The Nature Room

Our gardens are sanctuaries for a range of plants and animals, many of them unique to their locality or endangered around the world. In this podcast, I ask the RSPB's in-house gardening expert, Adrian Thomas, for his top tips on how to best look after your garden.Adrian is the author of RSPB Gardening for Wildlife, available in hardback and on Kindle here: https://amzn.to/39WGfmD. 

An interview with Dr David Hone, author of The Tyrannosaur Chronicles (Bloomsbury, 2016), available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2EYl8oA.Dr David Hone is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Biological Sciences Programmes at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a palaeontologist, writer and science communicator who specialises in the behaviour and ecology of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs. He has named over 15 species of prehistoric animal.In this episode, we discuss the tyrannosaurs, a family of (sometimes very large) predatory dinosaurs who lived on Earth for over 100 million years.Davis is also the host of his own - really excellent - podcast - Terrible Lizards, which I briefly mention in the introduction. Download and subscribe! https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/

If you are interested in taking a hands-on approach to protecting nature, there are loads of fascinating citizen science projects you can take part in - some don't even require you to leave your desk, others involve looking at lovely pictures of penguins...or listening to bird song. There is something for everyone so check them out!

An interview with author and ecologist Hugh Warwick, recorded in the run up to Hedgehog Awareness Week, a UK-based celebration of all-things hedgehog. We discussed what it is like to get to know a hedgehog, how Hugh came to be "Mr Hedgehog" and how we can better look after these wonderful animals. 

An interview with Tessa Boase, author of "Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women's Fight for Change", which is available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3fgtnZv.Few people are aware that the RSPB, Europe’s largest conservation organisation by membership, was founded by Victorian women working to end the cruelty of the feather trade. Established in a house in Manchester 130 years ago this year, the Society for the Protection of Birds was initiated by Emily Williamson, the wife of a middle-class solicitor. An organisation with the same aims, known as Fur, Fin and Feather Folk, was set up in London by Eliza Phillips and merged with the SPB in 1891.  Active years before the suffragette movement, Emily Williamson, Eliza Phillips and the fastidious campaigner Etta Lemon, were fair-sighted activists who utilised all the tools of communication available at the time, successfully capturing society’s hearts and minds and helping to bring about a change in consumer behaviour as well as some of the first laws to protect wildlife. 

The first episode of All Things Green, looking at the state of the world's eight curlew species on World Curlew Day.