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The birds of our countryside are amongst the most familiar. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:10 | |
and iconic of all Britain's birds. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:12 | |
CUCKOO CALLS | 0:00:12 | 0:00:17 | |
For centuries, we've celebrated them in music and poetry, | 0:00:17 | 0:00:22 | |
used them to forecast changes in the weather and the seasons, | 0:00:24 | 0:00:29 | |
and hunted them | 0:00:29 | 0:00:32 | |
for food and sport. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
And throughout our long history, these birds have not just shaped | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
the appearance of the British countryside, | 0:00:38 | 0:00:41 | |
but also defined its very nature. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
The countryside birds, in my view, are a constitutive | 0:00:43 | 0:00:48 | |
part of the countryside. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
You cannot describe the countryside without describing the birds. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:55 | |
If birds went out of the countryside, it would be | 0:00:56 | 0:01:01 | |
an emblem of a kind of nuclear post-nuclear deadness. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:06 | |
This is the story of the deep, age-old connection between the | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
birds of the British countryside and the people of these islands. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:15 | |
It tells of how we have used and abused them, | 0:01:15 | 0:01:19 | |
celebrated them and cherished them, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:23 | |
and watched their fortunes rise and fall. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:27 | |
And how, at the eleventh hour, we have finally come to understand | 0:01:27 | 0:01:31 | |
what they, and the countryside, really mean to us. | 0:01:31 | 0:01:36 | |
Wherever you look in the | 0:01:47 | 0:01:49 | |
British countryside, whatever the time of year, you will find birds. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:54 | |
Farmland birds such as the Skylark, the Grey Partridge, | 0:01:54 | 0:02:01 | |
the Lapwing, and the Yellowhammer, | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
have lived alongside us for more than 10,000 years - ever | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
since we first cleared the forests to prepare the land for agriculture. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:13 | |
So it's hardly surprising that when our ancestors needed to mark | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
the changing of the seasons, they turned to these familiar creatures. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:23 | |
Birds are very important seasonal markers in Britain and not just for | 0:02:23 | 0:02:27 | |
birdwatchers but for ordinary people too. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:30 | |
Everybody still thinks of | 0:02:30 | 0:02:32 | |
the first swallow, the first Cuckoo, as a way of marking the season. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:36 | |
You would have to be very dull of | 0:02:37 | 0:02:40 | |
soul indeed not to be moved by the life of the swallow, for instance. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:45 | |
The swallow has a very important part in our sort of national | 0:02:45 | 0:02:49 | |
idea of what it is like to be English, I think. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
We time our seasons by its coming and going | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
in an absolutely primitive and ancient in-our-bones kind of way. | 0:02:55 | 0:03:01 | |
The way swallows come and whistle and sing, | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
a joyous arrival, a swallow. | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
And the fact it makes its home in your outshed | 0:03:07 | 0:03:10 | |
in the garage if you leave the door open. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
It is very much a family animal and something that you really | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
seriously look forward to each year. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:18 | |
The coming of spring has also been marked by the annual appearance of | 0:03:21 | 0:03:25 | |
a letter in the Times newspaper, | 0:03:25 | 0:03:27 | |
commenting on the arrival of another visitor to our shores. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:32 | |
"Sir, while gardening this afternoon I heard a faint note which led me to | 0:03:32 | 0:03:38 | |
"say to my under gardener who was working with me, | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
"'Was that the Cuckoo?'" | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
CUCKOO CALLS | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
We always used to talk | 0:03:48 | 0:03:49 | |
about hearing the first Cuckoo and should we write to the Times. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:54 | |
My parents always said, "Should we write to the Times? | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
"Oh no, someone got there a week before." | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
And it was this lovely tradition. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
But this very British ritual may be coming to an end. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:10 | |
The Cuckoo is suffering a catastrophic decline because of food | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
shortages in Britain, and drought in Africa, where it spends the winter. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:18 | |
This decline threatens not just the bird itself, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:22 | |
but its cultural status too. | 0:04:22 | 0:04:24 | |
There is a whole folk culture across | 0:04:24 | 0:04:27 | |
the northern hemisphere about the Cuckoo. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
If you have to explain what it was, you have kind have rather lost the | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
point of the whole of that cultural aspect to birds. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:37 | |
It's the way in which a bird like the Cuckoo | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
moves from being the birth right of every rural inhabitant of the | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
British Isles, even though Cuckoos were never hugely numerous. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
It is such a distinctive sound, so ubiquitous, they are so adapted | 0:04:50 | 0:04:54 | |
to all sorts of environments, there are now large swathes | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
where Cuckoos are never heard and may never be heard again. | 0:04:57 | 0:05:02 | |
The fate of the Cuckoo has been mirrored | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
in the fortunes of many other birds of the British countryside. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:09 | |
In recent years they have suffered major declines, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
falling victim to the seemingly unstoppable industrialisation | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
of our farmed landscape. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:18 | |
All too often, our interests have taken precedence over theirs. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:23 | |
BIRDSONG | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
But not so very long ago, | 0:05:30 | 0:05:32 | |
towards the end of the 18th century, the British countryside and its | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
birds were still living in a state of rural harmony. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
We know this through the life and writings of one remarkable man, | 0:05:40 | 0:05:44 | |
the Reverend Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:49 | |
Since it first appeared, in 1789, | 0:05:57 | 0:06:01 | |
this modest little book has never been out of print. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
Gilbert White is an extraordinary phenomenon. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
He's said to be the fourth most published author | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
in the English language. This is quite extraordinary | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
for a country vicar writing what was in effect a series of nature notes. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:21 | |
"The swift is almost continually on the wing, and, as it never settles | 0:06:21 | 0:06:26 | |
"on the ground, on trees, or roofs, would seldom find opportunity for | 0:06:26 | 0:06:31 | |
"amorous rites was it not enabled to indulge them in the air." | 0:06:31 | 0:06:35 | |
He was remarkable. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
After all, without binoculars, that he saw the mating of the swift | 0:06:38 | 0:06:43 | |
up in the sky, | 0:06:43 | 0:06:45 | |
beggars belief really. I'm sure I couldn't possibly have noticed that. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:49 | |
White wasn't just a good observer, he was also an excellent naturalist, | 0:06:49 | 0:06:55 | |
at a time when many things we now take for granted about Britain's | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
birds had yet to be discovered. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:01 | |
For example, he was the first person to realise that three different | 0:07:01 | 0:07:06 | |
kinds of small, green warbler visit Britain each spring. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:10 | |
Previously it had been assumed there was only one. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:13 | |
"I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of | 0:07:13 | 0:07:19 | |
"the Willow Wrens, which constantly and invariably used distinct notes." | 0:07:19 | 0:07:25 | |
White's enduring appeal may be because he concentrates almost | 0:07:25 | 0:07:29 | |
entirely on his own little corner of the English countryside. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:34 | |
He was born and died in the village in which he describes, and | 0:07:34 | 0:07:40 | |
you get the sense that he knows it so intimately that he would know | 0:07:40 | 0:07:45 | |
if a bird arrived or if a leaf fell overnight. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
I think another thing that is really quite remarkable about | 0:07:50 | 0:07:53 | |
Gilbert White's work is the sense in which it is a kind of microcosm | 0:07:53 | 0:07:58 | |
of English country life. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:00 | |
It's as if, in a way, you can find the whole of nature within the sort | 0:08:00 | 0:08:04 | |
of manageable confines of just one English village. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
He redeemed the word "parochial" | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
from its sense of narrowness and limitation. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
He exalts the parish | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
as a place where all life exists and we can follow in his footsteps. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:22 | |
It may seem surprising that this diary of natural events | 0:08:24 | 0:08:28 | |
should have become so popular. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
Maybe it's because it portrays a very comforting image of the | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
countryside - a tranquil, unchanging landscape, filled with birdsong. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:38 | |
Just like another writer from our rural past, much of this appeal | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
is pure nostalgia. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:47 | |
Jane Austen and Gilbert White are more or less contemporary, and why do | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
we look at all these charming ladies in bonnets on the television set? | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
It's a picture of rural England, 18th century England, | 0:08:56 | 0:09:01 | |
which we find charming. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:03 | |
Yet for all the undoubted charm of The Natural History of Selborne, its | 0:09:03 | 0:09:09 | |
author may have been hiding his fears about changes afoot | 0:09:09 | 0:09:13 | |
in the wider world. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
Gilbert White's in his Parsonage | 0:09:15 | 0:09:17 | |
looking at what's going on in his back garden and in the fields beyond. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:21 | |
Then you say to yourself it was published in 1789, what happened? | 0:09:21 | 0:09:25 | |
The French revolution is happening on the Continent, the Industrial | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
Revolution is happening in England, massive social change. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:31 | |
No reference to the real world that's going on beside him and | 0:09:31 | 0:09:35 | |
that kind of obsessiveness sometimes worries me that it's wonderful but | 0:09:35 | 0:09:41 | |
there's a slight feeling of stop the world, I'd want to get off. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:45 | |
During Gilbert White's lifetime, some things didn't change. | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
The birds of Britain's countryside continued to thrive alongside us, | 0:09:49 | 0:09:53 | |
as we farmed the land in the age-old ways. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
But in the decades after White's death in 1793, this little world | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
was turned upside down. | 0:10:01 | 0:10:03 | |
The countryside would be transformed forever, and the birds that lived | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
there would begin a long decline, from which many have yet to recover. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:13 | |
One bird, more than any other, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:15 | |
symbolises the loss of this traditional landscape. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:18 | |
It's a bizarre, shy and elusive relative of the coot, the Corn Crake. | 0:10:18 | 0:10:23 | |
It looks like some silly little chicken really, let's face it. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:29 | |
I remember the first one I had. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:32 | |
I didn't realise what I was listening to for a while. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:36 | |
HE MAKES GUTTURAL SOUNDS... | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
going. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:39 | |
It's a Corn Crake! | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
Then your problems begin because they can throw their voice. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
It's just over there and you go just over there | 0:10:45 | 0:10:48 | |
but it isn't and it's still calling. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
You go round and round and round this little field. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
At the start of the 19th century, the strange, repetitive call of | 0:10:56 | 0:11:01 | |
the Corn Crake could still be heard throughout the British countryside, | 0:11:01 | 0:11:04 | |
from Scilly to Shetland. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
For one of Gilbert White's disciples, the poet and naturalist | 0:11:06 | 0:11:11 | |
John Clare, the Corn Crake, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:13 | |
or as he called it, the landrail, was the classic sound of summer. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:18 | |
"How sweet and pleasant grows the way through summer time again, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:25 | |
"when landrails call from day to day amid the grass and grain." | 0:11:25 | 0:11:30 | |
John Clare, the Northamptonshire farm labourer | 0:11:32 | 0:11:35 | |
who found fame as a poet, was also a brilliant self-taught naturalist. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:40 | |
More than any other writer, | 0:11:40 | 0:11:42 | |
before or since, he celebrated the birds of the British countryside. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:47 | |
In the minuteness of his attention | 0:11:52 | 0:11:54 | |
and his faithfulness to things as they actually are, | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
he's the best writer about birds that there has ever been in the language. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:03 | |
Rather than kind of speaking in grand rhetorical terms as many of | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
the great romantic poets did, he's really closely attentive | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
to the details of nature. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
What he has to a greater degree than anybody else is an eye for detail | 0:12:15 | 0:12:20 | |
and a relish for the ordinary, which means the ordinary has always | 0:12:20 | 0:12:25 | |
been turned into the miraculous. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
When we read the poems, | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
we really do feel it's like standing in a wood listening to a Nightingale | 0:12:32 | 0:12:36 | |
or walking through a field and seeing a Corn Crake or whatever it might be. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:40 | |
But by the start of the 19th century, this young writer's | 0:12:41 | 0:12:45 | |
whole world, the countryside and its birds, was about to change forever. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:50 | |
The reason for this change? Enclosure. | 0:12:50 | 0:12:53 | |
Enclosure was I think in crude | 0:13:00 | 0:13:03 | |
terms the privatisation of what had been an open and public landscape. | 0:13:03 | 0:13:07 | |
Enclosure transformed the old, traditional landscape of wide, | 0:13:07 | 0:13:12 | |
open fields by adding hedges, creating the familiar pattern of | 0:13:12 | 0:13:17 | |
small fields we know and love today. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
The irony is it's a much more recent landscape | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
than we perhaps tend to realise. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
It only dates back about 200, 250 | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
years because before enclosure, we didn't have this checkerboard | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
pattern, we had a much more open landscape with far fewer hedges. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:41 | |
Enclosure had a devastating effect | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
on ordinary country people, forcing them off the land and into poverty. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:49 | |
And by concentrating ownership in the hands of a few rich landowners, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:56 | |
enclosure would eventually pave the way towards modern, industrial-scale farming. | 0:13:56 | 0:14:03 | |
During the following 150 years or so, this would prove disastrous for | 0:14:03 | 0:14:08 | |
the British countryside and its birds. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
Today, we read Clare's poetry partly as a lament for a lost world, | 0:14:16 | 0:14:22 | |
but also because it's a very modern, environmentally conscious message. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:28 | |
Now, he begins to look more like a prophet of | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
the kind of environmental movements that call themselves deep ecology. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:38 | |
He seems to anticipate ideas of the kind that are caught up in | 0:14:38 | 0:14:43 | |
the Gaia hypothesis, which thinks of the whole world as one organism | 0:14:43 | 0:14:47 | |
with its own interests and its own self-regulating procedures. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:52 | |
For a warning of our disconnection from the environment, | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
we need look no further than the plight of the Corn Crake. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
Today, this mysterious bird has disappeared from virtually | 0:15:02 | 0:15:06 | |
the whole of our rural landscape. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:08 | |
It can now only be found in remote parts of Scotland, where traditional | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
farming is still being practised. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:15 | |
Not all countryside birds suffered the fate of the Corn Crake. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:27 | |
By the middle of the 19th century, the fortunes of two other species | 0:15:27 | 0:15:30 | |
were on the rise. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:32 | |
This would change the face of the British landscape forever. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
With a collective weight of | 0:15:42 | 0:15:44 | |
more than three million tonnes, the pheasant is, pound for pound, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
the commonest bird in the British countryside. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
Yet ironically it's not really a British bird at all, | 0:15:50 | 0:15:54 | |
but was brought here from south-west Asia by the Romans. | 0:15:54 | 0:15:59 | |
The native Red Grouse, by contrast, is a shy, retiring bird, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
found only in the remotest parts of upland Britain. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:08 | |
But the Grouse and the pheasant | 0:16:08 | 0:16:10 | |
do have one thing in common. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:12 | |
They're both very good to eat. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:15 | |
From the early 19th century, thanks to the invention of | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
the breech-loading shotgun, Grouse, pheasants, and their | 0:16:21 | 0:16:24 | |
smaller relative the partridge, became top targets for Britain's | 0:16:24 | 0:16:28 | |
gun-toting sportsmen. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:30 | |
Increasingly we see a development of country estates, landed properties | 0:16:30 | 0:16:35 | |
being used for sports shooting based on three quarries, three birds, | 0:16:35 | 0:16:42 | |
Red Grouse, the Grey Partridge and the pheasant. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
They would provide a six-month cycle of recreational activity and travel, | 0:16:45 | 0:16:50 | |
where people would move from one country house to another pursuing | 0:16:50 | 0:16:55 | |
the shooting of game birds. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:59 | |
Pheasant shooting became immensely popular in the 19th century. | 0:16:59 | 0:17:02 | |
It became one of those key markers of aristocratic identity. | 0:17:02 | 0:17:05 | |
It was one of the must-have things if you were a landowner. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:09 | |
You had to have a decent pheasant shoot really. | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
But ordinary rural folk took a very dim view of this aristocratic pursuit. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:18 | |
Actually if you want to pick one bird which brought England | 0:17:18 | 0:17:22 | |
closer to revolution than anything else, it would be | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
the pheasant because it also caused bitter social controversy, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
partly because it had become a symbol of aristocratic identity. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:34 | |
Shooting pheasants is difficult in many ways and demands quite a level | 0:17:35 | 0:17:39 | |
of skill but that isn't obvious, so it seemed a clear instance of | 0:17:39 | 0:17:43 | |
decadence and also fundamental idleness of the aristocracy. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:48 | |
They didn't have anything better to do with their time other than go out and shoot these birds | 0:17:48 | 0:17:53 | |
which are only there because the aristocracy have bred them. | 0:17:53 | 0:17:56 | |
The boom in pheasant shooting was a direct result of the landscape | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
changes brought about by enclosure. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
This allowed pheasants to be reared | 0:18:03 | 0:18:05 | |
on an industrial scale, and then released in | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
their thousands to replenish birds shot by the sportsmen. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:12 | |
Once enclosure had privatised the landscape, then landowners were able | 0:18:12 | 0:18:18 | |
to a much greater extent, to develop the landscape as they wanted to. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
With things like small little copses which would be very suitable | 0:18:22 | 0:18:26 | |
for pheasants to roost in or be bred in. | 0:18:26 | 0:18:28 | |
You have a kind of landscape which was suitable for and then became | 0:18:28 | 0:18:33 | |
developed for pheasant breeding, pheasant rearing. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:38 | |
And then of course pheasant shooting. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:40 | |
This new, more wooded landscape didn't just benefit pheasants, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
it also provided a haven for other woodland wildlife, including birds, | 0:18:43 | 0:18:50 | |
butterflies and deer. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:52 | |
Meanwhile, far to the north, on the windswept moors of | 0:18:58 | 0:19:01 | |
northern England and Scotland, another game bird was also playing | 0:19:01 | 0:19:05 | |
its part in changing history. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
It may look like a domestic chicken, but the Red Grouse has had a greater | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
influence on the landscape and economy of upland Britain | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
than any other bird. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
Although most of us will never set eyes on one, | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
its image and reputation have spread far and wide. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
# The sun shines on the mountaintop The Grouse go from the moor | 0:19:29 | 0:19:35 | |
# The guineas are waiting at the door... # | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
For two groups of people in Britain, | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
aristocrats and the idle rich, the Glorious 12th of August has | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
long been the most eagerly awaited date in the calendar. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
GUNSHOTS | 0:19:50 | 0:19:52 | |
It marks the opening day of the Grouse shooting season, | 0:19:52 | 0:19:56 | |
an industry worth at least £30 million a year | 0:19:56 | 0:19:59 | |
to the Scottish economy alone. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
But without the invention of one man, George Stephenson, | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
and the passion of one woman, Queen Victoria, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
the Red Grouse might have remained nothing more than an unremarkable moorland bird. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:13 | |
Previously, the Scottish estates were | 0:20:15 | 0:20:17 | |
hundreds of miles and a week's journey from London, but by the 1870s | 0:20:17 | 0:20:23 | |
landowners who had posh houses in Chelsea could | 0:20:23 | 0:20:27 | |
also own a Scottish landed estate and be there overnight, and that's | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
exactly what happened in the run-up to the Glorious 12th of August. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:35 | |
There were special trains laid on to channel people to the most remote | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
parts of our landscape | 0:20:39 | 0:20:42 | |
so that this kind of sport shooting could take place on Scottish moorland | 0:20:42 | 0:20:46 | |
and northern English moorlands. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
Grouse shooting received the royal seal of approval, through Queen | 0:20:48 | 0:20:52 | |
Victoria's regular visits to her Scottish country estate at Balmoral. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:57 | |
So by the end of the queen's long reign, Grouse shooting was as much | 0:20:57 | 0:21:00 | |
a part of the social calendar as society balls and Royal Ascot, | 0:21:00 | 0:21:05 | |
although rather more brutal. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
In some glorious autumns in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as | 0:21:08 | 0:21:14 | |
a million-and-a-half Grouse would be shot through the season. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
Today there might be fewer than 250,000 pairs of | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
Red Grouse in total in Britain. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:23 | |
This influx of people and money enabled huge tracts of northern | 0:21:23 | 0:21:28 | |
Britain to be opened up for Grouse shooting. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:32 | |
And because the moors had to be carefully managed | 0:21:32 | 0:21:34 | |
to stop them becoming overgrown with scrub and trees, | 0:21:34 | 0:21:38 | |
the face of our uplands was changed forever. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:40 | |
One of our most cherished landscape types remains heather moorland, | 0:21:40 | 0:21:46 | |
and these moors really have been, to a very | 0:21:46 | 0:21:48 | |
large extent, maintained for Grouse. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:50 | |
The fact that these moors have been cyclically burnt in order to | 0:21:50 | 0:21:57 | |
maintain the young growing shoots for Grouse to feed on | 0:21:57 | 0:22:02 | |
has been really very important in preserving one of Britain's crucial landscape types. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:08 | |
But while Grouse and pheasant shooting may have helped create | 0:22:08 | 0:22:11 | |
new habitats for birds and other wildlife, | 0:22:11 | 0:22:14 | |
it sounded the death-knell for Britain's birds of prey. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:18 | |
Anything that naturally included Red Grouse | 0:22:18 | 0:22:22 | |
or pheasants or partridge in their diet | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
became enemy in chief, | 0:22:26 | 0:22:28 | |
and so the other side of this sophisticated | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
gun technology used to kill Grouse was it was also used to knock off | 0:22:31 | 0:22:37 | |
every single bird red in tooth and claw. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:40 | |
And even species that posed | 0:22:40 | 0:22:41 | |
absolutely no threat to the hunters' quarry were ruthlessly persecuted. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:46 | |
WH Hudson, a wonderful writer at the | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
beginning of the 20th century, described estates in southern | 0:22:51 | 0:22:56 | |
England where the gamekeeper would shoot the Nightingales | 0:22:56 | 0:23:01 | |
because he didn't want the sound of the birds disturbing his pheasants. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:06 | |
There are stories of | 0:23:06 | 0:23:09 | |
gamekeepers shooting any small bird that was in the woodland because they | 0:23:09 | 0:23:14 | |
would be competitors for the grain laid out for the game birds. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:20 | |
Just as the fate of our countryside birds was looking bleak, | 0:23:20 | 0:23:25 | |
history intervened with the coming of the Great War. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
# Keep the home fires burning... # | 0:23:28 | 0:23:32 | |
Ironically, the shooting skills of both | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
the gamekeepers and their masters would prove to be their downfall, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
for they were among the first to join up | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
and to be sent to the front line. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
Most of these young men had never been abroad. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:49 | |
Indeed, some had hardly travelled beyond the borders | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
of their own parish. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
So any reminders of home, | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
such as the familiar sights and sounds of the British countryside, | 0:23:56 | 0:24:00 | |
became powerful totems of the land they had left behind. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
One of the most potent of these was the song of the Skylark. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
To pour this amazingly loud, clear, beautiful noise down on us, sometimes | 0:24:09 | 0:24:15 | |
from a height and from a body so small that you can't actually see | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
what the source is, that's what makes it like the voice of God, isn't it? | 0:24:19 | 0:24:24 | |
It is this... valiant quality that the Skylark has, | 0:24:24 | 0:24:29 | |
suddenly zooming up in the air, | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
and then when it's right up there, I mean | 0:24:32 | 0:24:34 | |
singing with such vigour and such... | 0:24:34 | 0:24:39 | |
You'd think it's got enough problems remaining up there, | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
flapping the wings, but he's got the energy as well to sing! | 0:24:42 | 0:24:46 | |
This unique habit of singing high in the sky | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
for such long periods of time meant that the Skylark was often the | 0:24:49 | 0:24:53 | |
only bird soldiers in the trenches could actually see. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:57 | |
Imagine you are in a trench in Flanders. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
You've been stuck in the ground for three months. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:05 | |
you're bogged down, and then this creature | 0:25:05 | 0:25:08 | |
appears in the sky with its song. | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
I mean, it must have had a huge impact on people. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
This little creature is everything you want to be. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
"Every morning when I was in the frontline trenches, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
"I used to hear the lark singing soon after we stood to, about dawn. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
"But those wretched larks made me more sad | 0:25:28 | 0:25:31 | |
"than anything else out here. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:33 | |
"Their songs are so closely associated in my mind with | 0:25:33 | 0:25:36 | |
"peaceful summer days and gardens or pleasant landscapes in Blighty." | 0:25:36 | 0:25:41 | |
Skylarks also appeared in many poems written amidst the horror of war. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:50 | |
Well, I suppose the Skylark is the sort of default bird | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
in First World War poetry | 0:25:54 | 0:25:56 | |
because it rises above, | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
because it sees things from the air. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:00 | |
There is that sense of escape, but also of going on singing | 0:26:00 | 0:26:08 | |
when all reasons around you are saying weep, | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
is presumably something that would cheer you | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
if you thought you were going to get your head blown off any moment. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
One serving soldier who was also a poet, John William Streets, | 0:26:20 | 0:26:25 | |
wrote of the ironic contrast | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
between his own situation and that of the soaring bird. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:32 | |
Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
And hark! Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky - | 0:26:35 | 0:26:40 | |
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:42 | |
His lyric wild and free-carols a lark. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:47 | |
I in the trench, He lost in heaven afar. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:51 | |
Along with 20,000 of his fellow soldiers, John William Streets | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
died on July 1st 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:04 | |
His body lies in a war cemetery close to where he fell, | 0:27:04 | 0:27:08 | |
where Skylarks still sing today. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
SKYLARK SINGS | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
During the four long years of the First World War, Britain's | 0:27:18 | 0:27:21 | |
Foreign Secretary was Edward Grey. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:24 | |
Grey had a lifelong interest in birds, | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
a passion he shared with another great world statesman, | 0:27:27 | 0:27:30 | |
the US President, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:36 | |
Back in June 1910, when Roosevelt was on a state visit to Britain, | 0:27:36 | 0:27:41 | |
these two great men had gone for a quiet country walk in the New Forest | 0:27:41 | 0:27:45 | |
in Grey's home county of Hampshire. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
Putting aside global diplomacy | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
and talk of military and industrial might, they simply talked birds, | 0:27:53 | 0:28:01 | |
and President Roosevelt later said that it was the highlight of his entire | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
European tour in the summer of 1910. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:09 | |
They saw and heard no fewer than 40 different species, | 0:28:09 | 0:28:15 | |
many of which they identified by listening to their song. | 0:28:15 | 0:28:18 | |
And one element of the story that I | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
particularly like is the fact that they did this walk alone. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
These two great men walking through the New Forest, quietly discussing | 0:28:24 | 0:28:33 | |
nature and wildlife and the countryside. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
Looking back, it is hard to imagine modern political leaders engaging in | 0:28:37 | 0:28:42 | |
such an innocent pastime. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a very strong relationship, | 0:28:45 | 0:28:49 | |
but that was based around shared political ideals. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
The friendship between Roosevelt | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
and Edward Grey | 0:28:55 | 0:28:57 | |
was based a passion, a love for birds | 0:28:57 | 0:29:01 | |
and an appreciation of the British countryside. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
After the war, when he had left high office, Grey returned to his | 0:29:06 | 0:29:09 | |
first love - birds. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:11 | |
During this period, birdwatching was fast becoming a popular recreational | 0:29:14 | 0:29:18 | |
activity, with a flood of bird | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
books aimed not at experts, but at the general public. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:23 | |
One of the best-known of these was written by Grey himself, | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
"The Charm of Birds". | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
Like The Natural History of Selborne, The Charm of Birds | 0:29:30 | 0:29:35 | |
was aimed squarely at a mass audience. | 0:29:35 | 0:29:37 | |
"This book will have no scientific value. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
"My observations have been made for recreation, in search of pleasure, | 0:29:42 | 0:29:47 | |
"not knowledge." | 0:29:47 | 0:29:49 | |
By the time he wrote this best-selling book, | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
Grey's eyesight was failing fast. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:54 | |
So it's not surprising that his writing focuses strongly on birdsong. | 0:29:54 | 0:29:59 | |
One of his particular favourites was the Nightingale. | 0:29:59 | 0:30:03 | |
"The Nightingale's song has compass, variety and astonishing power. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:11 | |
"It arrests attention and compels admiration. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:13 | |
"It has onset and impact, but it is fitful, broken and restless. | 0:30:13 | 0:30:19 | |
"It is a song to listen to, but not to live with." | 0:30:19 | 0:30:24 | |
The Nightingale had of course been celebrated by writers and poets | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
from the Greeks and Romans to Keats and Clare, despite its rather | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
unprepossessing appearance. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
You don't want to see a Nightingale, because if you do, you'll be disappointed. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:41 | |
It is just a little brown bird. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
And maybe that helps with the mystique of them as well. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
That you don't see it, it's just a song. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
And it is the Nightingale's | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
extraordinary song which has been the key to its fame. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
It's not the only bird to sing by night, but | 0:30:57 | 0:31:00 | |
it's certainly the most persistent. | 0:31:00 | 0:31:02 | |
It's fame is all the more remarkable | 0:31:02 | 0:31:04 | |
given that it has always been a relatively scarce bird in Britain. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
Everybody thinks they know what a Nightingale is and is like, but very | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
few people have actually heard one, and even fewer have seen one, | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
because the Nightingale is a very mysterious bird. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:21 | |
The most extraordinary thing is its volume. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:23 | |
It's extraordinarily loud. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:27 | |
It's also very rich in its range of notes. | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
The idea of something singing at night, a lone voice in the darkness | 0:31:31 | 0:31:36 | |
is going to set your poetic juices running, I imagine. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:41 | |
Is it lonely? | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
Is it singing to its love that will not reply? | 0:31:43 | 0:31:47 | |
And the sound fills the night. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:50 | |
During the years between the two world wars, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
one particular Nightingale achieved unexpected fame. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:02 | |
This totally wild bird performed | 0:32:02 | 0:32:04 | |
a spontaneous duet with the cellist Beatrice Harrison, in one of | 0:32:04 | 0:32:08 | |
the very first live radio outside broadcasts anywhere in the world. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:13 | |
The day was 19th May, 1924. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
It was a perfect evening for Nightingales. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
There was a full moon, it was a warm, summer evening, | 0:32:24 | 0:32:27 | |
and Beatrice Harrison put on her best frock and played the cello. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:32 | |
And played to an estimated audience of over a million people. | 0:32:33 | 0:32:39 | |
Beatrice Harrison and the bird had created a broadcasting sensation. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:47 | |
Thousands of listeners wrote to the BBC to praise the programme, | 0:32:47 | 0:32:51 | |
and the event was restaged every year. | 0:32:51 | 0:32:55 | |
The story of the final broadcast, | 0:32:55 | 0:32:57 | |
during the Second World War, is just as enigmatic as the very first one. | 0:32:57 | 0:33:02 | |
When the time came, the BBC engineer who | 0:33:02 | 0:33:06 | |
was in charge of the sound equipment, as the Nightingale started up, heard | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
the sound of approaching aircraft, and very wisely he stopped the | 0:33:10 | 0:33:15 | |
broadcast because he thought this might be some kind of security risk, | 0:33:15 | 0:33:19 | |
but he kept recording it, so we do have the recording, and what you hear | 0:33:19 | 0:33:24 | |
is this fleet of bombers, English bombers heading for Germany | 0:33:24 | 0:33:27 | |
gradually getting closer, and as the crescendo of noise builds | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
up from the bombers, so the crescendo of noise builds up from the Nightingales. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:36 | |
It's the most dramatic combination of sounds. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
DRONE OF AIRCRAFT/NIGHTINGALE SONG | 0:33:40 | 0:33:45 | |
WIRELESS: I have to tell you now that this country is at war with Germany. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:53 | |
# They'll be bluebirds over | 0:33:53 | 0:33:57 | |
# The White Cliffs of Dover... # | 0:33:57 | 0:34:01 | |
Once war with Germany had been declared, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
life for millions of Britons changed overnight. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
Families were separated as men went off to fight, | 0:34:06 | 0:34:09 | |
and children were evacuated to the countryside. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
And just as during the First World War, Britain's birds would provide | 0:34:12 | 0:34:16 | |
comfort, support, and hope at this time of national crisis. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:22 | |
# And a Nightingale sang | 0:34:22 | 0:34:27 | |
# In Berkeley Square. # | 0:34:27 | 0:34:32 | |
One young man, James Fisher, did more than anyone else to promote | 0:34:34 | 0:34:39 | |
the importance of watching birds as part of what it meant to be British. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:44 | |
Fisher was the David Attenborough of his day - a scientist, writer | 0:34:44 | 0:34:48 | |
and broadcaster who frequently appeared on radio and television. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:52 | |
Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was an unlikely man of the people. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:59 | |
Yet his life's mission was to convert as many | 0:34:59 | 0:35:01 | |
of his fellow Britons as possible to the pleasures of birdwatching. | 0:35:01 | 0:35:05 | |
James was a superior person in every real sense. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
He was highly educated, | 0:35:10 | 0:35:12 | |
very sociable, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:15 | |
good looking and he ticked all the right boxes, James. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:19 | |
James himself was erudite. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:23 | |
He was encyclopaedic in his knowledge of birds, | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
in fact he wrote bird encyclopaedias. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
He could tell you every postage stamp that had a bird on it in | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
the world, and as such, he left a legacy of books. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:39 | |
The most successful of Fisher's many bird books, | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
was also one of his simplest. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:44 | |
Published in 1941, during the darkest days of the war, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
Watching Birds was a Pelican paperback, priced at just six old pence. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:54 | |
The book would go on to sell more than three million copies. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:58 | |
It was the first serious bird book I'd read, and I found it a wonderful | 0:35:58 | 0:36:02 | |
book, I think mainly because it was such an inclusive book. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:07 | |
Here was this eminent scientist | 0:36:07 | 0:36:08 | |
writing for people like me, telling me that this was a | 0:36:08 | 0:36:12 | |
legitimate interest, that the sort of records and observations I might make | 0:36:12 | 0:36:16 | |
were worth making and were part of some larger picture. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
But for Fisher, Watching Birds had an even more important purpose, | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
as he made clear in the book's preface. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:27 | |
"Some people might consider an apology necessary for the | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
"appearance of a book about birds at a time when Britain is fighting | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
"for its own and many other lives. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
"I make no such apology. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
"Birds are part of the heritage we are fighting for." | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
Fisher was not alone in his views. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:50 | |
A survey carried out in the very same year | 0:36:50 | 0:36:52 | |
confirmed the British people's passion for their rural heritage. | 0:36:52 | 0:36:57 | |
The vast majority said, England is a village green, | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
is an old inn sign, is the birds and the creatures of the countryside, | 0:37:01 | 0:37:06 | |
the water mill, the winding lane. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:09 | |
That is the image of England | 0:37:09 | 0:37:11 | |
at a time when urban England is being flattened. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
Observing birds and watching them became this really strong way of | 0:37:14 | 0:37:17 | |
tying the observer and the nation together very strongly. By watching | 0:37:17 | 0:37:22 | |
birds you become a trustworthy member of your own culture. | 0:37:22 | 0:37:25 | |
Birds stood for a kind of rural British identity that was really | 0:37:25 | 0:37:29 | |
under threat in this wartime arena. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:33 | |
This new enthusiasm for watching birds | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
took hold in some unlikely places. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
It even became a popular | 0:37:39 | 0:37:41 | |
activity amongst prisoners of war, despite the obvious limitations. | 0:37:41 | 0:37:46 | |
COLONEL BOGEY MARCH | 0:37:46 | 0:37:48 | |
The main problem with being in a prisoner-of-war camp was boredom. | 0:37:48 | 0:37:52 | |
You had hours, days, weeks, months to fill, nothing to do and | 0:37:52 | 0:37:56 | |
it was described as being an endless Sunday afternoon with no prospect of | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
Monday, by one prisoner of war. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:02 | |
To combat this, they devised all sorts of diversions from | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
football tournaments to music hall shows, and, of course, nature study. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:12 | |
There's some wonderful letters where they talk about how they chose the organism to study. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:19 | |
At one point they tried studying snails, but apparently this was too | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
boring, even for prisoners of war. | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
But birds were the obvious choice, being both ubiquitous and abundant. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:32 | |
One prisoner decided to study one of the most beautiful creatures of all, | 0:38:32 | 0:38:36 | |
the Redstart. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:38 | |
Of course, the thing about these birds that they watched is that | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
they could leave the camp at any time. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
And John Buxton, who wrote an extraordinary monograph on | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
the Redstart using his prison camp notes made a lot of this. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
He said that the birds could leave at any time. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
"My Redstarts, | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
"but one of the chief joys | 0:38:58 | 0:38:59 | |
"of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:04 | |
"They lived wholly and enviably to themselves, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
"unconcerned in our fatuous politics." | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
He also talked about how | 0:39:11 | 0:39:13 | |
they didn't just represent freedom, but also these invisible barriers. They had their territory. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:19 | |
So he identified with them in that way as well. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
Buxton and his fellow POWs didn't simply watch birds - | 0:39:22 | 0:39:27 | |
they studied them more closely than anyone had, ever before. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:31 | |
If you look at the notebooks, and some of these notebooks do survive, | 0:39:31 | 0:39:34 | |
they're page after page after page of observations that detail | 0:39:34 | 0:39:40 | |
what each bird is doing each second of each day. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
They're extraordinary documents, and what they show is a kind of | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
massive translation of the kinds of things that go on in a prison camp | 0:39:47 | 0:39:51 | |
put onto birds, so here you have men who are obsessively watched, | 0:39:51 | 0:39:56 | |
all day, all night by guards. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
And they are watching birds, all day and all night. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:02 | |
I think bird-watching in prison camps is partly, obviously, freedom. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:07 | |
Here is a creature that can hop over the wire. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:09 | |
But also the slightly obsessional quality, it passes | 0:40:09 | 0:40:12 | |
the time, it enables you to focus on something and do it well. | 0:40:12 | 0:40:16 | |
It's the classic | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
retreat into collecting mania, retreat into classification. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:22 | |
You're in this situation which you absolutely can't control, | 0:40:22 | 0:40:26 | |
here is something you can control. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:28 | |
Back on the Home Front, the cinema was one way of escaping the horrors | 0:40:33 | 0:40:37 | |
of war, if only for an hour or two. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
And in one long-forgotten wartime film, the arrival of a pair of rare | 0:40:40 | 0:40:45 | |
birds in a sleepy English village | 0:40:45 | 0:40:47 | |
symbolised the defence of the British countryside and its values. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:51 | |
Let's have another look. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
That's what it is, you know? The Tawny Pipit. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
It does look awfully like the picture. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
Are you sure it's the only one without spots? Let's have a look. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:05 | |
It can't be. It says it's only nested here once before. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:09 | |
I'm absolutely certain. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:10 | |
Let's go and ring Uncle Arthur. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
-We've justified his choice in books, anyway. -Yes, haven't we?! | 0:41:12 | 0:41:16 | |
The Tawny Pipit is a wonderfully eccentric piece of British film-making. | 0:41:16 | 0:41:19 | |
It tells the story of a little village in England that discovers | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
that a pair of Tawny Pipits are nesting next to the village. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:26 | |
There are many characters that are very familiar from | 0:41:26 | 0:41:29 | |
this kind of film, the eccentric bumbling Colonel, the recovering | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
soldier, the airman who is charged with protecting them. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
And it's really an allegory about | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
looking after refugees, protecting them, involving | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
them in village life and basically preserving the kind of status quo. | 0:41:42 | 0:41:47 | |
You see, we've got two very rare birds nesting just over here. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
Birds? But what's that to do with me? | 0:41:51 | 0:41:53 | |
Well, they're right in the middle of a field, and all this, I mean... | 0:41:53 | 0:41:57 | |
Who are you? | 0:41:57 | 0:41:59 | |
My name's Hazel Broom. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:00 | |
Well Miss Broom, we shan't disturb your birds. | 0:42:00 | 0:42:03 | |
But it's a ground-nesting bird. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:04 | |
It's one of the most wonderful things that's ever happened in England. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:08 | |
It's rather touching, actually. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:10 | |
And not just because of the birds, but because of the rural socialism | 0:42:10 | 0:42:17 | |
of the idea, that all... the elderly colonel, the young corporal, | 0:42:17 | 0:42:22 | |
who's an ornithologist, the army, the nurse, the recuperating RAF man, | 0:42:22 | 0:42:27 | |
they're all in this together to support these two creatures | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
being able to breed. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
This young lady says they have a rare bird breeding | 0:42:32 | 0:42:35 | |
in a field here called the Tawny Pipit. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:37 | |
Anthus campestris? My hat, is this true? | 0:42:37 | 0:42:39 | |
Yes! | 0:42:39 | 0:42:40 | |
-Is there such a bird? -Oh, my hat, yes, sir. If this is true, it's absolutely terrific. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
Thank you, corporal. Very well, Miss, I shall proceed by road. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
Oh, you darling! | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
Tawny Pipit may not seem like a very revolutionary film - yet its deeper | 0:42:50 | 0:42:55 | |
message closely reflects the social and political climate of the time. | 0:42:55 | 0:43:00 | |
Very briefly - '41, '42, '43 - Britain | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
almost became a socialist republic. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:06 | |
That's what happened in the war, everyone helping each other. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
And you get a strong sense of that. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
It's a bit Ealing comedy, there is a corner of the English | 0:43:11 | 0:43:14 | |
mind that is forever Ambridge. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:17 | |
The film's plot relies on the fact that the Tawny Pipit | 0:43:19 | 0:43:23 | |
is a very rare visitor to Britain. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
For the man commissioned to film the birds this was a major problem. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
It was filmed by the wonderful bird | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
photographer Eric Hosking who had serious problems, of course, | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
because there aren't any Tawny Pipits in Britain. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
So what he had to try and do was to film similar birds | 0:43:40 | 0:43:43 | |
and pretend they were Tawny Pipits. | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
So he filmed Meadow Pipits, but from behind, because from in | 0:43:45 | 0:43:49 | |
front they would show their very characteristic streaked breast. | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
So he really tore his hair out over this movie, and it's quite | 0:43:53 | 0:43:56 | |
fun watching it as a bird watcher, because you raise one eyebrow and | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
think to yourself, that's not a Tawny Pipit, it's a Meadow Pipit. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
But like all great British | 0:44:04 | 0:44:06 | |
propaganda films, it all turns out fine in the end. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
Tawny Pipit portrays an idealised vision of the English countryside, | 0:44:13 | 0:44:16 | |
unchanging, and steeped in old-fashioned values. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
In reality, things were rather different. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:24 | |
A short while ago this was the 6,000-acre wilderness of Feltwell | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
fen in south-west Norfolk, where nothing grew, save reeds and weeds. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
Scrubland of peat and bog, where floods, more frequently than not, | 0:44:34 | 0:44:38 | |
turned it into a vast morass. | 0:44:38 | 0:44:40 | |
But it has taken a war to turn that | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
same wasteland into an agricultural gold mine. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
The Ministry of Agriculture has sent to work an army of men reclaiming the idle acres. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:51 | |
As the war dragged on, with national food shortages and the | 0:44:51 | 0:44:54 | |
prospect of widespread starvation, desperate measures had to be taken. | 0:44:54 | 0:45:00 | |
So huge swathes of our countryside were ploughed up for agriculture. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:05 | |
The entire emphasis was on maximising production. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:10 | |
And you can only do that by taking out what you call, the waste land, | 0:45:10 | 0:45:16 | |
and the waste land included half of all our ancient woodlands, | 0:45:16 | 0:45:22 | |
70% of our heath lands. | 0:45:22 | 0:45:24 | |
I think we've now lost 99% of our flower-rich meadows. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:29 | |
Any habitat that wasn't yielding agricultural produce was converted to | 0:45:29 | 0:45:35 | |
arable or to farming in some way. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:38 | |
The irony was that the more we planned | 0:45:38 | 0:45:41 | |
and organised and structured the future of the British countryside, | 0:45:41 | 0:45:47 | |
the more we lost sight of some of these | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
ascetic and romantic impulses that | 0:45:51 | 0:45:54 | |
people had for the landscape and for the birds that live within it. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:58 | |
During the post-war years, the juggernaut of the agricultural | 0:46:00 | 0:46:04 | |
revolution was unstoppable, fuelled by subsidies and new technology. | 0:46:04 | 0:46:10 | |
It was goodbye to the old-fashioned values of Tawny Pipit, | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
and welcome to the brave new world of men in white coats. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
And the boffins came up with what appeared to be the perfect solution | 0:46:17 | 0:46:21 | |
to improving productivity. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:23 | |
There was a bright new future for Britain, not only for industry, | 0:46:26 | 0:46:29 | |
but also for the countryside, | 0:46:29 | 0:46:31 | |
and so in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, we sought to get rid of | 0:46:31 | 0:46:37 | |
inefficient farming methods and systems and replace them | 0:46:37 | 0:46:41 | |
with cutting-edge new technologies of the time. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
And one of those technologies was the application of pesticides, | 0:46:44 | 0:46:48 | |
and the birth of what we now know as chemical farming. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
So you suddenly have this interesting combination of a bunch of chemicals | 0:46:56 | 0:47:01 | |
that could kill pests | 0:47:01 | 0:47:03 | |
and a need to increase food production. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
And, at face value, it must have seemed very straightforward. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:12 | |
You know, you get more of a crop | 0:47:12 | 0:47:13 | |
if you remove the weeds, because the crop gets all the food from the soil. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:18 | |
But these revolutionary new farming methods were having terrible effects | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
on our countryside birds. The two main problems | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
were the destruction of habitat and the widespread use of pesticides. | 0:47:26 | 0:47:31 | |
One, it was degrading the whole landscape. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
A lot of the wild life depended on the wild plants, | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
the rough bits of the countryside, the wet bits and so on and so forth. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
And if you've spent lots of time and effort wiping out | 0:47:43 | 0:47:47 | |
the so-called pests, when you kill the moths, | 0:47:47 | 0:47:50 | |
you kill the butterflies, and caterpillars, | 0:47:50 | 0:47:53 | |
then you remove that element of the food chain. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
As a result, the populations of many farmland birds went into freefall. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:09 | |
Eventually, environmentalists woke up to what was happening, | 0:48:10 | 0:48:15 | |
and began to warn against the catastrophe of a silent spring. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
But when it came to a choice between farming and birds, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
there could only be one winner. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:28 | |
There was a kind of | 0:48:28 | 0:48:30 | |
illusion, I think, in government and actually in society more widely, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:35 | |
that what was good for agriculture was good for the countryside. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:39 | |
People believed that the countryside | 0:48:39 | 0:48:41 | |
was safe in the hands of farmers, but I think no one really had grasped | 0:48:41 | 0:48:47 | |
the fact that actually there was a difficult choice to be made between | 0:48:47 | 0:48:52 | |
maximising agricultural production and attempting to maintain | 0:48:52 | 0:48:57 | |
a kind of rich, diverse wildlife in the countryside. | 0:48:57 | 0:49:01 | |
One man who witnessed the calamity in the countryside at first hand was | 0:49:05 | 0:49:10 | |
the author Henry Williamson, whose books, including Tarka the Otter, | 0:49:10 | 0:49:14 | |
had made him a household name. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:16 | |
"After the Hitlerian war when I had sold my farm | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
"and returned to North Devon and my writing, | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
the general use of other sprays on arable and grasslands caused the deaths of great numbers of | 0:49:31 | 0:49:36 | |
birds including such predators as sparrowhawks, owls and buzzards. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:41 | |
Williamson, a farmer himself, recalled finding | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
a family of Grey Partridges, all poisoned by chemicals. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:50 | |
I came across the two birds crouched side-by-side in death | 0:49:50 | 0:49:55 | |
with their chicks slightly larger than humble bees | 0:49:55 | 0:49:58 | |
cold between the protecting feathers. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
Even the largest and most powerful birds weren't immune to the effects | 0:50:04 | 0:50:08 | |
of what turned out to be a chemical time-bomb. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:12 | |
Birds of prey that struggled through the 19th century surviving | 0:50:14 | 0:50:20 | |
the persecution from gamekeepers to protect landowning interests, | 0:50:20 | 0:50:26 | |
had bounced back a little during both the World Wars when many of | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
the gamekeepers were posted overseas, were hit | 0:50:31 | 0:50:36 | |
tremendously hard by the chemical farming revolution of the 1960s. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:42 | |
The poison that we put onto the crops was concentrated up the food | 0:50:42 | 0:50:47 | |
chain in the bodies of smaller birds which were then taken as prey items | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
by birds of prey and they were producing infertile eggs or indeed | 0:50:51 | 0:50:55 | |
eggshells that were so thin they cracked under the incubating bird. | 0:50:55 | 0:51:00 | |
One species, the kestrel, did manage to escape the worst | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
effects of the chemical revolution. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
But ironically, it did so by taking advantage | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
of a new habitat created by us. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:14 | |
So we went through a period where | 0:51:14 | 0:51:16 | |
the only place you saw kestrels, for instance, | 0:51:16 | 0:51:19 | |
was along the motorway verges. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:21 | |
Because they were long corridors that were | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
excused agricultural improvement, nobody was spraying the road verges. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
So you hadn't got that kind of damage and the birds of prey that | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
survived were the ones that learned to feed along the roads | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
and you didn't see them over the fields. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:36 | |
But for some species, it was almost the end. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:40 | |
DDT, the main culprit amongst these agricultural chemicals, was finally | 0:51:45 | 0:51:50 | |
banned in 1984, more than 40 years after the destruction of our countryside and its birds had begun. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:57 | |
Since then, different groups of birds have experienced very different fortunes. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:04 | |
Birds of prey have been the fastest to make a comeback, not only because | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
of the banning of DDT, but also because in many parts of the country | 0:52:10 | 0:52:14 | |
they are no longer persecuted as ruthlessly as they were in the past. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:19 | |
Golden eagles, buzzards and red kites are now | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
a far more regular sight in our skies. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:27 | |
But the fate of many of our rural birds | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
could hardly be more different. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:33 | |
The continuing drive to make agriculture more productive | 0:52:33 | 0:52:37 | |
has been a disaster for birds that depend on farmland. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
Many species continue to decline, and have vanished from their former haunts. | 0:52:41 | 0:52:46 | |
These dramatic changes have happened not over centuries, | 0:52:48 | 0:52:52 | |
but during our own brief lifetimes. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
I can remember as a kid, as a teenager, you know, in the | 0:52:55 | 0:53:01 | |
'50s certainly, walking across what I wouldn't regard as anything | 0:53:01 | 0:53:06 | |
except just normal farmland and Lapwings coming up, | 0:53:06 | 0:53:12 | |
Skylarks were nesting there. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
In winter there would be a wintering flock of maybe 100, 200 Yellowhammers | 0:53:14 | 0:53:19 | |
and a few other finches with them and Buntings and that sort of thing. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:25 | |
In other words, more birds. | 0:53:25 | 0:53:26 | |
There was absolutely no question about that whatsoever. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:32 | |
And I remember riding around the headlines of fields | 0:53:32 | 0:53:36 | |
and clouds of lapwings. I mean, | 0:53:36 | 0:53:41 | |
pretty much blacking out the sky rising up out of the newly-ploughed ground. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:45 | |
Add masses and masses of Skylarks, and masses and masses of Finches. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:51 | |
And that was only 45 years ago. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:55 | |
And when I see a Lapwing now, I take my hat off to it, you know, it feels like a rarity. | 0:53:56 | 0:54:03 | |
Although they are waders, | 0:54:03 | 0:54:05 | |
Lapwings spend much of their lives on farmland, wintering in large | 0:54:05 | 0:54:09 | |
flocks on open fields, and nesting on rough grassland. | 0:54:09 | 0:54:13 | |
Since 1960 their numbers have fallen by 80%. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:21 | |
For me, the fate of the Lapwing is a kind of personal tragedy. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
It's almost autobiographical. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:27 | |
They're beautiful, | 0:54:27 | 0:54:28 | |
they sound fantastic, they remind me of my childhood, they remind me of | 0:54:28 | 0:54:34 | |
the landscape, they are somehow synonymous with a diverse landscape. | 0:54:34 | 0:54:40 | |
The loss of these familiar birds is a timely warning about the state | 0:54:42 | 0:54:46 | |
of the British countryside. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:48 | |
But its significance goes far deeper than that. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
Their fate, and the fate of all our wildlife, | 0:54:51 | 0:54:55 | |
is inextricably linked with our own emotional and spiritual well-being. | 0:54:55 | 0:55:01 | |
Human beings have suddenly, in my lifetime, begun to understand | 0:55:01 | 0:55:07 | |
that the presence of a healthy community of animals and mammals | 0:55:07 | 0:55:12 | |
and birds and reptiles and insects | 0:55:12 | 0:55:14 | |
is absolutely of huge importance to the health of the human spirit. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:19 | |
And the landscape with diversity in it is central | 0:55:23 | 0:55:27 | |
to being a human being and I think | 0:55:27 | 0:55:29 | |
as we destroy other species, we destroy something about ourselves. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:35 | |
The loss of these birds matters because it is, in the end, | 0:55:37 | 0:55:40 | |
an impoverishment. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
It happens quite gradually | 0:55:43 | 0:55:44 | |
so you don't notice it, like you don't notice your hair | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
going grey but it happens and when it's happened, you then notice it. | 0:55:47 | 0:55:52 | |
And if these birds were to vanish | 0:55:55 | 0:55:56 | |
altogether, our very concept of countryside would be under threat. | 0:55:56 | 0:56:02 | |
If birds went out of the countryside, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
the sedges withered from the lake and no birds sing, | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
to bring John Keats back into this, | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
it would be | 0:56:14 | 0:56:16 | |
an emblem of a kind of nuclear, post-nuclear deadness. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
If birds disappeared from the countryside, | 0:56:20 | 0:56:24 | |
it wouldn't mean the same, to call it the countryside. | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
It would be the non-urban spaces. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
To live in a silent world would be... | 0:56:31 | 0:56:34 | |
a really dreadful thing, dreadful thing. | 0:56:34 | 0:56:37 | |
The story of our nation's relationship with birds | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
has been a long and eventful one, | 0:56:56 | 0:56:58 | |
a journey from exploitation, through appreciation, to delight. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:05 | |
For centuries, we regarded birds purely as objects | 0:57:05 | 0:57:09 | |
to be used for our benefit, for food and fuel, sport and recreation. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:15 | |
But gradually, over time, we came to value them, cherish them, | 0:57:18 | 0:57:21 | |
and finally to understand what they truly mean to us. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:27 | |
MUSIC: Variation IX (Adagio) "Nimrod" from Enigma Variations by Elgar | 0:57:27 | 0:57:33 | |
MUSIC INTERSPERSED WITH BIRDSONG | 0:57:33 | 0:57:36 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media | 0:58:18 | 0:58:23 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:23 | 0:58:27 |