46: Autumn Days When the Grass is Jewelled

This week Callum couldn't make it so we've brought in a stunt double in the form of Poor Producer Amy. Together the Richards and Amy talk about the signs of Autumn - everything from bats to hedges, fruits to frosts!

The trio also discuss a recent article about the decline of birds and the state of wildlife recording overall.

CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside.

Send us photos of your interesting trinkets that your other half wants to burn or bin as submissions to the calendar or for fun at: [e-mail] 

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- CountrySlide website
- Negus' book tour dates can be found here


The Hosts
Richard Negus website
Callum McInerney-Riley website
Richard Prideaux website


Edited and Produced by Amy Green for Rural and Outdoor.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Autumn days, the.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Silk jet planes meeting in the air to be refuewled,
all the things I know so well.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Basically that could have been written about Suffolk, couldn't it,
because that's all that seems to be above you is
the bloody US Air Force practicing.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah, yeah, I know, Actually that is very true. It
was quite funny. I could remember that being on the
day before shockun Or started. There was this sort of
thing saying, oh, yes, we don't know when the US
Air Force are going to go in, but we think
it'll be quite soon. And I was looking up as
the sky was filled with all these tankers taking off

(00:50):
for Mildenhall, and I'm going, well, by the look of
the all this sky, either it's the most elaborate air
display ever or ARAQS going to look a little bit
more stone age like in about sort of half an hour.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yes, yeah, I mean there are all these forums and
things which basically very accurately predict when a Special Forces
mentioned is about to occur, because all of the particularly
the American ones, they're the pj's, the para rescue jumpers
sort of take off, which is their search and rescue
if you get downed aircraft behind enemy lines and they

(01:27):
all take off from Milderenhall and then immediately turn the
transponders off. Yeah, so something is happening over in the
Baltic lads.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Yes, we get the Ospreys suddenly going full chat out
of here, filled with them, filled with their rangers. That
there's a bat battalion of rangers at Mildene Hall. But
it is quite amusing as well, is that. I've got
some friends of mine who were RF and when we
were still flying Charlie won thirties, you'd see the solitary

(02:01):
one going over and I said to them, I said, wonder,
I said, it wors two together because he asked the Yanks,
and I said, well, why is that? Because you basically
get the daily run where they go back. Because I
believe that everything has to be transported for here from
Germany to the US air base because they have to
have everything sort of put in. And I said, why

(02:22):
do they have too, is it Matt Kitty? He said, no, genuinely,
it's standard procedures for US aircraft wherever they are to
at least fly in pairs because there is the assumption
that one of them won't know where to go. But
the other one might yes, there we go well down

(02:42):
in America. Yeah, well they used to.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Uh, there was an old farmer on you in up
Pensodonia who I worked with him a couple of times
on filming location stuff, so I knew him quite well
for that. And he lived down in the valley but
had land of rout up on top of one of
the mountains, and it also happened to be the mountain
that the US Special Forces and the pj's decided that
was a mountain there we're going to train for landing,

(03:08):
and osprey just on the edge of lowering the tail
tail the ramp, running out, running back on again and
sort of doing spot landings there in the middle of
the night. And he was up there just before dawn once,
trying to bring in the sheep on his squad bike,
and the this osprey drops out of out of the sky,
drops the tailgate. All of these US guys run out,

(03:30):
and then there's this little old Welsh farmer running up
to them on a Honda on a Honda quad.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
You can't park here, mate, Yeah, we're have my bloody sheep.
You're werrying a bloody sheep scattered over the mountain. What
are you doing? It went down? Well, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Don't think they were expecting that. That wasn't in their
rules of engagement. Is short Welsh farmers?

Speaker 3 (03:50):
No, perhaps that's that's a terrant that they should use.
They should always carry an angry Welsh farmer with them
whenever they dropped them out on a tailor operation and
push out taffy and out he goes, and great, I'm
going to get you all know, right, we all explain
to the listeners, I think something right, because they might
be thinking, my god, Callum sounding much more lucid and

(04:15):
grown up than usual. And it's because it's not Callum.
Producer Amy is actually on the show in what's not
lurking in the background like a no, here she is
and it's lovely to see you. We've let her.

Speaker 4 (04:31):
Out, twisted my arm into speaking for once.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yes, and the reason why we thought is twofold. Firstly,
Callum is doing his usual shirking thing right, because let's
go and let you into some of the back end
of the magic. That is we have to well yes,
I mean because obviously most people think this is sort

(04:56):
of run along the lines of sort of you know,
sky or something like that or or one of those
very professional podcasts like The Goals, Sanger Things. But no,
we basically have a quick thing. So we're all okay
for Tuesday then, because we've all agreed that we record
this usually on a Tuesday, dear listener, and nearly a

(05:16):
year now, yeah for you, nearly a year and camps
guys can't do that. And he go why, I goes, oh,
I'm just hanging out, hanging out, I've got so much
work on. And then the silly sod goes and uses
the Country Slide WhatsApp group to show us how much
work he's got on. And he sat around in some

(05:37):
swanky bar swilling Port. You know, I call him out
as a Charlottean.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yes, And what he's doing is trying to take a
photo of Port in a very well lit dining room
with a wonderful backdrop and a great setting. And if
you take a poor photo in there, you should have
your camera taken off. You basically too thing up and going.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Click yeah yeahs. And then he's going off, apparently to
go and lean around in another club or other to
do some more port stuff. I mean, honestly, he's going
to have hardened arteries just from looking at the stuff
and then so we couldn't make it. So this week
podcast is dedicated to the season of autumn, so we thought, well,

(06:28):
who better to get on the show than someone who
knows a lot about nature and a lot about wildlife
and some of the stuff that we see. Then Amy,
So therefore you, yeah, I know, in a breakward tradition,
you've got three people who may vaguely know what they're
talking about. And no crypt No, no crypto either. Yeah,

(06:50):
gonna say, if I asked Amy, I have to say
as well, again another downside this podcast. You couldn't see it.
The three of us had our pipes in our mouth,
smoking away and Amy's had the largest.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yes, tobacco pipes.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
I must say, sorry, yes, tobacco pipes. But it would
be actually quite amusing, wouldn't it if you sort of
we could use this in evidence, because you know, we've
had the Countryside is racist by monthly accusation with a
study die. So that means next month will be that

(07:26):
the country Side is misogynistic and we can say, well,
o contrere, look his country Slide Rural Britain's most popular podcast,
and look the one and only token woman has got
the biggest pipe. Great, actually contents that's probably got us

(07:46):
actually canceled now bum sorry, Yeah, that.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
A that Ai'll be picking up on this all over
the shop and just chucking it out of the window.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
Amy's massive pipe. Excellent. Yeah, okay, So anyway.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
When she hears the divert take criteria twice over because
she's also a Northerner.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, it was weird things with chips and Gravy's.

Speaker 4 (08:10):
Nothing weird about that.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
They just then go together, do they? You put vinegar
on chips.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
No gravy, gravy anywhere. It's not very old. I don't know.
Sitting sitting on a beach in the gray autumn weather
with fresh fish and chips is quite autumnal to me.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
See, I've got a problem with eating outdoors. I don't
like it. It's It's something that Claire actually does bring
up quite regularly, is that when we first started going
out together, she took me to St Andrews for the
day and she said, and we can go and sit
out on the on the sea wall thingy there, and

(08:53):
we can go and we can eat a polk of chips,
which apparently is Scottish for just a paper cone, a
poke of chips, and I went, well, it's outside with
our fingers and she said yes. I went no, no, no, no,
I'm not afraid. I'm not going to do that. I
don't mind a barbecue, that's but it just feels horrible

(09:15):
when you're stuffing chips and stuff in your face and
everyone else is just walking by. It just feels wrong
to me. I don't know why I grew.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Up on the coast as well, So chips to me
just means a fight with a seagull.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Generally the two go hand in hand. Is that if
I open this here, I'm going to end up punching
a herring gull in the head.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Ye, which's so speaking of which wild birds?

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Wild birds? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (09:44):
Come on a segue.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
So there's a there's a special WhatsApp group that you
and I are both in related to a work thing.
So we're not going to say any more than that.
But just before recording, somebody posted in there the what
is it? It was a Guardian piece talking about the
wild bird numbers continuing to fall in the UK, with
some species in dramatic free fall. So this is Helena

(10:13):
Horton's piece this afternoon on Tuesday, twenty third of September.
So wild bird numbers have plummeted since the nineteen seventies.
The government data shows that the trend continuing. Between twenty
nineteen and twenty twenty four, the species index declined in
the UK by four percent and England by seven percent.
And then intensing farming practices, pesticize, herbicide, removal of hederows,

(10:37):
some rare species are such as turtle doves are now
making a comeback as farmers create habitats RSPB. Farm land
bird populations have fallen by over sixty two percent and
over the long term eleven percent. In the short term,
so it's farmers are bastards apparently, and all that farm

(10:57):
nature restoration work was for nothing? Is that about right?

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Well, this is the fascinating thing, isn't it. I mean,
I do love this line that Miss Horton uses in here,
where she claims intensive farming practices have had significant impact
on some bird populations due to the increase in the
use of machinery and pesticides, as well as the removal

(11:25):
of habitats such as hedgerows. Now I like that the
increase in use of machinery. Now, how far how far
back are we going here? You know, Jethrow told damn
him with his horse drawn hoe. And farmers haven't been
allowed to remove hedgerows for I don't know how long

(11:45):
the number of I mean, it's not nineteen forty six,
Let's be honest. Yes, anyone with eyes to see would
know that there have been declines. But it just so
happens that today we had the High Suffolk Farm Cluster

(12:05):
meeting to discuss a few things and we are actually
looking at how we should and must record our data
better because almost like Cassandra, they'd said, the problem is
is that if you look at the data sets that
the government uses and are available for general use, they

(12:27):
if you lay those over for what they're saying is
literally on our patch that they're saying this is here,
and according to that, we have got barn owls coming
out of our ears. And the reason for that is
because they have very very high numbers because they're using
all the data of all the barn owl chicks that
have been wrung in this area. Now that would be true,

(12:51):
but that's the only data they're picking up on. What
they're not picking up on is all the other bird
counts and where we are storing this data because, as
I say in my book Words from the Hedge, one
of the most potentially profitable crops that we are going
to have in the near future is data, the harvesting data.

(13:14):
Knowing what we have, but until you actually go and
have a data set which is worthy of record, i e.
Looking at sort of five year plus periods that we thought, well,
it's not really worth the candle, so we've recorded it
and kept it to ourselves. How are we going? And
we're overlaying this data that the government is using whatment
government has been given, and it there's no resemblance to

(13:37):
ours at all. I mean, apparently we have no bats
and literally zero great Christish Newts. We have one yellow
hammer one apparently according to this data set, and only
going really And I'm sat next to the guy who
does all our bird recording, and it's going, well, that's
just nonsense. It's listal we've got. This is how many

(13:59):
I've got opening is sort of little data set, and
there's a farmer just next to us. He said, well,
I record all my news on by taking photographs of them.
He goes and I've cashed them in my phone. And
then you've got the guy who's our bee and fly
and wasp expert, and he's got all these not just
rare species, but species thought to be extinct. It's got

(14:23):
dead varieties of them in this little box thing, pinned
out like a sort of old fashioned butterfly collector would have.
And he's saying, well, this is what we've we've found
all this year, and you're going, wow, you know this
is We're not just talking like it's a cigarette box.
This is this great, big thing that's about the size
of a sort of three thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, which

(14:44):
he opens up and there's all these various bees and
wasps and things. I mean, what's the score, Amy? Why
is it falling down? This recording data the wind of seeing,
you know, the reality perhaps portrayed.

Speaker 4 (14:59):
What it comes down to is that question of where
does the data get input. So around the UK there
are these things called Local Environmental Record Centers or lurks,
and so in North Wales we have one which is
called COVNOD in kind of Liverpool Northwest area. I'm not

(15:22):
sure how far they go across now, because I think
they've expanded, but they're in Cheshire as well. They had
record in South Wales. I know they've got a similar thing.
They probably have one over in Suffolk as well, which
is they try to act as a central point where anybody,
any member of the public. You don't need to be
an expert, you don't need to be anything like that.

(15:43):
You can just input and say I saw an ota
on this day in this place and that's as much
information as you need to give them. Ideally, if you
can tell them if it's male or female, dead, alive, young,
that kind of information, that all helps to build up
a bigger picture. But the baseline is basically telling them

(16:06):
what species it was and where you saw it and
the date, and if you can upload a photo so
that a county verifier can have a look and say yeah,
that's definitely an otter, not a mink or a pole
cat or something like that, then even better. But those
local Environmental Record centers they exist and people can request
data from them, so you could actually put in a

(16:28):
data request and this is what ecological consultants do for
looking to see if there's any historical records in an area.
Is they approach the local Environmental Record center, they put
in a data request, they pay a bit of money
for it, and they're told if there's things like great
crested news or bats or whatever it is that they're
interested in in that local area, so that they can

(16:50):
use that in their report. I suspect that, for one thing,
maybe you do have a local environmental records center, but
they just don't have a lot of records, or it
might just be that the data that's been gone to

(17:11):
the government has been provided by RSPB, so that'll only
be data that has been gathered by their volunteers or
them like their members of staff. They won't be trying
to get all of the records from every other place
because like that record sharing doesn't always happen, they try
to make it happen. I know that there's been a

(17:32):
massive effort in North Wales to try and get records
all getting input into COVNOD. But there's going to be
people out there who are seeing things, who are recording things,
like you guys on the Suffolk the High Suffolk Farm Cluster,
and you're keeping that data to yourself because for you
it's really important for what you're doing. But like it's

(17:57):
it can be tricky as well because for private landowners.
I've worked with people who they know what's on their patch.
They are chuffed with what's on their patch, but they
don't necessarily want to share that information because they're either
trying to protect the wildlife in the case of things
like if they've got badger sets that they're monitoring, or

(18:17):
they don't want to put it on record because they
fear that it will impact what they can do with
the land in the future.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, there's a layer to add on that as well,
from a couple of bits of experience I've had because
I sort of sit outside the ecology bit, but I
do put some data into it. One site we manage
and Damey and I help manage as part of a project.
I won't say which species it is, but there's record

(18:48):
keeping problems there because the covenod database keeps rejecting any
entries you put into that site because at some point
someone mis entered the whole thing as the site and
there's sort of geographic boundaries and things for it, so
we can't record those species as being there because any

(19:08):
entry you put in doesn't just it just fires it
back out again. Another one a few years ago, I
put a sighting of a mink on there on the
Kloedogu River, which was significant because it was the first
time a mink has been spotted that far up and
they weren't meant to be there, so it was put
in there, this is a mink here is this is

(19:30):
actually quite serious and it was rejected because the recorder
looked at it and went, we've never had record of
mink there, so it couldn't be there.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
Well exactly, so we have got the inverse of that
here is that. I think I've mentioned him on the
podcast for Our Bee and Wasp and Fly Guru d
David Basham, who does a load of recording on our place.
He's recorded a particular species of bumblebee which was thought

(20:02):
to be extinct, was said to be extinct, and he said, well,
when he actually recorded it, he said, it just happened
to be that one blow could put one recording in
because it put it down and so there was there,
and then there had been no other recording since nineteen
fifty something like that, so therefore it was deemed to
be extinct. He said, well it wasn't. He said, actually,

(20:23):
you just have to be a little bit of a
an expert for a start to go and notice the difference.
I mean, let's be perfectly honest. Most of us who
would sort of say we're a bit of a naturalist
can usually spot the difference. Say well, that's definitely a
bumble bee, and that's a honey bee, and that's probably
a bee mimic. I think we'd probably get those three.
But when it comes down to these sort of variations

(20:45):
of you can't say. And he said, of course it
wasn't extinct. He said, it's always been about. It's just
no one's gone and looked for it, or if someone
did see it, they just didn't recognize it. They thought, oh,
that looks like that one, but it's not. It's this one.
So these things that are said to go extinct quite
frequently aren't. But he also, I mean, when when he
was showing me this collection of things, he was going, yeah,
that's a wasp. I was going, what I said, that's

(21:07):
not a wasp. It's a little black fly. And he
won't know it's definitely a wasp. And he then told
me it's a great, big, long name, and he said,
and it works with these ones which are spider hunting wasps,
he said, but it's a it's a mugger. Instead, I went,
what a mugger? Right now? I'm not even gonna bother

(21:29):
trying to go, And thus instantly my mind was filled
with sort of like, you know, he's got a black
hoodie on. He was blackness wasp right, and his sort
of trousers are far too low, which always seems to
be very stupid for a mugger. How he's supposed to
run away with trousers around that low, because you just
truly trip anyway. So apparently what this thing does right

(21:50):
is it hangs about waiting for the spider hunting wasps
to do their thing right, and he goes buzzing off
these spider hunters, and they go and have a fight
to the death with a spider because obviously the spider's
not giving up without a fight. And then it wins,
and then it bites the legs off the spider and
it so it's still alive, so it can then lay

(22:12):
its egg inside it, right, and then take it back
to its little burrow, where it then puts the little
cap on the burrow, and then the egg hatches out
and the larvae eats the still living spider right, all
so much, so good. Not the mugger Wasp. The mugger
Wasp is brilliant. It hangs about and waits for one

(22:33):
of its spider hunting mates to go and do its
stuff right and bite the legs off spiders and lay eggs.
And then it jumps in there and it steals the
It fights off the spider hunting wasp right, fights it off,
makes it fly away and goes ha ha, And it
lays its egg inside the poor old spider who's now

(22:58):
sort of got no leg and two eggs been injected
inside it. And then the mugger flies off, and the
original spider that's done, the wasp that's done all the
fighting to get this thing comes back and goes moron.
The Mugger's left the goods behind, takes the poor old
cadaver of this well still living sort of zombie like

(23:22):
spider body back to its little lair and puts it inside,
and the mugger's egg hatches two days before the normal
wasps one. They's done all the hard work, wakes up
not only eats the spider, but also eats the egg
of the other wasp as well, and then that's it.
So basically we have discovered you know, if you told

(23:44):
this to Nigel Farage, here'll be going, well, that's absolutely typical.
It's thehi all nature of even the wasps have lost
the work ethic. They can't be bothered to get in
fights of spiders. They just fight their own kind. Yeah,
I don't know what.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
This isn't later incredible though, it is not amazing, like
how did that evolve? Like it's just amazing amazing?

Speaker 1 (24:11):
Well, yeah, and how hubristic for man to look at
this and go right, well, well, this is the entire situation.
Having looked at several records on a spreadsheet, this is
the entire situation of nature.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
In the UK at the moment. Yeah, he's here's our
press release. Yes.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
So there was a county in North Wales which I
think to this day possibly had no records of earthworms,
not a single one, right, And it's like that that's
that is actually impossible. And I know it's not true
because I lived in that county it's Flintscher, and I
lived there and I know there's earthworms because I've seen them,

(24:47):
but there was not a single record, so like your bats.
But they do exist and there are people out there
who have records. I have no doubt that there is
a bat group, and they have records of where there
are maternity roots, of where the batsate, of where they
breed in autumn, and all of that information is out there.
It's just not somewhere central and accessible. No, that's the

(25:10):
key thing, and that's the problem is that when these
reports are compiled, is it all depends on where you
get your data from. If you're getting all of your
data from one source, you are never going to be
getting the full picture. You need to talk to people,
and there's a lot of people like naturalists out there
who are retired, who are older, who possibly only work

(25:35):
with paper maps, because I know that. In I was
secretary of the local back group for a couple of years,
and there was one gent there who was dedicated in
so many ways to nature, and he would drive around
at night in his battered old land rover with a
bat detector sticking out the window, trying to track bats

(25:59):
back to their roosts. I don't know how many times
he must have been pulled over by the police, all
sorts of things, but he was incredibly dedicated and he
tracked down roosts for the back group and we would
then we then went and we ringed some bats at
one of them because it was a new record for

(26:20):
that species in the area. And all of his work
was done on paper maps, and he just had his
landline telephone and he would phone you up and say,
I've got really exciting news. We need to go out,
we need to go and look at this. But he
did not do anything by email or anything electronically.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Gone.

Speaker 4 (26:40):
They possibly have because he's passed away, passed away a
couple of years ago, and I don't know because I'm
not as in touch with the back group now, I
don't know what's happened to his records. I hope to
God that they have been digitized.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Yeah, this is a big problem as well with history
groups and things like that, that these all these the
history periodicals and quarterlies, and there was a kind of
talk okay, if I can talk about it, if I
won't mention the county. There was a longstanding historical journal
for a county in England that was incredibly detailed, but

(27:18):
it had information in there that people were submitting from
all around the world, you know, sort of the tracing
their family history back and finding this diary from eighteen
ninety that there were then sending the details onto this
guy who then publish it in this journal, but it
was never online, all written, and he was when he
passed away. My mother made an attempt to basically buy

(27:41):
the rights so we could digitize it all and put
it on a website. And this guy's daughters went, nah,
we're not really interested in that, and they just got
rid of the whole lot. And that was that was
basically like the Library of Alexandria for this county in
terms of its history. And that has happened up and
down the country again and again. There's a rant coming.

(28:03):
I can feel it brewing within me when you see
articles like this silly little things in the Guardian, which
is Nature's in crisis. The RSPB must do more. And
this is not singling out the RSPB, because you could
see that in that stupid state of Nature thing from
was that three years ago? Yes, yeah, the one that

(28:24):
basically killed off a lot of farm policy that was
actually doing some good. These organizations, it is not just
them being naive or them just telling one side of
a story. They are being fiercely political for their own
financial survival. At the state of nature. I'm going to
sound like Ian Cockhill in a minute. These organizations, they

(28:47):
do it intentionally. They do it to say everything is
going wrong, everything's on fire, everything's in everything's terrible. The
only way to save it is for you to support
our grant to the lottery for this one point five
minute or two point five million and whatever. Never mind
the fact that when you look at the data on
the ground, when you actually go out and see it
for yourself, as we've covered so many times, private landowners

(29:10):
often not doing this better when the publicly funded organizations
and you can go look, you have no curbew left,
you have no black grouse, you have no lap wing,
you have no Merlin. This bloke you hate because he's
a millionaire, he has them all, and he has funded
their efforts for a fraction of what it has cost
you and the public tax payer and the taxpayer to

(29:34):
have no birds over there. He's got all the birds.
Yet he's the bad guy. You're the good guy. Dear
God in heaven. When do we break this cycle of
fuck wits?

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Wow? I should imagine, Mummy, I should imagine. But probably
how the cycle will be broken is you're going to
need a complete root and branch smash up of DEPHRA,
Natural England RPA. They'll all get absolutely mangled if we
get a reform style government next time, you know they're

(30:11):
going to be for the chop. The problem is is
that and a lot of those organizations do rely very
heavily upon RSPB data, Wildlife Trust data, et cetera, et cetera.
And as you correctly say, I mean, it's obvious to
those with eyes to see that this is where our

(30:32):
problem is coming from, is that you've got a bunch
of people who do not want to actually see nature
recovery because if nature recovery happens, it's a bit like,
you know, well, what's from your job anymore? You haven't
got a job anymore. If we've actually got really good
bird numbers and no one's being nasty to birds, then
you don't need the rules as aety for the protection
of them anymore, do you, Because everybody's absolutely fine and dandy.

(30:56):
And you know, I mean, we know you only got
a look on the Charity Commission website and you can look.
You can't see exact salaries that individuals are paid, but
it will give you bands of how many people receive
a salary of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to
our one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. How many received

(31:17):
this this? And there are a lot and I mean
a lot in the RSPB, one of whom is in
the two hundred thousand pounds and down to one hundred
and sixty thousand pound bracket, which one assumes is the
chief executive, and then all the other senior individuals who
have got there is into the thirties. I mean the

(31:37):
numbers getting paid there, that's a huge amount of money.
And so therefore that if they're only means of raising
cash is to put doom mangering into it. And when
you've got ready SAPs who will just suck it all
in and then regurgitate it out through the guardian who
will just parrot out this stuff, then yeah, I mean

(31:59):
it's doing the fundraising for them, isn't it. And the
bizarre thing was, are sat in this farm class the
meeting today and the farmers are shaking their heads. But
the ones who are the most irate are the naturalists.
That these people get paid very little money, but they
do it more for the love, not for the money
of it. Who are these hugely experienced recorders of data

(32:21):
who record our bird numbers, do their u nesting habitat surveys,
do the productivity surveys, are out there detecting bats and
sweeping for insects and all these wonderful things that they do,
and they feel shat on, you know, they read that
Helena Horton article and they feel shat on, And you

(32:41):
think that surely isn't why you enter journalism. And you
also then look at the senior people within the RSPB,
in the Wildlife Trust and you're saying, these are people
who have been members of your organizations for before you
were born, and you're shitting on them to and I think,
you know, it's really quite disgraceful. And so I've had

(33:04):
just had Richard's rant for him. I'm sorry, I've just
stolen your chips there by liking Richards Richard's rant.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Oh this isn't just screaming into the void saying what
can we do? I think this is going to change,
as you've said, I mean reform government and massive change
in government is going to is going to come. That's
pretty much inevitable. Now when you look at any other polling.
I just hope that it is it's going to swing
is in the right direction. But you know time will

(33:33):
tell you know my views on that. Yea, the old
way of looking at things, the way we've been working
for the last thirty years or so, is going away
in terms of how organizations are circular with government and
the the sort of the machinery of state is hand

(33:54):
in hand with these third sector organizations. That is going
to change and I'm seeing more and more of that
through my work and seeing how there are new ways
of doing things. I mean, at the end of this week,
so when this episode comes out to the public, I
will have just spent half an hour standing in front
of how a National Landscape's Board sort of having a

(34:17):
doing a presentation there which is stop looking just to
Wales to how to manage landscape, look at the rest
of the UK. And one of the things I'm going
to be using is Suffolk and another thing I'll be
using is Northumbria and places like that, because there are
more ways to do things than just looking at how
the breck and beacons do stuff. For example. You know
you can look at other places. It is allowed and

(34:42):
part of the part of the discussion. There is going
to be looking at what outcome you actually want for
these landscapes, look at what outcome you want for these
rural communities, look at the outcomes you actually want, and
looking to see who's doing it well rather than just
being in this constant state of trying. Well, if you're

(35:04):
trying but you're not actually looking to see whether you're succeeding,
your efforts are all a bit shit, aren't they. You know,
you've actually got to look and see are we having
any wins here? Are we having any success? And if
we're not having success, but we just keep trying to
find another way to do the same thing we've been doing,
you're just going to end up with the same result.
It's the definition of madness. But those things are changing,

(35:28):
and I want to say our stupid little podcast is
a small part of that, because people come up to
us and say people we've never who I would never
have been able to speak to about shooting or farming
or anything else when we talk to them about GWCT
and they say, well, who's that right? We're going to
listen to this one with these two ecologists talking about

(35:50):
farm clusters, or listen to listen to this one about
the Moorland stuff or anything like that. There's a new
conversation that could be had which takes it away shooting,
takes it away from shouting at garat shrubsoul or stuff
like that, which I do quite enjoy doing. But you know,
we have such a broad conversation here. We've now given

(36:11):
We've created these little things that we can send out
to people and our listeners can send to people and say,
just listen to this one. Just listen to this one episode.
Don't listen to them one where we're talking about horsepunk.
Just listen to this one episode. And we've got a
little bit of a wedge we can put into the
whole argument then. And I am feeling quite positive about

(36:32):
those things, even though that Guardian article has pissed me off.

Speaker 4 (36:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
Hello everyone, this is Richard from the Future, traveling back
in time to tell you that you really should subscribe
to us on Patreon. You can do that by going
to countryslide dot co dot uk forward slash support. There
it will take you through to Patreon. You can sign
up there to support us. It's about three hounds a
month or thereabouts depending on how you pay, and in

(37:03):
return you get early access to episodes, add free episodes,
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minutes or even more at the end of the show
where we say all sorts of things that really shouldn't
be in public, and you get access to our WhatsApp
group of supporters, which is rapidly becoming the best thing

(37:24):
on the internet. So there you go. That's why you
should subscribe. And now back to the episode.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Let's move on to something more positive. Autumn. Now you
know we're not talking. We ought to have play. If
we're really skilled, we could edit in the autumn, watch
music there, and then the three of us go hello,
and we could be sort of sat in front of
some once pristine landscape which is now all chewed up

(37:54):
by fifty five different production vehicles.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
I have a link to autumn what because I used
to look after injured bats and I hand raised a
brown long eared bat which was orphaned. Apparently it was
orphaned for a reason because he never learned to fly.
So he became my education bat. And I used to
take him to schools and take him to events, and

(38:20):
he would meet people and they would go, oh, my gosh,
they're so cute and avenue bats were so fantastic. And
when I was away in Australia, he went to stay
with another back care and she so happened to be
involved with Autumn Watch, and so my bat was on
Autumn Watch. He had a little slot live on Autumn

(38:42):
Watch when I was in Australia, so I had to
watch it at some stupid hour of the night. But yeah,
my little brown, long eared bats.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
So whilst you were away in Australia, Chris Packham sniffed,
your bat is terrible because he can't stop himself. He's
always sniffing things, isn't it always sniff So anyway, Autumn,
how do you follow that bat sniffer?

Speaker 1 (39:16):
The alleged about sniffer If his lawyers are listening, he
certainly sniffs.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
He sniffed. Was it a kestrel chick or something like that?
He sniffs he likes the prey of some bird of
prey and he says, I love sniffing them. And I thought, well,
I've ringed both kestrels and uh, barn owls, and I have
to say, barn owls stink. That is the most repellent nest.

(39:43):
I think that they're humanly is because it's this is
full of well, they've eaten their own brothers and sisters,
and there's his last two left in there, and they
sort of only see him be able to fledge because
the layer of sort of death, dead decay al pellets
and ship just right to the top. And then eventually
they've got their heads out of the little hatch and

(40:03):
they're going, is it's under fledge now because of sort
of their ships raised them up to the top.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Is anyway I wouldn't sniff that just aside, because this
is a podcast of asides. When I was growing up,
for reasons that don't need explaining now, we ended up
with barn owls hatching in the house and they'd learned
to fledge and they hunt in the house. So you
got to this weird point where I forget to tell people.

(40:28):
We forget to tell people when they came to visit,
they just walking down a corridor and you just get
that of a barn owl drifting from room to room
as it came to what was that just a barn aile?
Don't worry, what do you mean? It's a barn out there?
It's a barn owl. They're in the house, don't worry
about it, just can't come down the corridor.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
I love that We had a pet jack door for
a while called Mole, who was very amusing, and our
financial advisor came to see us, and he's a lovely,
big jolly guy. He comes all the way from from
Dorset come and see us, and he loves coming to
see us because he thinks, you know, we're out the country,

(41:08):
although he sort of lives quite rurally, but he always says, oh,
it's like proper countryside where you are, and I love
seeing it. And of course we had no thought the
fact that when it's boiling hot day, that you know,
and that we knew that we had a jack door
who would come down and join us and sort of
walk all over your plates while we sat outside on

(41:28):
the on the patio and he's talking to us about
why our investments aren't doing as well as he had hoped.
And the next thing, Mole suddenly appears and comes and
lands on my head and you coop. His face was like,
fuck me, bloody crows come down and lands on you goes, oh, no,
it's a jack door. It's Mole. Don't worry because my god.

(41:50):
And the next thing is a mole pops off my
head and lands on his balding pate and is now scrabbling,
catching his claws into his head to go and grip
tight because he's never landed on a bald head before,
and he still remembers it now. He said, I go
and visit some weird clients. He said, you know, I've
got lots of different classes. I've never had a jackdaw

(42:13):
come and join us. And it was our normal, a
bit like you having bar owls, just you know, in
the open, the downstairs loo, and there's a sorry, this
is busy. I'm just coughing up a pellet at the moment,
occupied occupied yea autumn. Anyway, Listen what I thought one

(42:36):
of the one of the things, Yes, we're been talking
for forty five minutes. I thought, one of the things
that would be quite interesting is that rather than all
the old shit of you know, mellow fruitfulness and all
that's the stuff, is the thing that you think, which
is quite uniquely a thing you go, oh, it really
is autumn, because it creeps up on you, doesn't it autumn?

(42:58):
So what's the thing that makes you go, oh, yeah,
that's autumn. Let's go with Amy first, what's your autumn thing.
You go, that's a that's a sign.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
That's a really hard one. Actually, I mean, for me,
it tends to be the end of survey seasons because
a lot of the wildlife that I do surveys for
are active during spring and summer, and then they start
to hibernate, like bats and newts and reptiles and dormice

(43:31):
and all that kind of thing. So tomorrow I'm out
on a dormouse survey. There's one more in October, but
then after that no more. That survey is coming to
the end of the season for that and yeah, that's
that's kind of the thing. And then also when we
start getting frost, just gentle frosts on the ground, that's

(43:54):
that's the thing. So when I take because I take
the dogs out for their first when they need a
wheaper thing in the morning, I'm always the one who
lets them out, and it's that it's that time where
it's it's still a little bit dark when I open
the door and there's a bit of a glistening of
frost on the ground, and then there's all the other
little just little indicators like the swallows and the house

(44:19):
martins going they've all been gathering recently, and then they're
tailing off now there's not as many around, and the
geese are starting to come over as well. So we
just saw a few wedge of geese fly over the
house just before we came in to record the podcast.
So yeah, and that's a that's an indicator as well.

(44:39):
For me, it's all those little little signs. How about you, Richard.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
The well, mine's aheady one. I don't know that I'm
going to I'm going to Nick richards one now, but
mine is when you see more berry than leaf. So
like the berries there have been appearing since August, so
you blackberries arrive, then the rowan berries are always an
early one. So rowan berry's appearing is a marker that's

(45:08):
autumn is coming, but not that it's here. So you
see rowan berry's appearing somewhere around the game fair when
I was over for that folk festival thing, rowan Berry's
appearing then, so that was autumn is coming. Someone's coming
to an end. But you hit a point when the
leaves start dropping out of the hedgerow, but you've got
berries around, so there's still it's a good hawthorn yere

(45:30):
at the moment, and we've got lots of hawthorns around
and that everyone's been talking about the slows being early.
But we've got rose hips everywhere now, and the rose
hips are suddenly filling the hedgerow and you've got those
The berries are blackbriany, always right next to them, which
is always a difficult thing if you're picking rosehips. Get
one of the toxic ones instead, but more berry than

(45:51):
leaf because the leaves are drying up and blowing off
and detaching, but the berries are going to hang around
for a while. So now all of a sudden, the
green it's stepping back a bit and pulling back, and
you've got the berries still hanging on. So yeah, that's mine.
It's like you suddenly go out and go, well ship,
there's a lot of berries everywhere, but there's no leaves.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
The hedges. The hedge is retreating. It's fascinating, fascinating. You're
quite right, it's very true. We've been working on a
hedge at a place called Thorny in the Fens. It's
right on the edge thy Thorny with an Thorny with
an e y at the end. Quite an amazing old

(46:32):
place out in the fence. It's if you walked about
a mile in one direction from where we were, you'd
be in Lincolnshire. But it's on the Fenland clay, still
very flat. It's would you call it beautiful, No, you wouldn't,
but it's got stark, you know, starkness to it that
makes you go. It certainly makes you stop and stare

(46:54):
around you, and you can see so far and whatnot,
and you're quite right. Every day we're going along, the
hedge was suddenly turning this maroon shade, which was largely
because you know, I think a lot of the hedges
around there are probably less than thirty forty years old,
be an ancient one really round there just wasn't a
very hedgy place, and they'd suddenly turned maroon. And it

(47:17):
was all because look, you say, it was those hawthorn
poems suddenly that they're more visible because the leaves are
starting to wilt and with a rather than four. But
the thing I've noticed with a hedge, and it is
a hedge related. One surprise for Ice is that this
particular hedge we were working on was two hundred and
nine meters long, and we had we sort of slowed

(47:41):
ourselves down for the last two days because we thought
we can't do We had seventy five meters left to do,
and we thought, well, we can't do that in one day,
so we'll have to do it in two. But if
we go and do fifty and only then come back
for twenty five, we'll be there for such a short
space of time it seems silly. So we thought we'll

(48:02):
split it into two equal lengths of what we're gonna
do for the last two days. And those last two
days were on a Monday and a Tuesday, and it
was noticeable that for the rest of the hedge it
had a sap that was quite high up still, and
it was springy, and you know, and when you make
them cuts, and you're just trying because we're laying these

(48:22):
pleachers very low, and you're then crooking them in place,
so you've got to get them as low as you can.
You have to make a very long pleacher cut to
give yourself a big hinge to go and get this
as low as we can. We're not doing some sort
of pretty staked and bound thing. This is sort of
laying it almost like in a Devon style, but not
on a bank. And so to get that low. Gordy

(48:44):
has to cut a very very long pleacher cut and
they were right pain for me to lay because you
had to get them just right, and they were bouncing
back up and whatnot because he hadn't cut right. They
were just really springy. Last two days the SAP had
obviously dropped just to touch because the SAP had said, yes,

(49:05):
autumn's here. Now I'm going back down the way, and
we then had to be careful they didn't go bonk
over that we'd almost cutting too much, that you had
lost that spring, and it was fascinating. It just took
two days one weekend, and the SAP told me that
autumn was more or less here. So I think that

(49:25):
observation of yours is delightful about the hedges going maroon,
which I had noticed, but I think you heightened my
attention to it. But also was the fact that the
SAP had gone. So I suppose it's those two things
leaf is about to for and that's it. You see,
hedges can tell us everything and anything. Now this will
interest you, Amy. I took a group of the Gipping

(49:50):
Valley Junior branch of their Young Farmers Club seriously with
these names Valleyping Valley. Yes, the river Gipping. There's actually
a village called Gipping as well. Lovely Paul Baker who
who is farms in our cluster, we've got the Gipping
goes through there. Anyway, I took them out and I

(50:10):
must have made about forty five kids came out for
a hedgerow ramble and they want to go and learn
adelaid hedges. So the future of hedge laying is secured
because I know we're going to get some. But it
was quite funny because of the darkness suddenly fell and
I was trying to explain to them about just how
important hedgerows were for retaining insects. And I was saying
all the benefits, and we suddenly got because the insects now,

(50:35):
it just got to that point of night and going
over the top, I've got just a load of bats
suddenly started hunting because everything is now coming out of that.
And the bats made my point for me of just
how important hedgerows are for insects because the bats suddenly

(50:56):
started going over Now. It was just my question, is
that because one of the kids asked me, he said, well,
they hibernate, don't they. He said, so do they eat
over winter? And I said, I don't know. I'm afraid
I'm not one on bats. So what do bats do?
Do they fully hibernate like a sort of hedgehog and

(51:20):
sort of stock up and then sleep it off and
then emerge, or do they wake up every once in
a while to top up? How do they hibernate?

Speaker 4 (51:27):
They do the latter. They are true hibernators in that
they lower all of their systems, so they lower their metabolism,
their heart rate drops, they're breathing drops, their temperature drops,
and they go into areas where there are stable temperatures
and decent humidity. So that's why that's are associated with

(51:51):
hibernating in caves, ice houses, down old mines, places like that.
But they do wake up during the winter and go
out and have a feed if the temperatures rise enough
for there to beat insects. But the thing for bats
is that and this is part of why they have

(52:13):
good years and bad years and things because bats aren't
fast reproducers. They have one pupper year. They don't necessarily
reproduce every year. They're not rodents. They are just normal
Their chiroptera, which means hand wing in Latin, and so
they have one one baby a year, and they will

(52:36):
only go out to feed if the conditions are good
for it, because flying expends so much energy that they
need to know that they're going to be able to
replace that energy and replenish it by feeding. So in autumn,
what bats are doing is their mating, so they actually
lack for some species, so they'll have males that perch

(53:00):
on the side of trees and sing for the females
to try and attract females in and they create these
swarms as well, which are often near hibernation sites. And
they will feed more in autumn as well because they're
trying to put down fat stores of brown fats, which
are the ones that they can live off more in

(53:21):
winter that break down slower, which are those slow metabolizing ones,
So they do put on weight in autumn, and if
the temperatures drop low and stay low all through winter,
they'll stay in that state of hibernation all through winter.
But if the temperatures rise, which nowadays they often do
we get these warm spells, then bats will come out

(53:43):
and feed in the winter months as well. But as
I said, there's no point in them doing so, and
less there's insects because they've got to expense so much
energy to close hibernation.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
So now would be a good time for someone who
perhaps wanted to go out and do a bit of
back watching, well before the clocks check and we've still
got a bit of evening daylight. Is to go out
watch over a sort of hedge that runs down from
either a wood or or a big old solitary tree
or a farm building or something like that, and you

(54:14):
sort of go out because I think when I had
these kids out there, it was just getting twiles. It's
probably I should think about now eightish and you can
still see a good bit of light up as if
you looked into the west then you could see them
go over. So now is the time to go back.

Speaker 4 (54:31):
Now is a good time. Yeah, now's a good time,
particularly if you've got kids, because it goes dark so
early now that you don't have to keep the kids
up later and things like that. And also the bats
will concentrate their efforts around dusk and dawn at this
time of year more because the temperatures drop in the
middle of the night, so they'll be more active and feeding,
particularly in the evening because at dawn. It's still going

(54:53):
to be very cold now, but in the evening time
that'll be the best time to look for them because
will be concentrating all their efforts then for feeding whilst
the insects are still up. Because once the temperatures, the
air temperatures drop below six degrees, the insects tend to
drop down as well and go into cover. So yeah,

(55:15):
it is a good time of year to go looking
for bats all along the hedgerows, along over tarmac roads
as well, because the tarmac roads will have heated up
with the sun during the day and then they'll be
releasing that. So particularly like tree covered lanes, they're really
good to go and look for.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
And if you've got a thermal, if you have a
thermal image from shooting or deer s talking or whatever
they are, they will pick up bouts as well. So
I spent I spent all summer doing a lot of
work around using thermals with them one of my other jobs.
And yeah, a lot of that time has been spent
watching bats unexpectedly sort of zooming back and forth along
headerows and watching these little blobs of heat as they

(55:54):
come along. And you can get to the point where
you can identify them by their flight patterns. Yeah, by
the swooping, the swooping of them, And it's amazing what
you can see when you're looking for something else and
you can see these little blobs of heat moving around.

Speaker 4 (56:09):
For kids particularly as well, they can sometimes hear them.
They can hear the little squeaks I know. So, yeah,
Richard can't. I can't, which is you know, Yeah, kids
have often still got that higher level of hearing. They
can hear higher pictures, so they can sometimes hear the squeaks.

(56:30):
I was on the survey with somebody recently. She was
accompanying us because it was a closed site, and we
were saying, oh, there's some bats that. Oh yeah, you
can hear that. You can hear that, and she said, oh,
is that bats? I've never known what that was.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
I've always been able to hear this squeaking when I've
been out at night, and I didn't know what it was,
and I thought everybody heard it.

Speaker 4 (56:50):
But it turns out she can hear bats.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
Nice because I struggled with some low frequencies, but I'm
quite good at those higher end ones. And another job
doing at the beginning of the month, Amy and I
were both working on two different sites at the same time,
and mine involved having to stand next to arboris and
tell them whether they're allowed to cut that tree down
or not. And one of them we got up to
it and said, no, it's already been surveyed for bats,

(57:15):
so we can crack on with it. And I'm sort
underneath it and with this arborist and we're going, christ,
I can hear a bout. What do you mean you
can hear about? And now I can hear about in
this tree. Honestly, I'm telling you, it's like weirdest. It's
very mechanical. This bat sound. What the hell is that noise?
And the arboris goes that might be me? What do
you mean it's you. I've got an artificial heart valve.

(57:35):
He's got this titanium heart valve.

Speaker 4 (57:37):
And what is that?

Speaker 1 (57:38):
What is where there is a pulses up?

Speaker 3 (57:41):
You can hear it go.

Speaker 1 (57:44):
Which sounds. You have to take my word for it.
It sounds exactly like a pipistrell.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
Well, wouldn't it be funny if you suddenly got a
randy male pipistrell trying to sort of start humting. It's
only a hot valve. He's halfway up a tree.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
Yeah, he's only a single line.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Pulling himself up. Rapist bats after me ever since I
got my heart, Yeah yeah, well, and do you know
we've actually got that in him the autumn autumn to
One of the things I've noticed my sounds that I've
been hearing is that we've had both red kites and
buzzards nest remarkably close to one another. Really because I

(58:21):
thought that, well, knowing the red kites, I thought they
would have predated the nests of the buzzards, or possibly
even vice versa. But they've nested very close together, and
there now the family group sort of is still roughly together,
both of them are. And because they sort of they've gone,
they live in a rather grudging neighborly way, you know,

(58:43):
sort of a bit like in a street where you've
got someone who's put up a vote Corbin and someone
who's put up a vote Theresa may Sign, you know,
twenty seventeen election. They're just looking mother, going yeah. But
I have to say, one of the most annoying sounds
I have heard in nature of late is immature red kites. God,

(59:10):
they sort of like warble away it's like one of
them kids who goes and gets you know, the worst
thing you could ever imagine is that, oh look, I'm
on a sleezy jet flight to Dublin, and oh good,
a screaming child age child has come on. And another
one who's got a plastic penny whistle, well that sounds

(59:30):
like a plastic penny whistle child. And then he got
ship gulls as I call them, which are buzzard, and
then the bloody ah man, it's terrible, you know, lovely
where you live, all that wildlife around, you know, because
I've just got corbin and trees are may supporters in

(59:51):
the trees. Bloody hell, I'll see your buzzards and raise
you immature herring gull. Oh yes, yeah they are. Yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Just that that we had one of my other jobs.
We were we were out with some chefs from this
big chain of smokehouse restaurants. We were teaching them all
about coastal edibles and things and getting the cooking up
on the beach and we were getting mobbed by seagulls.
But then all the all the little baby gulls arrived,
all these immature ones, and they were just hanging around.
I was working out is it a crime to take

(01:00:28):
a mightiless edgeless take a common muscleshell and launch it
at full speed as an immature gull, Because if you're
hitting wildlife with other wildlife, does that still count as
a crime.

Speaker 4 (01:00:41):
Yeah, I mean it was edible wildlife that you're throwing
at them, So you're kind of feeding them.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
Yeah, yes, vigorous. Yes, yes, I'm vigorously feeding the wildlife.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Yeah, well yes, So anyway, we've discussed this evening, and
we have discussed autumn, the clear signs of that most
people probably wouldn't think, and just the sheer nonsensical nature
of not recording nature properly and the repercussions thereof. And

(01:01:17):
you see, and we've all managed to do it more
or less on time, with no no stupidity. We've had
a few laughs. And I've just seen on the Old
Country slide WhatsApp that the hard working missing Callum has
just posted a photograph of himself appears to be stealing

(01:01:42):
a bottle of pombol. It's hard to read it because
he it's a door, isn't it. I don't know, So
he's obviously now to the point where he's photographing that hard,
he's now stealing all the bottles that he's just been
for photographing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
So yeah, if you ever watch one of those guy
Richie gangster TV shows, like The Gentleman, More Bland or
something like that, he's like a character from one of them,
except like the picture has been raised a bit. Yeah,
and he's a little little bit less menacing, a little
bit less menacing, but yeah, not zero, but less. There

(01:02:19):
is there cyber crime expert.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
When they they decide that, you know, white slave trade
and narcotics isn't for them anymore, we need to go
into cyber crime. We'll get Callum in and he comes, well,
I'm off to go and lay a hedge tomorrow on
a new place, Hainey Farm, which one Perdy Gold. Not

(01:02:42):
this time, but the time before going to go and
get lay I think a couple of hundred meters. They're
quite interesting because nearly in the shade of Elie Cathedral.
But once again we're still in the flatlands. What are
you up to this week, Richard naming or Amy's off

(01:03:02):
dormousing tomorrow? Aren't?

Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
Yes I am, indeed, yes, I've got to go in
traps around the understory of a woodland, through bramble and
all sorts of things to check dor mass boxes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
I've got to spend huge amounts of money because we've
our social enterprise, We've had grant funding and one of
the grounds we had was from the Royal Countryside Funds.
So we are running a project for the next twelve
months teaching hedge laying, coppersing and regen farming to eighteen
to twenty five year olds from the local area. So

(01:03:37):
it's a really good project. But as grant funding works,
you've got to say we are applying for this amount
of money to spend on these things, and when the
money arrives, you have to spend on those things, which
means I am having to go against every fiber of
my upbringing and spend huge amounts of money on new
kit in one go, which is exactly what I'm meant

(01:03:59):
to be doing. But it's like, right, you have to
go and buy this chainsaw, these bits of kits, this computer.
These are the things. I've spent spent about three grand
in the last week. And I'm trying to think when
I spent three grand cumulatively on anything, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:04:13):
I've not even spent that much on a car before.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
No, And on that note, we're heading over to the
after show for our lovely patrons to get what they've
paid for. Because they are our supporters. They support us
every month with a little payment and in return they
get to hear all the things and we're not going
to say in public, and they get access to our
WhatsApp group and a few other extra bits. So if

(01:04:36):
you go to Countryslide dot co dot UK forward Slash
Support you'll find out well how to access the bit
I'm going to say right now.