Blog - Podcast: Golden Grenades

Choosing the five bird species to save from the ecological end of days for this episode is Dawn Balmer. Dawn has worked at the British Trust for Ornithology since 1992, and her roles include fieldwork, organising ringing projects, BirdTrack Organiser, Coordinator for Bird Atlas 2007-11 and now Head of Surveys, overseeing long-term schemes and projects.
She has been a keen birdwatcher from a very young age and as a teenager volunteered at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust and meet John Tucker, the Conservation Officer at the Trust, who was a great influence in her early years.  She went onto Plymouth Poly to do a degree in Environmental Science and for the first time met other birders her age. 

Joining Kit for a chat about birds today is 11 year old Henry Day, aka Naturetastic Henry. He is absolutely crazy about wildlife and conservation and loves nothing more than exploring the natural world around his home in East Anglia and beyond, and sharing his adventures on his blog, socials and YouTube channel. He is a junior wildlife ambassador for the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, has given a rousing speech at the Restore Nature Now march in London and won a nature storyteller of the year award!

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.