Blog - Podcast: Golden Grenades

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.

Kit is joined by naturalist and conservationist Nick Acheson for a chat about his new book, The Meaning of Geese, published on Thursday 9th February 2023 by Chelsea Green Publishing.

Buy it here:

https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/the-meaning-of-geese/

YOLOBirder’s guest on Golden Grenades in this new episode is actor and sometimes director Samuel West. He’s played Hamlet and Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Jeffrey Skilling in Enron in the West End and the voice of Pongo in Disney’s 101 Dalmations II.  His television work includes Slow Horses, The Crown, Small Axe, Mr Selfridge and  his films include Darkest Hour, Suffragette, Van Helsing and Howards End.  He plays Siegfried Farnon in the new TV adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. As a narrator, he has appeared with all the major British orchestras.  Sam is an Associate Artist of the RSC and a trustee of the Campaign for the Arts.

YOLOBirder’s guest on the podcast this time is  North Shields born singer/songwriter Aaron Duff, who works both solo and with his full band under the name Hector Gannet.

Aaron talks about his five favourite birds, the five species that he would protect above all others when the environmental apocalypse arrives. We chat about how he started in music, his connection to the natural world, and the birds he would include in an all-bird band! Birds that mean home, the bird that “writes all his own stuff”, the bird with the “slicked-back hairstyle” and the bird that seems “as hard as nails”!

YOLObirder’s guest in the post-environmental apocalyptic wasteland is Dr Brian Briggs, a conservationist and musician on a lifelong quest to tune into the natural world.  Brian is both a manager of an internationally important nature reserve, and the singer/songwriter for the band Stornoway.

Stornoway were the first unsigned band to appear on Later… With Jools Holland and have subsequently toured worldwide and enjoyed main stage appearances at festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude and Isle of Wight.  Stornoway’s three acclaimed albums and three EPs combine Brian’s two great passions of music and nature and their most recent, Bonxie, entered the UK Charts inside the Top 20 and featured the songs of twenty different species of birds.