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Saturday 5 July 2008

Wild life

Living World (BBC Radio 4); World on the Move (BBC Radio 4)

This week we were looking for dippers on the banks of a fast-flowing river in the heart of Wales in the company of Kelleway and his sidekick Steve Ormerod, of the Cardiff School of Biosciences. Dippers, I discovered, are birds of craggy canyons and flashing, rushing water. You can recognise them from their white breasts and their dipping, bobbing flight as they swoop on to the rocks and shingle in the river looking for blackfly larvae. It’s really a songbird related to starlings and has the dumpy shape of a wren, a beautiful chocolate-brown colour with a pure-white breast, but it has adapted to its lifestyle on the river by having more feathers to insulate itself against the ice-cold water and a closeable nostril to prevent water going up its nose. ‘Oh, look! You little beauty,’ murmurs Kelleway, so as not to frighten it away.

What I should have been writing about, of course, is the BBC Natural History Unit’s big venture for 2008, World on the Move. But I’m in a sulk because it’s been scheduled at such an awkward time, 11 o’clock on Tuesday mornings, and I know that I’ll probably end up missing most of them. (I know, I know, I can always Listen Again, but who really has the time to catch up with missed programmes of an evening, or wants to wrestle with their laptop to do so?) Why, I wonder, can’t they cut short the Today programme by half an hour and give us instead 30 minutes of truly fascinating news every day? After all, an incredible amount of planning has gone into the series to set up links with experts and observatories around the world so that we can follow the seasonal migratory movements of animals as they happen throughout the year and around the globe, in the hope of finding out more about the awe-inspiring journeys of eels, albatrosses, godwits, toads...

Last week, for instance, we followed the flight of the willow warbler; a tiny summer migrant to the UK, just 10 cm in size, which each year in spring travels up from the dusty scrublands of the Gambia to nest within the leafy woods of Britain. Brett Westwood travelled south to the Gambia to find them in their natural habitat and to meet Solomon Jallow, one of that country’s best birders. Westwood found it strange looking for these little brown birds, olive-green and thin-billed to catch insects, among the acacia bushes of the sub-Sahara rather than hunting for grubs in the bluebell woods of Worcestershire. But as Jallow reminded him, ‘You cannot say that they are yours. They are ours!’ The warblers come from Africa, not the other way around. It was a lesson in humility, in understanding the bigger picture, in realising that there are things way beyond human imagination and capacity to control.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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