world, how to choose the 120 species that will make the series? Series producer Andrew Dawes shares his thoughts about choosing the birds and making the programmes.

When Tweet of the Day launched last year, it was only British birds that were chosen to lure the nation into wakefulness. Tweet of the Day returns this September with the most interesting, distinctive and downright peculiar birdsong from around the world.

Some birds instantly came into mind, as they bring wonder and glamour to the natural world. Blue bird of paradise, blue footed booby, emperor penguin, resplendent quetzal slipped under the wire immediately. Others like the unique wrybill, or the blood sucking vampire finch, waited patiently in the wings as encore understudies.

The BBC’s Natural History Unit has been to every corner of the globe but amazingly some birdsong was not included in the back catalogue. What the BBC didn’t have, Macaulay Library in America did. The series had hatched.

I could only choose 120 bird species, therefore many will be missing, yet we hope to bring you the best of what the avian world has to offer around the world; the spectacular, the bizarre, the songsters or in some cases those we’re about to lose forever.

Here are just four of the amazing birds who will open the series:

Hoatzins eat large quantities of leaves and fruit. To cope with this diet, their digestive system is more like that of ruminant mammals such as cattle. This fermentation process results in a manure-like odour, hence their alternative name of stink-bird.

The Wrybill is the only bird in the world whose bill is bent sideways… and always to the right.

As he struts and poses, the Superb Lyrebird unleashes a remarkable range of sounds. Up to 80% of these calls are imitations of the calls of other birds but they can also mimic chainsaws and the shutter of a tourist’s camera.

The sound of party-poppers exploding in a forest clearing is a sure sign that White-Bearded Manakins are displaying. The male perches on a stem with his white beard feathers extended and leaps to another perch. As he does so he strikes the back of his wings together creating a loud snapping sound.

Tweet of the Day

Free

Gallery of September’s Birds

About the presenters

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2014-07-21T12:08:34+00:00

Editor’s note – Plants: From Roots to Riches is a 25-part series beginning on 21st July, broadcast Monday – Friday at 1.45pm

As an evolutionary biologist, Kew’s director of science, Prof Kathy Willis - knew where she wanted to begin her story for this new Radio 4 series – in front of Kew’s oldest resident - the cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii) in the iconic botanical garden's palm house.

By happy coincidence, the cycad's arrival at Kew in 1775 coincided with the development of Carl Linnaeus’ binomial classification system for plants (and animals). All at once, the chaos of the plant world, which previously had no consensus on plant names, was reduced to order and modern botany, as we know it today, took root.

The cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii)

In this new series Kathy Willis focuses on the major breakthroughs in botanical knowledge over the past 250 years as seen through the lens of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In some cases Kew was the institution leading the scientific discoveries, in others it was responding to work elsewhere. Some of the science, of course, has changed beyond recognition in the 250 years since Kew was founded, with rapid advances in the understanding of, for example, molecular biology, and the technology to exploit it. But often the questions plant scientists have been trying to answer have remained pretty much the same.

Kathy Willis

What soon emerges in the Plants: From Roots to Riches story is that the first plant scientists were genuine pioneers. Some, of course, found themselves barking up the wrong tree, or even scraping at the wrong bark. But the real characters are the plants themselves, from the orchid that looks like a bee to the waterlily big enough to sit a child on. They exerted a powerful fascination that has inspired at once a quest for knowledge about their science, a cultural interest in taming, growing and (often) eating plants from the furthest corners of the Empire, and through a Western ion to understand and witness these compelling curiosities.

The Amazonian Waterlily (photo: RBGKew)

A great scientist once said that the important thing is not simply to accumulate facts, but to ask challenging questions and to seek to answer them. Some of the greatest challenges on earth today – population growth, food security and disease are intimately connected to our symbiotic relationship with plants and fungi.

Plants and fungi will certainly provide at least some of the solutions. The terminology and the scale may have changed: we can probably afford to believe that we will never again allow an entire country to starve because of lack of understanding of plants’ genetic diversity (as happened in Ireland in the 1850s). But, in the historical scientific literature it is remarkable how often we find long-dead scientists asking the same questions that we are still asking today: what plant and fungal diversity occurs on Earth and how is it distributed? What plants (and where) do we need to conserve in order to militate against ecological scarcity and environmental risk? Which plants and plant characteristics enable resilient and sustainable landscapes in the face of changes in our environment">Facebook

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Palm tree and cycad images © Kew Gardens

2014-06-22T05:00:43+00:00

Tweet of the Day, the early morning favourite that has established itself firmly in the daily routine of many Radio 4 listeners, is to fly the nest and venture beyond Britain’s shores as world traveller Michael Palin becomes part of the presenting team.

From September this year, the Tweet of the Day team will begin scouring the globe for the most interesting, distinctive and downright peculiar birdsong to bring back to Radio 4 listeners.

David Attenborough will launch the new series with the blue bird-of-paradise, a native of New Guinea. He comments: “When you first hear the call of the blue bird-of-paradise, it utters a sound so un-bird like you could be forgiven for thinking it came from some form of electronic device hidden nearby in the New Guinea forests.” Also featured by Sir David will be the hyacinth macaw, the largest flying parrot species in the world and native to central and eastern South America.

The Blue Bird of Paradise - archive audio from BBC Natural History Unit

Michael Palin, whose globetrotting has been documented in such television series as Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole and Full Circle, will present the final 20 episodes of the series early next year.

Michael Palin says: “On my journeys round the world I'm as fascinated by the natural life as I am by the people I meet. Early morning birdsong is often the first thing to alert me to the fact that I'm somewhere new and different.”

For the benefit of those who have not yet been roused by the early morning Tweets: each episode lasts a minute and a half, and features the song of a particular bird followed by insights into that bird’s behaviour and habits, as well as its literary and folklore associations. The series tells the birds’ stories through science, social history, culture, literature, music and just pure rarity.

The award winning series is currently being repeated but in case you aren't awake at 6am, Tweet of the Day is available to listen online or as a podcast.

Listen to: David Attenborough - My Life in Sound

2014-03-31T07:00:09+00:00

Editor's Note: Kate Humble presents Tweet of the Day in April. Kate Humble has worked on many BBC Nature programmes including Wild Shepherdess, Lambing Live and Springwatch.

Spring is coming and the mornings are getting noisier. It is as if nature is celebrating, with the rest of us, the lengthening and warming of the days. Our gardens, woodlands, parks and farms have been largely quiet throughout the winter, apart from, perhaps, the occasional plucky robin, or the mournful call of rooks.

Rook

But now birds are thinking about finding territories and mates and to do that they sing - or in the case of the Great Spotted Woodpecker, drum. The woods around us are full of them. The rat-a-tat of Spring at the door. This is a time of year to revel in the song of the blackbird, or the returning migrant chiff chaffs calling their name; to listen for the uplifting call of the curlew or the lapwing, which always reminds me of the Soup Dragon in the Clangers, but maybe that's just me...

Lapwing

I hope you enjoy April's Tweets of the Day as much as I enjoyed recording them. And if Tweet of the Day is the thing that brightens your morning, that April is a month when you can listen to birdsong live too, every morning, as the sun comes up. Like Tweet of the Day, it's worth waking up early for.

Listen to: Tweet of the Day

See photos of April's birds

More about the Tweet of the Day presenters and sound recordists

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2014-02-10T09:36:33+00:00

Editor's Note: John Aitchison presents Tweet of the Day from 10 to 28 February. John Aitchison is a wildlife cameraman and photographer. He has worked on many BBC Nature programmes including Big Cat Diary, Springwatch and Yellowstone.

John Aitchison

Birds bring the world to life. I love the way they can appear anywhere, at any time, rewilding even the most man-made settings. Often it's their calls which first draw my attention to them: the strident song of a garden wren, the festive tinkle of waxwings in a car park, wild visitors from the north around Christmas time. Bird sounds define the UK's wildest places too: the whistles of wigeon drifting across a saltmarsh pool in Norfolk or a flock of chough calling their own name above a pale Hebridean beach.

Wigeon

At home I often hear the high-pitched calls of white-fronted geese flying over the house while we are having breakfast. The geese are flying between their roost and finding their own breakfast in the fields. They have come from Greenland to spend the winter in Scotland, an extraordinary flight which fills me with amazement and delight each time they re-appear in the autumn. Recording these geese for Tweet of the Day was especially satisfying because my teenage son Rowan helped me. His generation are the ones who will decide whether there will be enough wild places in our country for inspiring birds like these.

Waxwing

John Aitchison

Listen to Tweet of the Day

See photos of February's birds

More about the Tweet of the Day presenters and sound recordists

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2013-11-13T18:06:51+00:00

Listen to Tweet of the Day - The Common Crane from Thursday 14 November

Tweet of the Day - Recording the Common Crane chick

At one time Common Cranes were abundant in British wetlands across the country but by the beginning of the 17th century they had ceased to breed in Britain - persecuted by hunters, and prey to the drainage of wetlands for agriculture. So, the Common Crane is the subject of a re-introduction project to bring them back to the West Country and in particular, the Somerset Levels and Moors.

One of the chicks

The rearing of Common Crane chicks is being undertaken by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge. This is the third year of the project, which began in 2010 with the aim of releasing one hundred birds over five years. It is hoped that by 2025 there will be 20 breeding pairs on the Somerset Levels and Moors.

The Tweet of the Day team meet those who care for the chicks and walk the bio-secure compound twice a day for 15-20 minutes encouraging them to forage for food. Crane chicks have to put on no more than 10% of their total weight every day in the first thirty days of their lives. The growth plates at the end of their long leg bones are stimulated by walking so the birds need lots of exercise in order for their legs to grow properly. With too much food and insufficient exercise their legs can bow and collapse under them.

Tweet of the Day - The crane suits

Anyone who has any with these birds has to de-humanise themselves by putting on a ‘crane suit’. It’s light grey in colour, the same colour as the plumage on the adult birds, with an attached cotton helmet and black visor through which to view the world as a crane. It’s hot too. Every crane project member also holds a metre long ‘puppet’ stick with a coloured plaster cast moulding of an adult crane’s head at the end of it. This model has a small spoon attached to the end of it where the food is scattered on the ground to encourage the chicks to forage.

Sound Recordist Gary Moore with the crane's head microphone

We're happy to be recording their delicate sounds for Tweet of the Day listeners. Sound-recordist Gary Moore, has the excellent idea of taping a tiny microphone to the model head so he can get some very close up sound from the chicks. He also puts another microphone at ground level so he can record the general atmosphere around them. There are two calls we can distinguish, the call to attract the attention of the parent which is high pitched and insistent and says "feed me" and the soft purring "content" call which says "I'm happy".

As we creep mysteriously about lifting our feet higher and extending our stride as well as slowing down every particular movement, the sense of a sci-fi world fades away and turns into a magical experience. Being human doesn’t count here, humans have become invisible. Our noises, actions, language and preoccupations have given way to another, simpler, and largely silent existence. Just for a moment I sense what it feels like to be a crane and the peace of it overwhelms me.

Listen to Tweet of the Day - the Common Crane from Thursday 14 November

Tweet of the Day - Full details

Tweet of the Day - Presenters and Recordists

See photos of all the birds featured in November (images courtesy of the RSPB)

BBC Nature

2013-07-31T13:42:34+00:00

Editor's note: Michaela Strachan presents Tweet of the Day from 1 August. Here Michaela shares her love of birds, with a look ahead to some of this month's Tweets. You can listen now or the programmes to keep.

Michaela Strachan

If you'd like to be truly spoilt with the sound of bird song, listen to Radio 4’s ‘Tweet of the Day’. This month you'll hear my dulcet tones along with a daily Tweet. August Tweets include the Stonechat, Oystercatcher, Bullfinch, Golden Eagle, Barred Warbler and many more. What a truly terrific tweet of a treat to wake up to!
Birds have held and always will hold a fascination for me. How I would love to be a bird just for a day, to be able to fly and see the world from a totally different perspective. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by migratory birds - how does a bird as small as a swallow fly all the way from the UK to South Africa every year? It will always baffle me. I do it regularly but with the help of a plane and a lot of fuel!

Stonechat (Saxicola torquata) - image courtesy of RSPB (rspb-images.com)

I love watching birds, but I am not really a birder. My knowledge is sketchy to say the least, although having done Springwatch for a couple of years it’s a lot better than it was! I’ve been lucky enough to go birdwatching all over the world though so here are some of my highlights:
• Seeing macaws and parrots at a chalk lick in the Amazon, truly a stunning multi-coloured sight.
• Watching a satin bowerbird in Australia decorating his bower nest with blue bits and bobs like pen tops and ribbons to try and attract a mate.
• Watching hundreds of vultures at a ‘vulture restaurant' in South Africa - it was like a giant carcass bird table but your average patron was a little larger than a blue tit.
• Seeing Carmine bee eaters in Zambia and watching them fly in and out of their river bank nest holes.
• Holding a harpy eagle in Panama and really testing my biceps out.
• Getting a kiss of a hummingbird in Canada! It was for ‘Michaela’s Wild Challenge’. I stood by a sugar water bird feeder with lips pursed and sugary lipstick and had a lot of patience!
• Becoming a volunteer for SANCCOB and helping them with their African penguin chick bolstering project. We filmed rescuing late born chicks and rehabilitating them for re-release for a series called ‘The Great Penguin Rescue’. It’s being edited now.
• Going to Antarctica and seeing hundreds of wild penguins.
• Watching the common sandpiper sitting on eggs by the railway line on last year’s Springwatch, surviving the trains and the rains!
• Seeing those gorgeous water rail chicks on this year’s Springwatch. Following Monty the osprey over two years on Autumnwatch and Springwatch.
Hmm....I’ve just realized that for someone who’s not really a birder, I’ve been truly spoilt!

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2013-07-03T16:26:21+00:00

Tweet of the Day on Mon 8 July is the Osprey. Richard Thaxton, RSPB Scotland Site manager - Loch Garten, Abernethy National Nature Reserve, explains the importance of ospreys and how the site of the first pair to return to the UK has become a pilgrimage for nature lovers, changing the way we watch wildlife.

Osprey

Ospreys were driven to extinction in the early 20th century and were not seen again on our shores for several decades. Following new laws restricting persecution, the first pair returned to the UK at Loch Garten near Perth in Scotland in the 1950s.
This site, on the RSPB Abernethy reserve, has become a pilgrimage for nature lovers and has helped pioneer a new way for people to engage with nature using the latest technology.
The RSPB osprey viewing facilities at Loch Garten first opened the doors to a curious and excited public in 1959 and 14,000 people came to visit. Today, collectively nigh-on 2.4 million people have visited, between 30-35,000 each spring & summer season. And amazingly, we are still doing pretty much today what we started doing all those years ago. Our face-to-face engagement by staff and volunteers has proven a winning formula, and one we stick to, wowing people with spectacular wildlife, and sharing our ion and enthusiasm for ospreys and nature.
A visit to the Osprey Centre acts for many as a springboard, for what becomes for them, a life-long interest in birds and other wildlife. I've worked at the Osprey Centre for many years and I meet many people who came as children and are now coming back with their own children, their grandchildren and even their great grandchildren. It has become a generational thing, to see the famous ospreys of Loch Garten.
It's an act of faith every year, on their part and ours, there's no guarantee that they’ll come back, but come back they do and so do the visitors. Some return every year, but choose a different week or month each time, to see the season at a different stage - when the birds arrive, when they’re on eggs, to see chicks hatch and growing, or to see them fledge and leave.
We haven't stood still though, we have moved with the times. The first camera to be installed on an ospreys nest in the UK was here, back in 1989. This revolutionized the experience for all, but for one important audience in particular - the young, who don’t always find telescopes and binoculars easy to use. The camera on the nest enabled people to witness the intimacy of osprey family life, and gave an insight into aspects of their lives not previously witnessed. And for children, enthralled to see nature red in tooth and claw, an osprey tucking into fresh fish, ripping it to pieces before their very eyes will, we hope, live long in their memories.
Modern technology has enabled us to share the joy and pleasure of ospreys all the more. Nowadays our web-linked cameras, beam live pictures into homes worldwide. Images from the nest, streamed to the web, have been a fantastic way of engaging with a massive off-site global audience, 24/7. The nest camera is infra-red, so at night when we are sleeping, folk in California for example, are watching it over their breakfast. It has proved hugely popular with schoolchildren too, watched in classrooms, linked to their schoolwork, helping them discover and learn about the wonders of nature.
The pioneering set-up at Loch Garten way back then, has inspired similar wildlife interpretation sites the world over, for ospreys elsewhere, and for much other wildlife too. From those first beginnings to today’s modern hi-tech interactions, these developments have served to make the osprey a household name, helping raise their profile and enter them into our consciousness. From the history of their demise at the hand of man, the triumphant return of those first returning pioneering pairs, to their firm re-establishment, both in of populations and in our psyche, as one of our most cherished wild birds, the osprey's story is a fantastic world renowned conservation success that begets life-affirming optimism for other wildlife.

Steve Backshall presents the story and sound of the osprey.

The osprey is Tweet of the Day on 8 July
More from Tweet of the Day
Hear a selection of our Tweets

2013-04-24T07:33:04+00:00

Tweet of the Day

The Natural History Unit Radio Office is always alive with a strange twittering; a buzz about birds, especially at this time of year when spring finally heaves itself out from under the blanket of winter and our feathered friends begin to sing to mark their territories and attract a mate. It starts with our resident species, birds like the Great Tit bellowing out “teacher, ,teacher, teacher,… “ the Blackbird (arguably the best songster in town) and the robin. Then we wait with eager anticipation (especially this year) for the migrant birds like the Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler and Blackcap and before you know it, there’s a babble of song it seems from every wood, hedge, tree and roof top aerial and the air is filled with sound.

Even though many of us wouldn’t describe ourselves as keen birdwatchers, twitchers or ornithologists, who doesn’t enjoy hearing birds in their garden? But don’t you often wish you knew who was singing? For centuries birds have been inspiring writers and musicians from Beethoven to Britten, Vivaldi to Vaughan Williams. After all, birds are composers; they were making music long before us.

So given that there are well over 500 species listed as British birds, our Natural History Radio team struck on the idea of a series which featured a different call or song on every day of the week, and Radio 4’s ‘Tweet of the Day’ was born.

In the first of a new series, David Attenborough introduces the cuckoo.

Brett Westwood, producer, presenter and naturalist extraordinaire set about the task of allocating our British birds, first to months in which we’re most likely hear them and then each bird to a day. Meanwhile I hauled bag after bag of recordings from the Natural History Unit sound library up several flights of stairs to my ‘eyrie’ office and listened to over 1000 recordings to see which we might use. Amongst them were wonderful old recordings by one of the pioneers of wildlife recording, Ludwig Koch, but there were also gaps … lots and lots of gaps! So we recruited a team of superb wildlife sound recordists; Gary Moore, Geoff Sample and Chris Watson and set them the task of capturing sounds for the series, (as well as raiding their own archives!).

David Attenborough presents the song and story of the nightingale.

Then Brett started writing the scripts. We wanted the programmes to be short – like a snatch of song - a tweet – just 90 seconds; opening with the song or call followed by a story about the bird. And there’s no shortage of stories; everything from fascinating ornithological facts to fanciful folklore, and from astounding feats of endurance to tales of theft and fraud.

David Attenborough presents the sound and story of the storm petrel.

Sir David Attenborough agreed to narrate the first month and everyone swung into action; microphones to the ready, the recordings began. We’re making this series as I write; the whole team is involved with the programmes and website, blogging and tweeting. So far from a mild twittering in the office, there’s a great orchestra of sound; as we capture the calls and songs of more than 260 British birds!
Tweet of the Day - full details
Tweet of the Day - presenters and recordists
BBC Nature
All imagery has been provided by the RSPB

2009-09-09T10:58:01+00:00

Here's a lovely thing. A colleague pointed out that the producers of the excellent Last Chance to See TV series with Stephen Fry have dug out the original Douglas Adams radio series from 1989 and put all the episodes on their web site to listen to. A real treat.

Episode 1 of Last Chance to See, created by Mark Carwardine, who also created the original radio series, was on BBC 2 Sunday and, thanks to 'series catch-up', you've got two months to watch it.

The Last Chance to See radio programmes are here.

The picture shows Douglas Adams (left) and Mark Carwardine in a publicity shot for the radio programme that I found in the BBC's picture library, Elvis.