The Wandering Ecologist Podcast

In this episode I visit my friend Paul Stevens, just down the road from home, to gawp at a fantastic set-up on his house. His sidewall is bedecked in Swift nest boxes and House Martin nest cups, providing a beautiful bird metropolis where these declining red-list birds can thrive. Paul makes these boxes and nest cups from scratch himself, drawing on his experience he has gained from working with these birds. The successes he has had at home for Swifts and House Martins has really fired up a w...

Transport yourself to the beautiful mountains of northern Spain as we visit our lovely friends Katie and Luke at their Wild Finca – an old farm they are managing through agri-wilding, creating the most wonderful diverse habitat mosaics for nature and a refuge their young family. This episode is a departure from the normal format with a long and wide-ranging discussion on how they manage the land with Asturcón ponies and Casina cattle, the importance of environmental education for local ...

Transport yourself to the beautiful mountains of northern Spain as we visit our lovely friends Katie and Luke at their Wild Finca – an old farm they are managing through agri-wilding, creating the most wonderful diverse habitat mosaics for nature and a refuge their young family. This episode is a departure from the normal format with a long and wide-ranging discussion on how they manage the land with Asturcón ponies and Casina cattle, the importance of environmental education for local ...

Join me for a bit of autumn sunshine on the beach as I meet up with inspiring conservationist Henri Brocklebank, Director of Conservation at the Sussex Wildlife Trust. In this episode we hear about an uplifting conservation story happening just beneath the waves off the Sussex coast, in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The act of understanding the value of a healthy functioning marine ecosystem has resulted in a trawling exclusion zone of over 300 square kilometres, and has ki...

Episode 5 takes us on top of the South Downs at the Wiston Estate where I join awesome entomologist, Graeme Lyons, on some invertebrate surveys. We’re looking at the benefits of having wildflower strips along the arable fields, and how having a diversity of these conservation options on the farm are providing habitat for nature alongside food production. We talk about how the complex structure in the conservation headlands, wild bird seed mixes, fallow fields and nectar & pollen mixes of...

Join me for episode 4 as I learn all about the return of Britain’s largest and most epic bird of prey to southern England…the White-tailed Eagle. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the launch of this podcast, at the Global Birdfair at Rutland, and I couldn’t have had a more apt guest to talk about this amazing project: Dr Tim Mackrill. Tim was a local boy captivated by Rutland Water’s Osprey reintroduction by Roy Dennis and Tim Appleton in the mid-1990’s. Inspired ...

Join me at Brighton’s Castle Hill National Nature Reserve for episode 3, where I’m hot on the trail of Britain’s most endangered insect: the Wart-biter Bush-cricket. They’re tricky to find so luckily I’m with my pal and brilliant entomologist, Alice Parfitt, who is leading on the species recovery programme of this impressive species through her work at Buglife and the Changing Chalk partnership. With the backdrop soundscape of Corn Buntings, Yellowhammers and Linnets we tune in to the distinc...

It’s episode 2 and I’m high up on the South Downs to meet up with my chum and amazing field naturalist, Neil Hulme. Today we’re focusing on the Duke of Burgundy, and how Neil’s life-long passion for this exquisite butterfly, and the knowledge he has accumulated from close observation and field work, has resulted in a huge turn around in its fortune. It has gone from being on the brink of extinction in the county to making an epic come back. Working with landowners and the South Do...

Join me on a trip to the Sussex coast for episode 1, where I’ll be meeting up with my good friend, Pete Hughes, Ecologist for the Chichester Harbour Conservancy. We will be learning all about the success of the Return of the Tern nature recovery initiative and how some nesting rafts are restoring the breeding populations of Common Terns to Chichester Harbour. These beautiful migratory seabirds nest on shingle, but this natural nesting habitat can be severely affected year on year by a multitu...

Trailer for the forthcoming Wandering Ecologist Podcast!