Natural World

BIRDS TWEETING

Early mornings, for me, are some of the best times.

The dawn chorus comes and the reeds are full of birdsong

and it's a wonderful, happy time.

BIRDSONG

It's a great time to be on the river.

It's time to find food

because you've been building up an appetite all night.

Time to find a mate.

A time to declare your intentions.

This is still my patch. This is my part of this river bank.

It's a wonderful, peaceful time of day.

And the light, if you're out there at sunrise,

sometimes the light is so, so special.

There aren't many really wild places left in this country

but on the Shannon river, you still get that feeling

no-one has ever been there before.

I want to see this river in all its moods, in every season.

Not just how it looks but how it sounds, how it feels.

I want to find the hidden places and the hidden creatures living there.

FROG CROAKS

I'm going to have no fixed agenda. I just want to wander.

Wander and explore.

This river is a lifeline for countless creatures who

shelter in and around its waters.

I'm going to follow them and see where they take me.

Spring on the Shannon.

The great awakening and there's such a sense of purpose in the air.

The orange-tip butterfly is one of the first of the season

and it's a real sign that spring is here.

Just a couple of months ago, all this was under water

and then the water recedes and they sort of appear out of nowhere

and colonise these watery meadows.

They're the most perfect little creatures.

Their wings are so delicate and the colours are so rich.

The two sexes are quite different.

The female doesn't have those lovely orange tips.

These must be some of the most beautiful,

natural wild flower meadows left in the country.

Never seen herbicides or pesticides.

It's just the way this rough grassland, farmland,

used to look in Ireland.

The landscape really hasn't changed but there is something missing.

This place should be resounding to the cries of the wading birds.

The lapwing and the curlew and the ring plover, the redshank

but they've all gone.

They've all disappeared within about the last 20 or 30, 40 years.

Some people blame the mink for this emptiness.

Ground-nesting birds, their little chicks

and the eggs have no protection against a predator like that.

But, you know, nature tends to be more complex than that.

The real reasons sometimes for the rise and fall of different creatures

can be very hard to identify.

Our countryside has changed dramatically in the last few decades

and I guess the river is just reflecting that change.

Now, you can travel for mile upon mile on this river

and never hear the sound of the curlew or

the call of the lapwing or the whistle of the redshank.

It's all gone.

It's very, very few and far between.

There are one or two places left on the river where

they still nest successfully.

Now, these low lying fields are known as the Callows.

This is exactly what birds like curlew and redshank

and lapwing need to breed.

And that is the warning call of a redshank.

BIRDS CALL

He says I'm too close.

And it's a call that just says, "Potential danger.

"Await further instructions."

Now, if I was to get closer,

if I was to get out of the boat, you would hear a very different call

and that other call is a real warning.

It says, "Not only have we spotted danger, but we actually have

"to react to it right now" and it's a particular call they make,

sort of a lovely, flutey whistle.

And that tells the chick to go straight for cover.

They're relying completely on the parent's vigilance.

People sometimes call them the guard dogs of the Callows.

I have a friend who lives in a remote part of the west of Ireland.

The only way to get to his house is on foot and he can always tell

if there are visitors on the way because he'll hear that redshank

calling and he'll know there'll be a knock on his door ten minutes later.

I don't see this as a journey from source to sea.

I see it very much as a wander around the entire system.

I want to be on different parts of the river

at different times of the year.

I have lived in Ireland most of my life

and I guess the Shannon is something I feel I've taken for granted.

I mean, this is the longest river in Britain and Ireland and it divides

our country in two from, sort of, the wilder west to the gentler east.

You have this feeling of crossing the Shannon.

You know you're going to another part of the country.

It reminds you of how time passes and the lives that were once here

and you have to sort of wonder, what will we leave behind?

Will the monoliths of the Celtic Tiger

look as romantic as the castle ruins?

I don't think so.

BATS SQUEAKING

Bats are one of the most unappreciated of creatures.

There are so many nasty stories associated with bats.

When you hear these stories and see the movies,

it's always about vampires and giving them a bad reputation

and that somehow seems to get engraved in our consciousness.

They are utterly harmless to human beings, absolutely harmless.

And they are not just harmless to us.

They really benefit, I mean, any creature that

goes around scooping up midges in the thousands is a friend of mine

because some nights on the river you would wish you had an entire

swarm of bats accompanying you every place you went.

We have about 30 mammals in Ireland and ten of them are bats.

If only we could totally reverse the way that many of us see them

and look at them as the incredibly well adapted sort of ancient

creatures that they are.

These are Daubenton's bats.

They are known commonly as water bats and that's

because they are perfectly adapted for life on the river.

If you look really closely, you can see the odd one flitting by really

fast and what they are doing is they are hunting over the water surface.

They're looking for little insects

which are caught on the top of the water.

As they struggle to free themselves from that surface tension,

they make little ripples and what the bats are doing now,

they are echo locating and finding where those little

ripples are coming from and they can sort of scoop up the insects,

either with their tail or with their feet.

They have extra big feet and they use those to just lift

the struggling insect from the surface of the river.

Flitting back and forth there.

The bats themselves live, I guess, in a different world.

They perceive the world in a different way to me.

Although their eyesight is as good as mine,

it's not much good to you when you're flying about in the dark.

So, as they fly up and down the river,

they have their mouths wide open and they are effectively

sort of screaming at the water and waiting for that echo to come back

and that's how they discern their environment.

That's how they see where they are going.

They like to hunt on the calm stretches of the river

because if the surface is too disturbed,

they wouldn't be able to locate their prey.

They're incredible aerial acrobats, constantly scanning the surface.

Incredible creatures.

Beautiful creatures.

This weather is really tough on the creatures that live off the river

and this wind has been continuously blowing for over a month.

Not quite what I had in my mind's eye when I set out on this journey.

I imagined those lovely, fine,

April evenings as the days start to lengthen.

Just listening to the birds singing, maybe sitting by a little camp fire

but for the last four or five weeks I've just been huddled down like

all the other creatures, waiting for this spell of weather to pass on.

This year this weather came at just the wrong time.

There should be great hatches of insects

and not just for the birds but for the fish and everything, too.

You know, everything is feeding voraciously at this time of year.

For nesting birds it's not just that the parents might not be able

to supply their chicks with enough food,

but the chicks get actively hammered by the wind and the rain.

But then it will be amazing if the conditions do pass and

the first sunny morning, the whole place will just come alive again.

There's nothing like travelling on a river.

There's just that feeling of sort of peace and tranquillity.

You can kind of drift in and out of animals' lives

and they don't even know you've been there.

You don't disturb them.

When I'm paddling my canoe,

I'm just wondering what's happening beneath me.

That whole cycle of life, things meeting and mating

and breeding and things killing each other, that's all

happening in the water but it's something that's hidden to us.

There's one fish that's found throughout this river system,

seldom seen, but at this time of year their presence becomes obvious

and that's because it's mating time.

People call them the barracuda of the Shannon.

It's very much the creature that, if you were a fish,

you would want to avoid.

They're superbly adapted for their environment.

They can move very, very fast if they have to.

Any fish that comes within striking range has no chance whatsoever.

Some people look at predators as being cruel

and this sort of thing but that's really not the case.

If you're an animal that's been injured in nature,

be you a deer in a forest,

if you've got a tiger around, the tiger will kill an injured deer.

If it breaks a leg, instead of dying slowly, a tiger will spot it

and kill it and the pike are sitting there at the bottom of the lake,

they're just not randomly chasing any fish.

They're looking for the ones which are moving a bit slowly,

or aren't doing so well, so they are sort of like an anaesthetic.

They put people out of their misery. They put fish out of their misery.

Right now, food is the last thing on their mind.

They're just thinking about making babies.

What the females are actually doing is,

they're laying their eggs on those little bits of reeds and they will

lay thousands of eggs, but they'll only last there for a few hours.

And then they'll fall onto the gravel beds so you

sort of wonder, why do they lay them on the reeds in the first place?

Maybe it's because the eggs are more likely to be fertilised

in mid-water. Must be something like that.