Episode 10 Springwatch Unsprung

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE A very generous welcome here from

the people of Suffolk, welcome to Unsprung. I am not here, I am

actually at home with my poodles in the garden, because we recorded this

on Thursday night! But we have still got a cracking show for you. We have

been here and Minsmere all week, and there has been loads of action, take

a look at what we have been watching.

This show is about the way that people connect with wildlife. It is

sizzling, it is spectacular, it is Springwatch!

Mr Will young! Benjamin Zephaniah! I find that absolutely incredible,

what an amazing bird! APPLAUSE

That is what we offer you, I think we offer you some of the finest

British wildlife, and also some very exciting guests.

Tonight is not going to be an exception to either of those things.

My first guest rose to prominence in 1970, when she published The Female

Eunuch. And spent, she has been courting controversy with views on

feminism, literature and the environment. She is here in her role

as president of Buglife, I give you Germaine Green! Thank you very much

indeed for coming in. Our second guest is a man with a van, but no

ordinary van, not white and full of tools. It was a classic band, but he

has updated it, and he has got a mission, trying to clean up our

beaches and making a pretty good job of it, Mr Martin Dorey! Nice to see

you! And nice to see you all sun. Great week. What a week it has been,

we have at everything from tattoos two poems, it has all been there

once, so much action on the live cams. Unbelievable, it feels like it

has been read or -- eat or be done. I have been doing some reading

myself! That is the way the world goes round, we have to be pragmatic

about that, our job is to report on what we see, we do not judge it, we

try to explain it, and predation is a fact of life. I have put together

a gallery of photographs from the amazing things we have got in,

please keep sending them in. I have them fast food, these are fabulous

pictures. This is a picture of a cuckoo by John Tymon. A good

photograph, it has clicked that caterpillar up and is about to

swallow it. Superb, cuckoo eating caterpillar. On a similar theme,

here we go, blackbird. Look at that, a blackbird with a meal worm, this

might be in someone's garden, since they are not a native species. Get

quite close to this one, that is a pied wagtail with insects in its

mouth, and Phill wants to know how they stuff so many in their mouth

without dropping them. Some birds have backward facing spines on the

roof of their mouth and their town, which means that once they have got

it in their mouth, it does not slip out, and that they can grip it once

it is within them out. Some have spines on the edges of their beaks,

but not the pied wagtail, it will be using the spines inside its mouth.

Incredible. Beautiful bird. Because we have the president of Buglife in

tonight, I have been scouting for some good bug footage. What is going

on here, do you think? Well... If you could just tell us! This is a

case of mistaken identity. I think one of those... There is a full ice

needing in to have a look! Ladybirds in action, trying to procreate, but

not working very well. We also had this quite bizarre picture, which

has been sent in, the coin is full-size reference. What on earth

is that?! I cannot see what that is, is it a desiccated caterpillar? It

is grotesque, it looks like something out of the Aliens movie. I

might have to come back to you on that. Big as well. Great size

reference, I like that. Time for the quiz, of course. We have been

setting a quiz every night, Sophie has been setting it with their

incredible collection of bird's wings and feathers, so for the final

time, here is Sophie. Hi, this is my quiz for you. This

bird gets its name from a spiny red tale. The male fans its tales out

during courtship displays, whose feather is it you might I think that

is a proper hard one, but quite a big clue at the end may be. It is

very distinctive, I am envious of her collection, I don't have one of

those, I would quite like one. I do not know what I would do it, target

under the bed with all the rest, of course! And we are not live tonight,

so Blake along at home, I hope you get it right. Kabul, thank you very

much for coming in. APPLAUSE

-- Germaine. A well-deserved welcome there. Before we crack onto

environmental things and bugs and all such stuff, how do you feel

about Harry Clinton getting the nomination, first woman getting the

presidential nomination? -- Hillary Clinton. It is funny you should say

that, because countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines have

elected ex-wives of heads of state because they could not find anything

else, and I do not think sharing a bed with Bill Clinton is necessarily

the best preparation for running one of the most powerful and dangerous

countries in the world. But at least she's a woman and it is not the

other way around. Why does that not make my heart sing? Is not as if

women are essentially different in some special way, especially when

you have got the military-industrial complex telling you what to do. I am

sure Hillary will be very professional, but we have had such a

disappointment with Obama, I am kind of frightened we will have another

one. With the world be a better place if women were running it? No!

OK, rather disappointed, I thought it might be yes! Let's move on, you

are interested in natural history, have been from a young age, you have

a reserve in Australia and in the UK. Well, sort of, I have got three

acres of mistakes at exit 9 of the M11. I have a wood which should be

chalk grassland, and I have got an orchard which should be chalk

grassland, a much rarer habitat than the ones I have created. I would not

make that mistake again. But I am selling that house now, and the

people who are interested in buying it would like to keep it the way I

have got it, which I think is probably wrong! We have got some of

your photographs. Do you like that picture? I thought it was OK... Oh!

It has already gone. The forecast of your interest, your bugs, president

of Buglife, how did that come about? I cannot remember, apparently they

contacted me because of stuff I was writing, probably in the Telegraph

at that time, and I was trying to remember when I started really

caring about insects and being concerned for them. There seems to

be such a determination to eliminate them, and it seemed to me obvious

that we could lose the snow leopard and it wouldn't make a huge

difference to us. But if we lost a sizeable proportion of our in

vertebrates, we would die, and the planet would die with us. And the

other thing was, they were not popular, you know, everybody likes

cuddly things, you know, they will spend a fortune on dogs and birds

and everything else, but you cannot get them to care about creepy

crawlies. So do understand the role they play, and there were other

things I had almost forgotten. I was friends with Miriam Rothschild, a

great entomologist, of course, and I used to stand in my garden in Italy,

photographing butterflies all day long. I generally didn't have any

clothes on, because it was very remote, so I was kind of bakes to

the colour of pig skin. And I had the occasional wonderful butterfly

photograph that was not made by Oxford Scientific Films. One of the

happiest days of my life was when Miriam said that my photographs were

the best she had seen. You should have brought them along! All my

papers have gone to Melbourne University, and I tried to do my

iPhoto library the other day, and somebody can tell me how to get

those blasted thumbnails to turn into pictures. I have thousands of

them! One of the things that caught your eye on the series so far, the

Meadow ants' is amazing. Incredible piece of filming, it was not full of

drama and tension and so on, it was just the operation of that very

complex society. I hadn't quite understood, but I think you have got

minor and major ants in those communities, so they are actually

organised on a hierarchical basis. Our notion of them as a primal

board, a democracy of some sort, they are not really like that. --

horde. They actually teach each other things, if one finds a source

of food, it will go back and teach another ant how to find the food. It

will lead and forward and teach it the landmarks it needs to see, then

it will run back to the nest and teach another one. When it has

taught another, it will go back. Incredibly complex, social animals,

like the pollinators. They are in big trouble, and we are not entirely

sure why. We tend to overestimate, overemphasise the role of the

honeybee, the hive bee. We tend to underestimate the role of other

pollinators, hover flies for example, accidental pollinators. But

one of my fixations has been that I have always cared about flowers, but

I suddenly realised one day that they are only half the story. I

think it was actually when I was growing my rainforest in south-east

Queensland, and we turned up these brown weevils, and it turns out that

in the fossil record those same weevils are there, and I was

suddenly thinking, my God, flowers and their pollinators evolved

together. How does that happen? And that strikes me is a mystery like

the blue sky. How did it happen? I mean, some people will say God

arranged it, I don't happen to agree with that, but I would really love

to know how it happened, and I really wished that people understood

that when you see the flower and its pollinator, you see the completion

of a process. The two things coming together to form a perfect union,

purpose. It is great, if you are running a forest, when you get your

obligate parasites and dependence on the plants you are planting, because

it tells you that you are getting something right. We never kill

insects, even when they overwhelm our tiny trees - we hope that

balance will eventually be restored. We do not go booming in to destroy

them. Tolerance is what we need when it comes to managing the wild, a bit

more tolerance all round. Yeah, I don't know about the midges Buglife

will be receiving letters of complaint. We should be nice to

midges. I have been feeding them all night! As you said before, it is eat

or be eaten, but that is not the story, it is eat and be eaten.

Ferrer point, I have given them enough blood! Each guest that comes

on is given a challenge, drawn to be wild, they have a range of artist's

materials to produce a piece of artwork that represents some part of

the Minsmere reserved. What have you come up with us it is a good ten

minutes' work. A! Acid over! What about this?! --

hey! Pass it over! What do we think? You have clearly been painting

before. It is my job to judge this, you see, and we have got some

abstract expressionist work up here, some mixed media work. Yours is more

traditional, a landscape with depth, perspective, colours, and element of

pointillism. What I do not have is a pin, so I'm going to nick this one

off Ed Burns, which was so bad it would figure on the floor! I am

going to put yours quite high up, it is the first time we have had a

proper go at a landscape, so I am going to score it, I'm going to

demote Georgia's from last night, I am going to put yours into third

place up here. APPLAUSE

Pretty good, pretty good! That is very good, we have had some strong

artwork this week. Now it is time for the final high share of the

week, when Chris back and spend some time in a bird-watching hide with a

final place that you might recognise. At the London wetland

centre, this is certainly a national treasure.

Hello! Just doing a spot of sprucing up the binoculars with this tea

towel. It is Gavin and Stacey to towel and

you are. Good heavens. I'm not sure it's a great accolade. I remember

that day very well, that photograph. There was a brilliant day. Let's do

some bird-watching. Have you been here before? A couple of times but

not for a while. Quite good birding this morning. A few crows over

there. They murder. -- a murder. That is apt. There is a Heron over

on the far bank. I saw a Heron in Regents Park the other night. It was

sitting, posing among the display of juleps and things. It was sitting so

still. My partner actually thought it was false. I took a picture and

he said, why did you take a picture of a false Heron? I said it was

flapping its wings and moving its head. They do stand very still.

Absolutely still. It was beautiful. You just walked into the park and

there it was, so exciting when that happens. You have been into birds

all of your life? Yes, my grandma was a great one for the birds, she

used to feed the birds and gave me tips and always had a birdbath. You

just learned to take care of them and watch them and enjoy them. You

know, it was all there and it was fun and I loved it.

A black headed gull here. It is like a dark brown, so neat, it is as

though it has dipped his head in chocolate. It's quite a handsome

bird. A few years ago now I saw a gull regurgitating its food for its

young. It was quite a sight. I was walking along the seafront somewhere

and there was a flat roof and this gull came down and the young one was

like, give me some food and then all of this stuff came out. Quite a. I'd

never seen it before. -- quite a sight. They will regurgitate like

that. It is so peaceful. If it weren't for that line of houses we

could be in the countryside. Shall we get rid of them? We could grow

some trees so we can't see them. APPLAUSE

You know you were talking about herons and finding it hard to tell

the difference between a plastic Heron and a real one? I thought we

would have a look at social media and see if it is true. Plastic or

real? Real. Correct. That is real. Yes. What about this one? Real but

unusual. It is probably digesting, it may be catching the sun to heat

up the blood to improve digestion. The bug is back. A gentleman over

here has come up with the answer. What do you think? I think it is the

law -- laver of a great silver water beetle, it has come out of water. It

is a big vegetarian laver. It has deliberately come onto land? It's a

rare animal. That is a good spot. Round of applause for this

gentleman. APPLAUSE We liked learning about wildlife,

that's what it's all about. We love an audience expert. Indeed we do. I

will see you towards the end. Martin, come and join us. Great to

see you again. I introduced you as a man with a van

and of course it was an old VW. It was. You were into surfing? That's

right, I started surfing and having to camp because I didn't live near

the sea and I got fed up with tense because they will eat and are

rubbish, I started sleeping in camper vans and it went from there.

Recently you have been a guest on caravan driver of the year? I was

eight guest judge. I had an absolute riot. -- I was a guest. Old camper

vans are cool but caravans, are they call, too? Yes, they are. Yes, they

are. Obviously the surfing got you into the sea and when you got in the

CU realised there was a problem with plastic? Yes, basically, just from

going to the beach over many years, you start noticing things happening

and changing and I moved to Devon in 96 and there had just been a spill

of sun lotion, and I found these bottles on every beach. So yes, I

kept an eye on it and organised clean-ups on the beach. We had big

storms in 2013 /4 team, I think we call it Hercules, and the beach

where I live in Cornwall was devastated. -- 13 /4 team. There was

so much rubbish and I wanted to do something about it. You have come up

with the two-minute beach clean? It seems to have gone crazy. What I

would like you to do is explain the two-minute beach clean, its ethos

and practice and how it is successful, in two minutes. I can

give that a go. Ready? It is very simple, it is the idea that you go

to a beach and spent two minutes picking up litter, it may not

seem... Even I got that! It is nothing to anybody but the thing is,

the more people do it... We invite people to post pictures to Instagram

or Twitter so we can then gather this community of people and if you

imagine if everybody in the room did two minutes, on Saturday, then that

would be God knows how many minutes and together we can make a

difference. You might think that in two minutes you can't do, you can't

make a real difference, but I did two-minute clean in Minsmere, and I

picked up this horrible thing. This is a balloon that someone has lost.

The point that we make is that a balloon like this could end up

blowing into the reserve because it was on the reserve and it could end

up around the neck of something beautiful. Actually, even though I

have just done two minutes and take on this one piece, it makes a

difference. You can't be overwhelmed by the problem, it is so massive

that you can't just look at it and go, my God, the ocean is dying, you

have to say that I can make a bit of a difference and I don't want to

walk past a balloon that then you guys on the reserve discover

tomorrow around the neck of something lovely. I've lost track of

time! The key thing is that it's not just in the UK but overseas? It has

spread because of the Internet, it is great and people are picking up

all over the place and we have had Instagram posts from Antarctica,

Australia. New Zealand. This is a last graph. That is the dead Sea,

one of our regulars. 20 of people all around the world, 17 or 18,000

pictures to Instagram, God knows how many on Twitter. And it has been

picked up. They launched it last week in Israel and they are

launching it on Saturday... Did I explain enough? I think you got most

of it in. There is just so much to it, it has legs. Every day we feel

as though we are hanging onto its coat-tails. Obviously it is a real

issue and the countryside is also equally a nuisance, terrestrial

litter? Yes, we have started working with Dartmoor National Park because

they have litter issues. We have picking stations, I think there are

pictures of them, you borrow a bag and take a litter picker. We have a

tweet from the Dartmoor Rangers, they say, get involved on Dartmoor.

It is already happening. The National Park in Dartmoor have two

of our signs. Here they are. They put them out at hotspots so on

Sunday afternoon when there are 100,000 people roaming around

Dartmoor, they invite people to clean up. And actually there is a

psychology to it that people are saying, hang on, maybe there is a

problem with litter and maybe I should not litter. We did a trial in

Cornwall and compared to the year before with regular beach cleans,

there was a 65% degreaser on the beach. We now have six signs in

Dartmoor, 40 over the UK and 20 in island and 120 going out to Ireland

in the next month. If we reduce it by 65% on each beach maybe, just

maybe we are making a difference. You are making a difference, mate.

It was a great idea. You have spread it all over the world and now you

are cleaning up litter in the countryside as well. Martin, thank

you very much. APPLAUSE You are justifiably pleased about

litter but what about your artwork? This reminds me of the beach and I

wanted to do something that is really special to me, the yellow

iris which is a wild Iris, Jermaine was telling me the Latin earlier. It

reminds me of this time of year because they are so fleeting, they

come out and disappear almost as quickly. I saw one on the reserve

today, it is not a great picture but for me it is quite emotional. There

is an emotional attachment to the Iris, they are very striking and

around this time of year. What can I say? It is quite primitive, really.

Quite childlike! It is bold but it's not buying off -- van Gogh. He put

yellow paint to canvas with his sunflowers. I will put you down

here. The composition was weak. Your art might not be brilliant but job

beach cleans our fantastic. Keep sending them in. Do it over the

weekend and tag us. We would love to see your pictures. Let's try to

resolve the question that was set at the top of the show. These were the

feathers. Here is Sophie with the answer. These are the feathers of a

female common redstart. APPLAUSE Holed I hope you got it right at

home. Sophie, we think you are brilliant. -- I hope you got it

right. Well done, you. Sophie has been fantastic. Jabbing that will be

in the post, second class! Chris, this is a wonderful picture of you.

Look at that. Joyce who is 81 years old. 81! She has captured the jump

perfectly. What a fabulous sweater. That's all the time we have. Martin,

it has been a treat. That is all we have time for, we will be back on

Monday. I will leave you with the sparrowhawk. The big question is,

will be eggs that it is sat on Hatch? See you next week.