Blog - Podcast: Golden Grenades

This is where my obsession with the fastest bird on the planet all started! For a while, we were shown a weekly BBC educational programme at school called Look and Read which included a serialised drama section. And the storyline that made a 9-year-old me sit bolt upright on the hall parquet floor and stare wide-eyed at the big telly on wheels was called Sky Hunter.

Sky Hunter was brilliant; 3 kids discover a plot to sell a stolen Peregrine Falcon and a collection of eggs, and get into a whole load of bother with some baddies. I loved it and was keen to do a deep dive (or deep stoop-sorry!)

For the second year running Kit and Will are out on location for a very special episode. We were invited by Gareth Jones of Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group to join him for a weekend of ringing one of the best birds in the UK. But which bird??

Contains severed limbs, bad whistling, bonus churring and… the “king of the forest”!

Will’s What Bird Is That? animated bird guide can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqKz51w0w4LyLW6Q_dttv0w

In this episode, Kit is joined by Emily Joáchim, a freelance conservationist and writer. Emily has been obsessed with wildlife, particularly raptors and owls since childhood and, after completing her zoology degree, worked for various conservation organisations before spending 4 years studying the breeding ecology of the Little Owl for her PHD. She has worked with long-term nest box monitoring groups for over 15 years and is the founder of the UK Little Owl Project, which is dedicated to UK little owl research and conservation and aims to further our understanding of UK Little Owl ecology.

Contains the whiffiest owl of them all, the raptor that quacks like a duck and a car boot full of baby ospreys!

In this episode Kit is joined by ATM, a street artist who paints urban walls with birds threatened with extinction. He has a lifelong love of nature, having grown up surrounded by birds in an abundance which is now a distant memory. He has a particular connection to their songs, calls and the wild spaces they inhabit. His giant wildlife murals fill walls across London to Bristol and on to Poland and Norway. By aiming to express the unique character and energy of each creature he paints, he wishes to communicate their value and importance, and the need to ensure their survival.

After a rather long hiatus, Golden Grenades is back! In this episode Kit is joined by Graham Appleton. Graham started birdwatching and ringing when at school in Birmingham and became heavily involve in the Wash Wader Research Group as a teenager. After a first career as a maths teacher and deputy headmaster, Graham worked for the BTO from 1997 to 2013, initially as a fundraiser and latterly as Director of Communications. He has been a wader fanatic for fifty years and writes the popular blog WaderTales in which he describes the latest findings from wader researchers in ways that the rest of us can understand.

Kit’s guest on Golden Grenades for this episode is Josie George. Josie is a writer and visual artist based in the West Midlands. She is the author of her highly acclaimed book A STILL LIFE, a memoir about life as a chronically ill mother with a big heart and wide-open eyes. She is a regular writer for The Guardian Country Diary and her own blog bimblings, sharing a different view of nature from her urban neighbourhood, often from her mobility scooter. Josie spends her days finding doorways into remarkable places right where she is (even if that’s often in bed).

In a break from your usual programming, Kit and his pal Will Rose are on location! In Part 2 of our Northumbrian odyssey, we pick up where we left off and Tom Cadwallender shows us around his local patch. Then we head into the hills to meet up with secretary of the Rare Breeding Birds Panel, Mark Eaton and hopefully a plethora of red-listed bird species.

May contain a man casually chucking a baby bird!

In a break from your usual programming, Kit is on location! He’s bought a roaming microphone, mounted it to a stick and is taking his old mucker Will Rose around Northumberland to show him the local wildlife. En route we chat to some local legends of the bird world, wear nets on our heads and learn that Puffins are mingers.

Featuring; Heather Devey and Cain Scrimgeour of Wild Intrigue and the Godfather of Roseate Terns, Tom Cadwallender.

May contain Peregrines.

In this Golden Grenades bonus/extra episode Kit talks to writer and conductor Lev Parikian about his new book, Taking Flight.

This episode of Golden Grenades features Arjan Dwarshuis, a professional bird guide, writer, and motivational speaker, who also holds the current Guinness Book World Record for observing the largest number of bird species in a single year. In 2016, he launched his global “Big Year” and ultimately observed 6852 of the world’s roughly 10,900 bird species, setting a record that stands to this day. His yearlong adventure raised nearly 50,000 Euros for the BirdLife’s Preventing Extinctions Programme. Arjan also starred in the award-winning documentary Arjan’s Big Year, and appears regularly on radio, television, and podcast programs in the Netherlands and beyond.