An Urgent reflection on Starlings with Seán Ronayne who is an Autistic Bird Expert

An urgent reflection on the behaviour of Starlings with Seán Ronayne who is an Autistic Bird Expert Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

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• 1:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Caress the bare chest kestrel in the festering vestibule, you whooping onus. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If this is your first time here, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Some people even go back to the start. There's 460 episodes. You can partake in that journey in a linear fashion if you choose. Or you can fucking pick an episode at random. Whatever you want. It's up to you. Or you could even start with this episode here. I'm currently floundering around the bowels of my tour, waiting to be shat out by the rectum of life.

• 1:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I can have a rest. I've been ill with chickenpox and I've been touring. So I've got two weeks off before I'm back on the road. I'm hoping this weekend. Because it'll be a week into March, which is safe enough weather wise.

• 2:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm gonna plant some, I'm gonna plant some, some early potatoes in bags with my two little monkeys. I have well rotted manure and I have...

• 2:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Some peat-free compost. I've never grown potatoes before, but I'm very enthused about doing it. I bought these wonderful potato-growing bags. They're just little canvas sacks with a flap on the side. And you plant your seed potatoes. And when they grow, you open up the flap and reach in and pull out the potatoes. I'm gonna become a vegetable-growing man this summer, using only containers. I have experience growing tomatoes and growing hash, but I don't have experience. Growing potatoes, carrots, broccoli, cabbage. So I'm really excited about the prospect of that.

• 3:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And my mother, my mother is making me eat humble pie because

• 3:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  she used to grow cabbages and lettuce, she still does, grows cabbages and lettuce in hanging baskets that she hangs off her washing line. And if you go to her house and she feeds you cabbage, you have to ask, was this cabbage grown beside your underpants on the washing line? So she's finding it very amusing now that I'm growing. She said to me, you wait and see, you'll have your cabbages and your broccoli in the pots on the ground, and one night the slugs will show up and they'll eat them all. And you wait and see. You'll be hanging your cabbages on the washing line too. But you know what, I won't.

• 3:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I remember, I remember being a teenager, being about 16.

• 3:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there was one night.

• 4:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was out on the fucking street with a lot of my friends. And it was dark, it was dark with just streetlights.

• 4:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one of my buddies says, is your jumper high vis? The fuck has gone on with your jumper? You're sparkling, your jumper's reflecting a lot of light.

• 4:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I looked and the jumper that I was wearing was covered in, in, all down the back of me, covered in, in slime trails that had dried in, dried in, iridescent slime trails all down my back. Because my ma, my ma had been drying my jumpers on the washing line between cabbages. So what had happened is the fucking slugs and snails in her garden had figured out, they went, right, okay. Think you're smart, are you? They'd figured out that she was growing the cabbages in the washing line. And some very adventurous slugs and snails in the night time that climbed up the pole.

• 5:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then like a tight rope had made the journey across the washing line to get to the cabbage. But I had a jumper in between, so the fucking snail or the slug had crawled over my jumper to get to the cabbage that my mother was hanging on the washing line. And then I went out into the street with my back vandalised with snail slime. Iridescent, illuminating in the dark. So I probably will end up hanging, hanging cabbages on a washing line, but there won't be any clothes on the washing line at the same time. That's, I have a strange relationship with

• 5:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  snails and slugs and the washing of clothes. That's not my only story about snails and slugs and, and trying to dry clothes. So one way to, to definitely not have a snail crawl all over your jumper when you're drying it is to put it in, in a tumble dryer.

• 5:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And once, about six or seven years ago, I had a tumble dryer that just stopped working, stopped working. And I had to call out a repairman to get a look at my tumble dryer and figure out like what the fuck's going on? Why is it broken? And when he opened it up, he said to me, a slug is after break in your tumble dryer. And I'm like, what?

• 6:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was one of those old Trump tumble dryers where.

• 6:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  It goes out a hole in the wall, right? So there's a vent that literally goes outside. So he said that a slug, that's a slug had crawled in the vent, right? Because slugs are attracted to tumble dryers because they're warm and they're also moist because of the condensation. So he said a slug had gotten into the tumble dryer and then crawled up to the circuit board, the electronics, and that it's the slime trail of the slug

• 7:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  had connected two tracks in the circuit board that weren't meant to connect, that the slime had basically short circuited the fucking tumble dryer. And that's why it broke and that he could see the slime trails on the circuit board. So that's two very strange and separate situations where slugs have interfered with my life when I'm just trying to dry my clothes. So I have a magnificent guest this week.

• 7:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is this person's second time appearing on this podcast. I spoke to them at the weekend there at a fantastic gig down in Killarney in the Inuk. Sean Ronayne, he's an ornithologist specialised in recording the calls of birds. And it's his goal to record every single bird species in Ireland. He's serious business. Sean first came on this podcast, I think two or three years ago. And we had a wonderful conversation because

• 8:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  he's deeply passionate about birds. This is something that he's seriously, seriously interested in. And anyone who's as passionate as they are about a subject as he is, is automatically fascinating. Sean's also, he's autistic and he's a similar flavour of autism as myself. We're quite similar and it's great chatting to another autistic person is fucking fantastic because this.

• 8:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  You get a thing that's referred to as double empathy. When we chat to each other, we both know we're talking to an autistic, especially when we're backstage by ourselves. We both know we're chatting to another autistic person. So there's no need to mask. So both of us are just chatting to each other. No fucking eye contact. Both of us staring all over the room and just ranting at each other about our various interests. No small talk, none of that shit. Just, this is, we're grand. Just fucking work away. There's no judgment here. We know the crack. And double empathy, it's a wonderful way of looking at communication.

• 9:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, it's a theory of communication, right? That the difficulties that arise for autistic people when we try to communicate with non-autistic people, that it's not the autistic person's fault. It's not, the autistic person isn't the one with the deficit. Instead, it's an equal, a reciprocal mismatch in social understanding. So autistic people can struggle with conversations with neurotypical people. Similarly, neurotypical people can struggle with conversations with autistic people.

• 10:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when autistic people are around other autistic or neurodivergent people, we don't get communication difficulties. We get a type of flow. In the same way that neurotypical people will get that from being around other neurotypical people. And that there is called double empathy. And it's a lovely theory. And it does, it rings through with my lived experience, particularly a lot of people who I've really connected with over the years. People who...

• 10:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can just have a fucking wonderful chat with. Quite a lot of those people have since found out that they are neurodivergent. And I mean people, someone I could have met at a gig 10 years ago. And just stayed chatting with them for ages in a pub. No awkwardness, no small talk. Being able to discuss interests and for them to discuss interests with me. Not feeling pressured to pretend to be quote unquote, normal. Not feeling concerned that I'm saying or doing something eccentric. Not feeling judged or that the person thinks I'm weird.

• 11:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, that's, that's why I avoid. A lot of the time I avoid small talk with strangers because it's that fear of, at what point is this person gonna go, wow, you're weird. This guy's kooky, this guy's crazy. That's not enjoyable when, when you're not trying to be kooky or crazy or just being yourself. But some people, some strangers, that just doesn't exist. And there's conversational flow. And three separate instances over the years. Like I, I got a mail, it was about, about four months ago, I got a mail from someone going, how are you blind, boy? I met you years ago after a gig in Galway. We had a great chat in the smoking area.

• 12:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then I will literally remember, I'll, I'll remember that conversation going, oh, fuck it, that person, we had a class chat about dinosaurs. And I remember it because those moments stand out. When I meet a stranger and have conversational flow and it's really enjoyable. I remember that because it's rare. But six months ago, yeah, someone made me. And they're like, oh, I'd met you years ago at a smoking area. Just want to let you know, I found out I'm autistic and your podcast has helped me. But that there, that's double empathy. The idea that there's not a deficit, there's not a communication deficit on the part of

• 12:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  the autistic people in society, rather a mutual misunderstanding between neurotypical people and autistic people or neurodivergent people. And it's just a theory, but it's, it's one that I like and one that does ring true to my lived experience. But Sean Ronayne, my guest, he's definitely someone I experienced this double empathy with. We just have great flow with conversations and we chat about birds. I mean, birds are his thing, like he, he's, but I have a, birds are his thing, but I have a profound tolerance for bird conversations, as you can tell with the star.

• 13:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  The reason Sean came down to Kerry, cause he's from Cork, to do this is because he's been listening to my podcast and he knows about my starling obsession and he's an expert in this shit. So he had some very important starling information to tell me, which we do get around to. So the first half of this conversation, it's about birds, but it's also about me and Sean just having a chat about what it means to be autistic and two autistic people speaking together. And then the second half, that's very bird focused. But look, Sean Ronayne is a, he's, he's an ornithologist. He's very passionate about what he does. He's an educator, he's an activist.

• 14:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  He has, he's written a book about his journey of recording bird sounds. He's made a documentary. Check out his website, irishwildlifescounds.com. And also he does live, he does live events, live speaking events, which are wonderful. And you'll get all his dates and the venues there on his website. He's got one coming up in Cork that's sold out, but in May, he's in Kerry. And then he's at the Hill of Ischnoc for the Bieltena Festival on May 9th. But check out his website, irishwildlifescounds.com. And here's the chat that me and Sean Ronayne had.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  How was this for a professionally run show?

• 14:48Speaker 04

  How are you getting on?

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I've been looking forward to this. I've been deep diving all sorts of mad bird songs. I was listening back to the old, the first episode that we did and I couldn't help but laugh. We go off on mad tangents, the two, well, two autistic people at a stage together. And I was listening back to some of the tangents we did the last time and we started to talk about corncraakes. And you were saying something about corncraakes and in the middle of your sentence, my grandfather's on Limerick.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  You did actually, yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  I don't know, I don't even know why it came into my head. Oh, I know why it came into my head because my grandfather used to curse the corncraakes and we were talking about that.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  What do you mean curse the corncraakes?

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Because nobody could get any sleep with them. Do you know what?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Oh, not literally put a magical curse on them?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Well.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  He goes like fuck the corncraakes?

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they, they, they, well, they don't sing like they, they kind of scream like through the night.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  But isn't that beautiful that you could, in a, a situation where you could say fuck corncraakes and no one would mind? Whereas now if you said it, you'd go to jail.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  I, I, I've been speaking to a few people about their, you know, so many people have recollections of corncraakes and it's, it's, it's absolutely gorgeous. But do you know what?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  They're not gone, gone.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  No, they're not like, and, and there's a great conservation program going on in the north west and they're bouncing back really well. But let me tell you something, right? I'm getting these stories from people and there's some mad stories. Like I, I have one person who put out, it was his grandfather told him the story and they put out their bed sheets to dry out in the grass for whatever reason. And they lifted it up and there was like a, like a herd of corncraakes came bursting out. There's another guy who was losing the plot because he hadn't slept all summer with them and he went out in the middle of the night blasting a shotgun screaming at the corncraakes. But anyway, they're, they're the kinds of tangents we went on. I was listening back in Wolves as well.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  What, what? Just back to the corncraakes there.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  We haven't even started yet. Should I introduce myself?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  They're very noisy. No, but I, I, that's the other thing as well. A man just walked out talking about corncraakes and, and some of ye might not have heard me introduce him and they're just like, what the fuck is this? I love this though. Imagine a tortoise just walked in. Imagine like a Japanese tortoise just walks in and says, I wonder what Irish people do on a Saturday night.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  It's a fella with a bag in his head talking to another cunt about birds.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  I'd say we're, we're gonna be worse tonight. Do you know, I've actually had an ADHD diagnosis since.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  I know.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  I'm after, I'm after starting these, this medication. I'm on a new dose now and I feel like an astronaut tonight.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  I, I actually. You told me the name of it backstage and I looked it up and it is, it's speed.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  It's cons, it's, is it really?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  It's not far off. It, it is an amphetamine. And then, and then I, I said, do people use it recreationally? And they said, yes, they do.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  It's a, it's, it's called Concerta. You're not supposed to drink coffee or alcohol with it. And I had a cup of coffee yesterday. Oh my god. But anyway.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  But the thing is, so, no, but I was, because the question I asked you, I thought that I was gonna get an ADHD diagnosis when I went, because the thing is with me, and it's a common thing with ADHD people, is if I'm doing work, I kinda need the deadline. I kind of, instead of working rationally and, and chipping away, I need the adrenaline of the deadline. And apparently, that's quite ADHD.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  It's more like the fear, the terror. I need the terror of the.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  But it's, on a neurological level, I heard, it's, it's the sudden release of adrenaline gets your brain into the state where it can concentrate. And without that rush of hormone, you're just scattered beyond that.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Apparently that's, it's, it's use, it's a useful piece of information, because without that piece of information, you can start saying to yourself, I'm a lazy fucker, I'm terrible for fasting.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Where it's like, you can't do much about this. It's your brain.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're basically, you're, you're chasing dopamine, because your, your brain doesn't produce it like, like other people. So you chase, and you can, you can chase it in healthy ways, or you can chase it in unhealthy ways. Healthy ways being, you know, going manic in the gym, or, or, you know, on a bike, or running, whatever. And then unhealthy, comfort eating, you know, instant dopamine hits like chocolate, pizza, beer.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  You're kind of, we went to coffee and cigarettes and all this, carry on.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I, I, you know what? I gave up. I gave up alcohol, cigarettes and meat on the same day.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  And I was backpacking in Saudi East Asia and it was that.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  That's an awful decision.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  What a place to do it.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Andy's in.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  What a place to do it. And it was absolute torture. I remember it. But I also remember, I also remember, like, we were, we were doing this mad thing. When I say we, by the way, it's my, my partner Alba. Uh, she's here with, with the little one, but, uh, but they're in there. And, and like.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  We're talking home, man. I wouldn't want your child hearing that story or just.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I forget, I've seen, I forget that I've written an autobiography and sometimes people come up to me on the street and say really personal things to me like, I thought that was beautiful. I'm thinking, how do you know that? Do you know? But anyway, we, we were trying to live off this 50, 50 cent a day food budget in Saudi East Asia. And they kind of, did you ever eat meat for, uh, under 50 cent? It was like.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  In Ireland, no, but like.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  There were like.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Was it, was it?

• 19:54Speaker 04

  There were, there were noodle dishes with what seemed like rubbery testicles inside them. So that was another.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Fan of the awful, aren't they?

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, that, that made it easier to become vegetarian, to be fair, like.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Was this?

• 20:07Speaker 04

  I don't even know.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  No, against awful and that, I just don't like.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Have you, like, it's, it's.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Have you, you've tasted like intestines and stuff? Have you had a crack at that, have you?

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Tripe and drushene.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Like, what, what people are into is the taste of poo.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Oh, Jesus.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  No, but seriously, like, no disrespect, I'm not into it, but like, it is literally the taste of shit. And people who enjoy that, it's like, mm, that's what I want.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember, I remember my dad used to eat a lot of liver. Uh, not like.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  That's the taste of piss?

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Not like.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, that's kidneys, sorry.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  No, no, liver, it tastes like, I used to put a lot of coins in my mouth when I was a kid. And liver, liver tastes like that.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  It's like a penny's cousin.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  It is that. Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  And then kidneys is, uh, is wee wee.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. All right. Well, I haven't, I haven't.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Um, James Joyce in Ulysses, he's got beautiful descriptions of food. And one of the descriptions is the character of Leopold Bloom, who's, I, I think, it was Joyce was doing this to show that Bloom is Jewish, but he's not practicing Jewish. So he's frying kidneys and it's a wonderful description of eating the kidneys. And what he's waiting for is for the kidney to explode in his mouth and for him to taste all the pig's piss.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh. That sounds lovely.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  That's what people are into, lads. Do you like shellfish? Or you're fully vegan, eh?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  I had an awful experience with shellfish. I remember-

• 21:32Speaker 03

  What type?

• 21:32Speaker 04

  Speaking of Barcelona, right? Jeez, I went to, myself and Alba, right, we went to meet our friends that had come from Poland and we, we set aside this day especially to meet up and have this meal. Didn't I eat shellfish? I started to say to Alba, "Alba, I'm not feeling too good." And I'm always trying to get out of social situations. She's like, "Sean, come on now, just, just, you know, have a bit of chit chat." And I said, "No, Alba, I'm being serious." And she, she honestly thought I was pulling a leg. And next thing I, I got up in the middle of the restaurant and started vomiting, standing up.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Oh no.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  You had to turn it sexual.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  But it didn't stop. And I, we, we got into the car and I went, and I went back to-

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Vomiting, standing up.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  I went back to El Prat, where Alba's from, and they were driving full speed to get me back. And I was rolling down the window, going through the Zebu crossing, projectile vomiting as we went. So that, that was the end of shellfish. That happened before, like, before the, the meat.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  I know Catalan is not Spain, but I, I have a similar, like, I, I also have problematic, uh, shellfish and Spanish things, but it's, did I tell you this story before?

• 22:33Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  I, it's, so I don't eat shellfish because my mother's allergic. So I don't know if I'm allergic, but I don't want a chance that it's not worth it.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  It's not worth finding out. So I'm just like, "No, no, no thanks, lads, I don't want shellfish." But when I was writing my book, I go to this city in, in Spain called Cordoba.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Ah, I remember that.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  I was writing my-

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  And I'd be going to all these different cafes with my laptop, right?

• 22:59Speaker 04

  I do that too.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  It's, it's a lovely thing to do.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's lovely.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  But it's a smart enough city. So when you're there all the time with a laptop writing, all the waiters were like, "Oh, we notice you come here a lot to write. What are you writing?" But they're fucking Spanish. So I just go, "Ah, you know, fiction." And then the fucking waiter hears fishing, right? So he, he's like, "Oh, fishing." So he gets it into his fucking head that I'm like some food reviewer, that I review fish specifically. And there, this cafe was very proud of their fucking prawns. So a cuntie comes down to me. With a load of free prawns. And I go, oh, thanks, because I don't want to be rude. But now I've got these non-consensual prawns. What am I gonna do with these prawns? I'm not fucking eating them, but I don't want to say no.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  And he doesn't speak great English, and I speak no Spanish. And he thinks I write fishing stuff. So I'm like, right, okay, what am I gonna do? There's loads of cats everywhere.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  So I see the fucking cats, and I'm there with the prawn going, mm, lovely. And then

• 24:03Speaker 03

  and I start handing the prawns to the cats, right? And they start eating them, so now the prawns are gone. But in the meantime, your man had told all the other waiters in the other restaurants that I was a fishing reviewer. So I couldn't go fucking anywhere without non-consensual free prawns. So I it ended up with me getting followed by cats all over fucking the prawns had gone and the cats were just fucking following me, this gang of cats.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Kurt, these strange things seem to happen to you a lot. These kind of weird things happen to me a lot, too.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  I wondered about that, right? I reckon these things happen to all people, but because we're autistic, we're better at remembering them or framing them. Or it could also be, because one thing I mentioned about autism,

• 24:51Speaker 03

  something that annoys me is being eccentric, right? But like, I don't want to be like that. If I'm trying to be normal, I'd be more mental.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it can be grand, but sometimes it can be not nice because people laugh at you all the time.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  And I consistently get myself into ridiculous situations because of my autism. Now, I don't know what's that. How autistic is that situation? I suppose it is because the non-autistic thing to do is, oh, no, I'm sorry, sir. I didn't say fiction. I didn't say fishing, I said fiction, fiction. That would be the non-autistic thing to do. Instead, I went, oh, awkward, someone's talking to me. He thinks it's fishing, better do nothing about it. And then I arrive at a strange intervention that involves cats.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know, like, because I probably put it on the same, like, you know, can I tell you a story? Go on. Um, this, this is a kind of a means of an introduction of some sort, so I suppose. Um, I, I, um, I love, I love birds, like.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  And I love, I love all sorts of nature, really. And, uh, like, I guess, look. Fifteen minutes in. As we're, as we're on, you know, as we're in this topic, like, I may as well go there. Like, from my, I never really got past the first date, like, and, uh, it was the eye contact. And I also, I didn't know what to say to them other than talk about birds, like, really mad facts about birds. Like, like, do you know a gold crest, the smallest bird in Europe, weighs five to six, the same as five to six paper clips? And then it migrates from, uh, you know, Norway to Ireland. Are they aware they're going on a date with an ornithologist, or is it just a fella called Sean from Cork? Uh, I just, they didn't know what hit them. It didn't, it didn't go far, like.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  And, but like, then, then, then I met Alva, then I met Alva, and Alva was the first person who really actually listened to me. I don't know, I don't know why, like, um, and, uh, so, uh, we, we would go into this, but like, I would always insist on, um, like, this is the perfect angle for me, you know, I would always insist on sitting next to the person so I didn't have to look them in the eye. And so we'd be sitting, sitting forward, having these conversations while we were facing forward. And people would be like, oh my God, what's wrong with this guy? And, uh. How would you manufacture this? Where, where, what, like? I would just say to them. They have to go on dates on a train? I would say, no, I would say, so, I, I would say, sorry, do you mind if I actually sit next to you? And they'd be like, um, okay. That's a big one, on a first date. It's what I used to do, because if I didn't do that, I would just shut down.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Would you tell them why? I didn't know why. Ah. I didn't know why. I was. That's mad. I was diagnosed at, at, at the age of thirty-two, like. That's fucking mad. And. You're going on a date, can I sit beside you? Like, you know. Isn't that mad, isn't that not mad? Oh, I used to do it, like, and you know what? Would they ask you why?

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Um, I don't remember, to be honest with you. I think I blocked it out. Like, and I, I, I, I started. I have the most wonderful conversations with, with strangers in the passenger seats of cars. But then when I get out and we have to face each other, I shut down, like, and I don't know how to operate anymore, like, do you know? Seriously, yeah. I'm the same, I know the crack, I know exactly what you're saying, yeah. Yeah, we, we, like, we had, we, we had a fierce conversation, they're both looking at opposite sides of the room at the back, didn't we? Oh my god. And we were flowing. But, uh, I don't even know how we got into this, like, I'm supposed to talk about birds, aren't I? You can talk about whatever the fuck you want. Uh, but, uh, yeah, like, and, um, so, so the diagnosis was, was, was amazing, like, and, um,

• 28:31Speaker 04

  um, yeah, it was such a journey, it was such a, like, a, a journey of understanding, because obviously, like, all of these strange things were happening. Strange in, in terms of, like, everybody else wasn't doing that, and so it made me kind of stand out and maybe not fit in. And getting the diagnosis, like, I was able to understand, okay, like, oh, that, that's why I used to do that thing, or, or, used to do that thing. And so I had to ask Alba, I was like, Alba, can you teach me how to look into people's eyes without looking like a stalker? Or, without looking like, you know, somebody who's, uh, you know, really shifty and, yeah, and so, Alba had to literally teach me the etiquette of, um, uh, eye, eye contact, like, you know, and I'd be, and I'd say, like, are you supposed to look into the centre of the eye? How long are you supposed to look? Do I have to count?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  And she said, look, just count, and every now and then flick your eyes away and come back again, you know?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Do you still, do you, so, when you were chatting to me backstage, I could tell you, you're just, you're grand, it's like, it's blind, but it's fine, so you're not around the guy.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  But in certain situations, do you still deploy the eye contact?

• 29:32Speaker 04

  What, um, what do you mean now, like, but it was?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Like, it, it depended on who you're meeting, are you gonna go, this is gonna be an eye contact situation? Or are you gonna go straight in, I'm gonna stare at the wall?

• 29:40Speaker 04

  I don't know, though, I think about it, like, it's different, you know, you know, when I know somebody, and if I'm really comfortable with them?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Um, like, I hadn't seen you in a while earlier, and that's why it was, we ended up hugging, I blurted out. That was, I, so I told them, it's because I pissed on my hands. And I'll not say, I'll not say what I said, but it was the most inappropriate thing to say to somebody that you haven't seen in such a long time, and he was like.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Well, I immediately knew, all right, okay, there's not gonna be small talk here, you're gonna go to, to 100.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So there's like, yeah, that's what happens with me. Like when I meet someone and it's like, there's a silence and I don't know what it says. Like, what do I say? And then something comes in and it could be, it could be Anthony, like, you know?

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  And that, that, that's what happens, like.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  And I've thought about the, so I also am not a fan of eye contact, right?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  I find that if I'm not making eye contact, then I can look at the inside of my thoughts better. That's pretty much it.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean?

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  It's, I'm.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  That makes sense.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Talking when I'm not looking at a person.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  I heard.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  But then when I'm looking at the person, it's like, it's a bit like that clock there, you know what I mean? You were saying as well, you're shit at reading clocks, aren't you?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm the same. It's embarrassing. And if, like, I, sometimes like people buy me a wristwatch and I, I, I slowly hide it away. Because if, I'm afraid that somebody's gonna ask me the time, because, you know, it's, it might only be a few seconds, but, you know, the average person can tell like, what's he doing? Like, why is he looking at it so long? I'm, I'm, I'm, as you said, I'm figuring out the time.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Single time.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  I'm working it out. I'm not, it's not an instant, oh, it's half seven, it's, what, what's that? You know?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Well, one thing I'll say to the audience here, because no one knows about these things, because there's forty percent of people are noradiverted in some way. So a lot of people have difficulty reading clocks and shit. There's a thing you can get and they're cheap as fuck. It's called a time timer and I use them and it's changed my fucking life. So it's, it looks like a clock, but there's no numbers on it. And what it is instead is, my one is the colour blue. So if I'm doing a bit of work, so if I sit down to write, we'll say, and I wanna concentrate on my work and there's a clock in front of me like that. I wanna know the time. I'm writing, writing, writing, and then my head goes up and now I'm not reading the time and figuring it out. And that takes about a second.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  That little bit of figuring it out takes my mind away from my work. So I replaced it with a time timer. Now, it's like, oh, I've got that much blue left. Do you get me? So I, it's, it's, I know it's an hour, but it's, there's that much blue left. So I just go up, down. No fucking numbers. They're brilliant time timers, they're called.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's no processing, I suppose. There's no calculating it, like.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Do you have any bird sounds to show me?

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Too many. Camer, I've been working on this playlist for, for the whole week, like the last.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Sean records birds for a living.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do, like, and, and, and that, that wasn't intentional, by the way. It just kind of happened and I'm, I love it. Like, I mean, I was listening to them anyway. Um, I suppose I better tell them how it happened.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Go on, yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  We moved to Catalunya. Alba, Alba wanted to move to Barcelona because she was sick of the rain in Cork. And, uh, we went over and, you know, me being me, I needed to learn all of the bird sounds of Catalunya because I needed to become fluent in that language. And that was the language I focused on. I became fluent in bird in about six months, like, and I still only know a few phrases in Catalan and Spanish. But, uh, this is when I bought, this is when I bought my first sound recorder. I bought my first sound recorder, uh, an Olympus LS12 second hand online. And this allowed me to sound record mystery, mystery birds when I was out in the boat. And I'm going to show you one of those, right? So I don't know if you've ever been to Barcelona, but just as you, as you come into the airport, look down and you'll see all of these, uh, big, uh, lagoons and it's full of birds.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  And that's where I spent every day of my life until I became fluent in bird. Because I needed to work, like, so these are some of the early mystery birds that I, that I figured out there. Uh, they're not all birds, actually. Now, if somebody has heard this, um, you can't answer. All right, ready?

• 33:51Speaker 04

  So to me, that sounded like a dinosaur hiding in the reed bed. And it's actually a thing called a purple swamp hen, which is, well, it's purple, it likes swamps, marshes, and it looks like a chicken. Now, this next one, it took me a long time to figure out. It sounded like a bunch of people struggling to open a bottle of wine in the reed bed, right?

• 34:18Speaker 04

  And then, "Come here, I'm playing another track here. What's going on here? I can hear ton yells in the background." Oh, we're in Romania. Hold on, I'm going back. So here's the other one, right? "This is a sound. I used to be terrified of it because I'd hear it in the dark of the night. I would be the last person. They'd have to kick me out of the nature reserve, and I would hear this. Do you ever hear a pheasant suddenly jumping out of cover? It scares the hell out of you. Well, it's like that, but a lot worse."

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  That's a roe deer.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  That's a pheasant?

• 34:52Speaker 04

  No, no, no. I was just making a comparison.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. What's that?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  They give me a similar fright, pheasant and roe deer. It's a roe deer. It's Bambi, basically, like, you know? By the way, I brought cormorants for you today. You were looking for them the last time. I have a load of cormorants.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  I love the look of a cormorant, but I'm not familiar with their sound.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Will we ever listen?

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, I'm always staring at them.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Cormorants are...

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I hope it doesn't let me down.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Oh, come here. The cormorant will never let you down. So, I've got a few things here now, right?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Do you know, it reminds me of when Charlie Chaplin was a silent film star for ages, and people loved him, and then as soon as they heard his voice with the Tonkies, he lost his career. And I hope cormorants aren't going to do that to me.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  This'll level them up again, right? So I've got cormorant calls, cormorant coughs, and cormorant pooping.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Let's do the call first.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  All right, we'll do the call first.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Jesus, I just realised.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  It sounds like it hates being a cormorant.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Doesn't it? That animal is not happy with it being alive. That's just like, "Kill me, kill me, kill me, please. What am I?"

• 36:14Speaker 04

  That's what they sound like.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  It hasn't disappointed me. It doesn't sound sneaky or pathetic.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  That's one rendition. This is another rendition. Sometimes they sound like this, right?

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Looking like a goat.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Do you know what I love about it?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  What?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Like, so my visual understanding of, I love watching the cunts just going into the water and the way they don't create ripples. There's a ripple. There's a ripple in that.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's lovely.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  What, can I hear the shitting cormorant please?

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so we've got, here's the shitting cormorant now. We'll have to be quiet for this one.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  I'll turn up the volume a bit.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Right, I already know. Shitting from a height too, from a branch.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  You wouldn't want to be under that.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Was that the sound of its rectum?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, a fierce, it was a bit of a scutter, like.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  A diuretic cormorant. Come here. We've one more. Here's a cormorant coughing, and they do a lot of coughing. And I, I don't know why, but I think it's because they get either fish bones or fish scales caught in their throat. Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  It sounds, it sounds like an old man, like hawking.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  That made me lose a bit of respect for the cormorant there.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Really?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Oh, we, we'll just say it was a, we'll just say it was a raven then.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Are you into cormorants? Do you like them?

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Love them, yeah. Um, I'm not sure if they're into me, like, but um, I, I recorded them for the first time only like a year ago. They're, they're amazing things. Yeah. So like, one of my favourite places, nature was always an escape for me, Roaches Point. Roaches Point guards the motorcar carver, it's gorgeous. And I always wanted to escape road noise, even as a kid, without realising that I was autistic, like. And so I would go there and you have this amazing peninsula and you have a cliff and you, you climb down the cliff. And once you get down there, everything from behind you, like all of the shipping noise and it's, it's all blocked out. And all you have are these cormorants yodeling from the rocks and coughing and just all of these amazing birds, like, yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Um, like, everyone and the spectrum is different, right? So do you get upset by unpleasant noises, by, by cacophony?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Um, yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Uncomfortable.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Uh, I get very annoyed. Um, so.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  And what is that? Is it like?

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Like, like it becomes, it becomes too much like for me eventually. Um.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  And does it feel, um, like, one of the things that triggers me is just human beings. Like, as in, but, but specifically, I don't know, like, I, I can't deal if there's people in my house.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Like if someone's coming to fix things in the house and it's not, it, I feel, it was today, there was an electrician in the house and lovely and everything, right? And I'm trying my best, but it literally feels like someone's beaten me.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  That is what it feels like.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  I just, I just.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  And is that, is that like with you?

• 39:28Speaker 04

  I just go and start talking to them about birds. Um.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  But, but is noises, that when you say annoying, does it feel like?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Noise is a big issue with me and, um, it, it was obviously all my life. And, um, like it used to cause some extreme reactions with me and, and like, I used to get just even blackout, like not physically, but I would lose memory from the situation because I was so stressed with it. Um.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  What, what big triggers for you?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Uh, kind of bassy sounds, bassy noises or noisy neighbours. Um, and I had one neighbour who had a.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Truck rumble?

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Oh, man, he had a whole, like a home cinema system on the wall and I used to be able to hear the lyrics of his song in the shower, like, and in bed as well. And, uh, yeah, it, like, I tried everything and I couldn't block it out. Like, thank God he moved out in the end. Um, but I use noise cancelling headphones now and it's, it's actually, this isn't a dramatic thing to say. It's life changing. I don't know if you use them, but it's incredible, like.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  So I'm sensory seeking, like with me and the, and the spectrum is, is sensory seeking with sound. So I, I'm, I actually quite enjoy quite a lot of sound. And I don't mind lights either, but my thing is people.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  You know?

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  I, I, I hate that. I sound like a cunt. Sound terrible, I know.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  I just, like, I have the same thing with people, I'm just, it's not that I don't like them, it's just that I always end up talking to them about birds or something that they might consider to be a bit unusual.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Well, there's that as well, and then there's the social rejection of being weird.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I know that I'm going to do that, like I said to you earlier, like, I could have a phone call about, I don't know, someone could be calling me to renew my car insurance, and I could start talking to them about barnacles, about the latest calls that I heard of barnacles. And I can't help myself, I love it so much, and I'm so excited, I feel like they need to hear it, you know, and I do it all the time, and I'll be walking past, she's like, Shaun, who are you talking to there? And I was like, and I have to say, I'm renewing the insurance, and you're talking to her about barnacles, will you ever leave her alone? So, and that's a...

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Do you often find that people are receptive to it, or?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Do you know, I guess, since people know who I am now, like, I get away with a lot more, you know? I talk, I talk, I talk to the airsoft people now about birds, and I can get away with it, you know?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  You have people walking up to you asking you bird questions?

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and it's lovely, like, you know, and I guess at first it was a little bit strange, I told you, like, after we did the film bird song, RT appointed a psychologist in advance, in the anticipation for the change, like, because I never thought about that aspect of it, you know, about kind of being recognised, and, you know, a much, much smaller level too.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  I have a bag on my head, no one fucking...

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, gee, I don't recognise you. I let you in with Kirk the other day, and I didn't know who you were. But, yeah, what was I saying?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  You were talking about... Oh, fuck it, I forgot as well now.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Oh, this happened the last time too, didn't it?

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, they... Yeah, yeah, the psychiatrist in RT.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Dr Mally Coyle, and she was so lovely and so amazing, and she was like, she kind of prepares your mind for, you know, the kind of flood of comments, which, which did happen, like, it was, it was so beautiful. It was also kind of addictive, you know, because, you know, when someone is saying something nice to you...

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  You want to see it, and you want to see it again, and, like, I found myself even refreshing my phone, like, which is not good, and then she was also, like, helping me with negative comments, because you could get a thousand good... Comments and one negative comment from someone or even a comment that you perceive to be negative and was kind of worded strangely can just destroy your day like. But she was, you know, they were, they were great in that sense, like, and they, they kind of set everything up to safeguard me from the worst of that, like, and that was, that was amazing, like, but like. Even when Birdsong went out, like, it was such a niche thing, but I think there was more of, you know what, actually.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  It was a beautiful documentary, though. It was very, very well made and it was, RTE in fairness put out a lot of shit and. But like they do, like.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Like promo, you mean?

• 43:24Speaker 03

  This was really good.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, oh, oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, like.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  No, no, this was like, I saw it and I went, I can't believe this is on RT one.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  It was so slow and lovely and was like, this doesn't belong in this format.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  It's a compliment.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  It was really annoying. I, I, like, you can compliment because I didn't make it, like, you know, I was just, I was just there talking about birds. The compliment goes to Kathleen and Ross and everybody, like, you know, who are, who are amazing. Jeez, what was I going to say? I had at least three different unrelated things to say to you and they've all gone.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Do you know what? I'm after realising that my, so the clock is not only an hour behind, it's an hour and 10 minutes behind. So according to this clock, you should have had an interval 10 minutes ago.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  Can I, can I just say one thing when we come back?

• 44:17Speaker 04

  I actually have some very specific things that I'm very excited to tell you, so I'm gonna, we should, we should try and stop rambling maybe a little bit. I can't wait to tell you this, man. Seriously, I always.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Go on, tell me one thing.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  I can't because once I start, I have to keep going.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  I'm fucking smoking a fag at the interval now because of this.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Will we do a mystery song before we go?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  We'll do a mystery song, go on. This is mad altogether. Jesus, what did I, what did I call this again? Oh, Jesus. Look at this look. Are you ready for this? What is this? I heard this in the middle of the night and I thought that I was going to have to call the guards.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  What is that?

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Is that a fucking fox with a cough?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  It's not a fox.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Who?

• 45:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  I think you might be onto something there. Is it?

• 45:07Speaker 04

  It's not a mam- it's not a mammal. I thought it was actually a woman in trouble screaming in this quarry that I was walking in. And I had to look around and I was like, what the fuck is this? It's a fucking swan?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  No!

• 45:19Speaker 04

  And I'm after, recording it several times, and did you see that mad book I have there?

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  It's the most obscure, it's the most amazing book. It was made in the 80s and it's still the most concise.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Is that normal swan noises?

• 45:29Speaker 04

  No, that's romantic swan sound. So that's swan, right?

• 45:33Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  That swan, let me do it one more. That swan is actually displaying, right? Let's go again.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Ayah.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Woo! That's, look at this, woo woo! But that's what it's doing, isn't it? Is it a male or a female swan?

• 45:58Speaker 04

  It's the male, it's the male displaying, yeah. It did a lot of other weird things as well. I've got loads of-

• 46:03Speaker 03

  What does a swan display look like? Is it camaraderie? Is it?

• 46:07Speaker 04

  It was dark, like, I didn't actually see it. I just found out through, you know, reading that book and putting it together.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  So swans display sexually in the dark?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  It seems like it, yeah. A lot of things happen in the dark that I didn't realise.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Seriously, like, come here, do you want to hear a flock of flamingos flying over a woodland when an owl is calling in the middle of the night?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Go on, go on.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  The eye necker trying to sell a few pints here.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  I hope I haven't lost it now after I sold it. Oh, come here, listen to this right. This is a flock of flamingos flying over the Catalan pre-Piranes, the foothills of the Pyrenean Mountains, the Pyrenees Mountains in Catalunya. In the middle of the night as a tawny owl call. God, what's happening to my words? A tawny owl calls, right here.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  So they're migrating, right? Here they come.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Don't worry.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  There come the wing beats.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  There they go. Look at his big train. Wow.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Flamingos migrating over a mountain forest in Catalunya in the middle of the night with an owl calling.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Um, myself and Sean will be back out in about 10 or 15 minutes. You go and have a wonderful pint and a piss. All right, Douglas.

• 47:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right, let's have our little, little Ocarina pause now. I could. Oh, I like talking over that babble there. That's nice. It sounded, it felt like being at a golf tournament there.

• 48:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  We'll have a little break here for some advertising. And I, I do have an Ocarina present and I could play it for the Ocarina pause, but I don't want to instead. So I, I mentioned at the start of the podcast, I'm really looking forward to growing some potatoes this weekend. And I, I've kind of been thinking about nothing but potatoes. I got this massive book. It's called The History and Social Influence of the Potato. It's about 2,000 pages long. It's fucking huge. This is the bible of potatoes. Very heavy book. And I'm going to hit myself into the head with this book and you're going to hear some adverts for some bullshit. Okay?

• 48:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  So this is the hitting myself into the head with The History and Social Influence of the Potato book by Radcliffe Salomon. I believe it was written in the 1950s, I think. I'm going to hit myself into the fucking head with this book and you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit, all right?

• 49:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh.

• 49:15Speaker 01

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• 51:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, not myself. Be a good way to not.

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• 53:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that voice?

• 53:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'd like that. Imagine that, just like two minutes of silence because I go unconscious from hitting myself into a book about, hitting myself into the head with a book about the history of the potato. But three really solid chapters on the famine inside there.

• 53:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm probably gonna have a potato podcast coming up after reading this book.

• 53:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's powerful stuff.

• 53:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Alright, that was the Ocarina Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is what I do. This podcast is how I pay for all my equipment, how I pay my bills, how I rent out my office. I'm eight years into this podcast. I fucking adore it. I love this work. My goal is to make it to 10 years. I really wanna make

• 54:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  it to 10 years with this podcast. I wanna show up every single fucking week to make that happen. But I don't miss a week, even when I'm on tour, when I have chickenpox, when I'm exhausted. It's very important to me that I put my podcast out on a Wednesday for the humility of it and the gratitude. I'm grateful that pursuing my passion and curiosity is something that I can deliver each week and earn a living from. That's what I'm grateful for and I'll never take it for granted. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. And if you can't afford that, for

• 55:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  whatever reason, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for fucking free because the person who's paying is paying. For you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. Wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. And also, it keeps this podcast independent. I am not beholden to advertisers. They can go fuck themselves. No advertiser comes in here and tells me what to speak about or what my content is. They advertise here completely on my terms. Being listener funded gives me that type of autonomy. All right, upcoming gigs, because I'm a busy buy. March 14th, which is two weeks away.

• 56:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm up in Carlo. That's sold out. 26th of March, bit of Cork, the Cork Opera House Cork Podcast Festival. That's nearly sold out there. Very few tickets left for that. That's, I'd say 50 tickets left for that. Check out the Cork Podcast Festival in general. Joe and Ed who run that are lovely, wonderful people, great fucking promoters. They do a lot of gigs for the love of putting gigs on. And I love promoters like that. Then in April, 4th of April, up to Castle Blaney. Castle Blaney, all the way up there in Monaghan. Let's go. Then I'm back down in Limerick, right beside Yarthy's Couch, on the fucking

• 56:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  9th of April. I'm in Limerick City at the University Concert Hall. That's a hometown gig for me. Again, I played that venue last year. I never thought it was possible that I'd be able to gig the University Concert Hall in my own city. But here we are. And it's right beside Yarthy's Couch, the spiritual home of this podcast. Yarthy's Couch, if you don't know, is, it's a stretch of river in Limerick City where eight years ago, I meditated and received visions from an otter. And now it's on Google Maps. I love that. What I lo-, I love that. I love that on this podcast eight years ago, I named a little

• 57:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  spot on the river where I used to meditate. And I named it after an otter called Yarthy Aharn, who lives down there. And now it's there on Google Maps as Yarthy's Couch with reviews and people go and visit it.

• 57:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And like, I came up with that in 2018. But if you go a half an hour up the river from Yarthy's Couch, you'll see a spot called Finton's Grave up near Loch Dark. And that is thousands of years old. That's connected with Irish mythology and a man called Finton, who came to Ireland 10,000 years ago before the biblical flood, and he turned into a salmon and lived up there in Finton's Grave. And I adored that. Yarthy's Couch and Finton's Grave are there beside each other on the map. Part of the same collective folk mythology.

• 58:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Anyway, I'm, yeah, I'm gigging at the University Concert Hall Limerick on the 9th of April, and that's there, right beside Yarthy's Couch. So that's a very, very special place for me to be doing a podcast. And the University Concert Hall, my dad, after he retired, he worked as a security guard in that building, in that building where I'm doing that gig. When I was a little kid, I remember my dad coming home and I'd be worried about him and scared about him, being the night watchman on this giant, uh, empty theatre.

• 59:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  So to be doing a gig in a theatre where my dad worked for like, I think, seven or eight years as a security guard. I just like to imagine his presence there. He never got to see my career. He never got to see anything that I did. Um, I was too young when he died. And just, yeah, there's two things this year that I know that if he was alive, would have made him very, very proud. The first one is...

• 59:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  My dad spent most of his life working in Aer Lingus, which at the time was the Irish National Airline, but it was state-run, you see. And he was a union organizer and he took great pride in his job and his place of employment because it was state-run pension, there was a pension with the job. He was involved in the unions and Aer Lingus meant a lot to him. And this year Aer Lingus are showing my documentary, Blind by the Land of Slaves and Scholars. They're showing that on there on all their fucking flights. So I know that would have made my dad incredibly proud.

• 1:00:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the other thing is for me to be playing in the venue where he used to be a security guard. I'd love to have been able to make my dad proud, but he's dead and he never got to see anything that I did. All he saw was me failing my leaving cert. So those two things, not even in, not in a supernatural way, they just, they have a lot of meaning for me. To do things which I know he would be very proud of if he was alive, carries great meaning for me. Right, 20th of April, Vicker Street. All right, um, come along to that, you know, my Vicker Street gigs are fantastic crack.

• 1:01:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then the 25th of April, we've got that Galway gig, the one that was rescheduled. There's still a few tickets left for that. I'm gonna take it easy this summer. I'm not gonna do a lot of gigs this summer. I want time off. I want monkey time this summer. So I'm gonna be in Berlin in July. Where is it? No, fucking June. I'm in Berlin in June at the Babylon Theatre, two nights, 19th and 20th. First night is sold out, still a few tickets left for the second night. Then in July, I'm at the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield. That's in, is it Sheffield City Hall? Where the fuck is it? I don't know, you'll figure it out.

• 1:01:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's on the, the 5th of July, I believe, there in Sheffield. And then October, big massive tour there, um, which, big tour of England, Scotland and Wales, which is almost sold out, even though it's, it's a good bit away, but it's almost sold out, right? Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. That's my fucking English tour, Scotland and Wales. And you get those tickets at faen.co.uk forward slash blind by. And let's get back to the chat now with Sean Ronayne. This second part is, this is a long podcast this week, but fuck it, who cares?

• 1:02:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can listen to it in installments if you want, it's up to you. This second part is very bird focused.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  I think the clock has been fixed now. Um. You were chatting backstage about the, the scientific, scientific argument against feeding birds, that, that we shouldn't be feeding birds.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I know. That's, that's not a popular thing to talk about. You know, there was a guy, uh, went viral on Instagram talking about it recently and the hate that he got. And I feel so bad for him, but there actually is scientific reasoning behind it sadly. Um, so that, like, you know, there's a number of reasons that, that come up. Um, one is that bringing a load of birds into one, you know, small little point. It's, it's, you know, it's a, it's a breeding centre for, for disease essentially. And so diseases can come and be passed amongst the birds.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  So you're basically, you put all this seed out and now you have a load of fucking crows, you have a load of vintages and they, they shouldn't be beside each other.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, they're together in their natural numbers. It's like when we, when we go onto an airplane, you know, you often, you often come home sick like. When you, when you send the kid to the crash, the same thing. And, and so it, it, it's, yeah, it spreads disease like quite rapidly. Another, another reason is that it changes the species dynamics. Um, so basically bird feeders favour kind of generalist, almost aggressive, bold birds. And the other species then don't do so well. And so the numbers of the other birds will spike and the, you know, the, the shire often less common species will, will decline because they can't compete.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  So big confident birds are like, I'm gonna beat the peanuts out of that thing I am, I can do that.

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like even, even blue tits, do you know blue tits? Blue tits is. One of the most aggressive birds you can ever come across. And so I don't, I don't ring, but I have friends who ring. So, so they catch birds and they put little rings on them. And then they can study them. So they can find out how long they've lived, if they're recaptured, know where they've travelled to, so on and so on. And the bird that they were most afraid of catching, aside from the likes of a sparrowhawk, was blue tit. Because they would, they would lock on to the, the little bits of skin on the edge of your fingernails or the webs between your fingers. So, so yeah, they're a really mega aggressive, generalist bird that does really well as a result of bird feeders.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  So, and I, what I was thinking was, um, so if like you still want to have a relationship with birds in your garden, right? And you don't want to put out the seeds. If like I, I planted a wildflower garden and it was only six foot by six foot. But after a year, when the, and it was indigenous native wildflower, right?

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Cause that's the thing, I'm always saying this, right? When you go into fucking B and Q or you go into Woody's and you go, oh, I'm gonna do a good thing now. And I'm gonna get some wildflower seed. You have to make sure that it's indigenous Irish wildflower.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  I was in fucking, it was in Woody's the other day and I looked at the back of the, the, it was called Irish wildflower seeds.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  And then I looked up every single flower, only two of them were indigenous, the rest of them were from Europe. So.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  There's, I think it's called Irish wildflower seeds dot A E. I think that's the website.

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  He is the real deal. So if you get them off him and sometimes I've got.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Irish wildflowers dot A E.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  That's the one.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  That's legitimate.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  He's the guy.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Native fucking wildflower. So I got those and I put them up my back garden and after a year. I was seeing insects I had never seen before in my life, you know? But I know that those insects are food. So if I have that, then the birds are gonna come, they're gonna eat those insects and they will eat the indigenous seed.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  So that's surely a good way to feed birds.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  That's, that's, that's the way to do it. Like, um, and I guess, I guess putting out peanuts and seeds, it's an instant hit. Like, you know, it's like. Having that bar of chocolate, but having, having, investing the time into putting out the, the wildflowers and having them grow and so on and, and come into seeds. It's a longer investment, but in the, in the long run, it's better like, and like, I, we did the same, we, we didn't, we didn't plan them, we were lucky in, in that there was kind of a, there was a native bank of seed in the soil, it's seen and a lot of things came up, like there was foxglove came up, there were different kinds of willow herbs. And there were, you remember those things that we used to throw at each other when we were kids, stickybacks?

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Then they loved them as well. And so

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  And they stick on to birds, don't they?

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a method of seed dispersal essentially, you know? So anyway, like we've had so many birds just coming to those seeds and taking the insects. And I think, I think that's the, the solution, but you know.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  And a pond, my, my buddy Colly, you've never met Colly, have you?

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  No, not yet. I, I'd love to meet Colly.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Colly, I've had him on the podcast about four times. He's the, the chief biodiversity officer up in, in Trinity College and he's obsessed with, with ponds. And he's trying to get everyone to build a pond. And what he'll say is like, a pond, if you don't have space for a pond, a fucking wheelbarrow full of water that you leave alone becomes a pond of sorts. But you get all these little aphids.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  And dragonfly larvae, that's all stuff. And, and one thing as well, because something that was racking my brains for ages is, I said to Colly, okay, if I built a small pond, he said, fish will arrive there eventually. And I was like, fuck off. But you know what I mean? I'm like, go in, how, how the fuck? If I build a pond in Limerick City, is a fish going to arrive inside there? And he's there, it will, it will. Do you know how the fish will get in there?

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  I think I know. Can I?

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Go on, go on.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  So a mallard, a mallard or a heron will be in a bigger pond and the eggs will attach to the leg, it will fly and it will, it will land in and the, the fish eggs will come to

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Birds cleaning themselves in the pond will bring the fish eggs. That's what they do. That's amazing.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like, here's the other thing, right? Ireland has lost ninety percent of its wetlands in the last three hundred years, which is more than any other country in the entire world. And so I think we owe it to, to bring some, some ponds and wetlands back. You know, we, we've lost, um, we've lost a lot of species with, with our wetlands as well.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Have you heard about the Czechoslovakian beavers recently, though?

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  No, this is amazing. So, in, in the Czech Republic, no, seriously, in, in the Czech Republic, this was only a month ago. So they had this huge, Czech Republic is a gorgeous country. And they had this massive, massive area, which they had used it as a military testing ground during the Cold War. So it was like half the size of Cork. And then the military were like, we're not testing here anymore. So the government of the Czech Republic were like, okay, let's rewild this massive area. And this was twenty eighteen. So they, they decided, okay, we're gonna do it. How much is it gonna cost? Bureaucracy gets in the way. So twenty eighteen, they're like, we're supposed to rewild this massive area,

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  but this politician says no, or there's not enough money. So nothing happens. And then while the politicians are arguing about rewilding this wetland, they'd effectively left it alone. And one family of beavers, one fucking family of indigenous Czechoslovakian beavers. So that was about eighteen members. They went back to Czech, it's a month ago. They had built dams and rewilded the entire area themselves. They had restored the wetlands. And it's reckoned that, that, that, that one family of beavers did what would have cost the Czechoslovakian government ten million euros. Do you know, and it was just like, let the beavers do it.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Do you know, now we can't do that in Ireland because we don't have beavers, but in countries where you do. And it was, it's just beautiful to hear something like that, you know, they had, the beavers know the crack, leave them off.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  They're, yeah, they're, they're, they're natural ecosystem engineers.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  They're like, because that was something that I often wonder is, what's the point to humans? Now, I was asking, uh, Professor, Professor Jane Stout, Professor Jane Stout, who is the...

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  She started the Ireland Pollinator Plan. She's the reason that county councils aren't fucking, are letting the roundabouts grow and stuff like that. And I asked her, I'm like, what's the fucking point to humans? Because we're nature, like, we're animals. And the point of us is, we're a bit like beavers. We change ecosystems. We're one of the few animals that can go into an ecosystem and change things. We've just gone a bit too far.

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, a little bit. Come here.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  But it is one of the things, like, I'm not into God, right? But one of the things that does keep me awake at night is I think, why the fuck would nature create us if we can fuck everything up? So we must have been created by either a god or an alien.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  I think, don't people say that we're an anomaly? Like, something went a bit wrong, but we're like a mad ape?

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Or, we were put here by artificial intelligence. And the point of us is to be the sex organs for the machines. So our very point is to get to a point that we can create, AI kills all of us and then the AI wins.

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  Kerry, my mind is going on a hundred tangents here.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Listen, the real reason you came down to Kerry is because you had some very serious things to tell me about starlings.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And I use the serious things that I wanted to tell you about starlings to go on a hundred tangents, which should all line up nicely. So where do we begin with starlings? I don't know where to begin.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  I'm gonna ask you one question about starlings.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  Go on, yeah.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  So I have a big thing with starlings, more than a fucking big thing. I'm after causing international tourism in Limerick. There's a street that I've renamed the bird shit district. And people travel from fucking Australia, South America, everything, just to slip on bird shit in Limerick. The council fucking hate me. They're gonna Charlie Kirk me, I'm telling you.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  And I managed to cause, they're after cutting the trees to try and prevent the starlings from coming back, and I know they're pricks. I was trying to get them to turn the street into, um, to put bioswabs, they're artificial wetlands, because I found out the history of the starlings of Limerick, where the starlings are in the city used to be a riparian zone. So the purpose of those starlings is that they would eat food in other parts, come to this wetland, which is now a city, and then they would shit. And the purpose of their shit was to go in, or into the riparian zone. It would flood, and then the nitrogen from their shit would get carried up and brought into wetlands. And that was the, that's the purpose of those starlings in Limerick within biodiversity. We've built the city

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  there, so now the shit goes nowhere. It just, you slip on it. But, what was I gonna say? Well, here's the thing. I know that starlings are mimickers. Is it possible that when I walk around the bird shit district and listen to starlings, that I might be hearing noises or sounds from a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago?

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  Okay, so that's exactly what I want to talk to you about.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Go on!

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Right. But-

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Is that mad? Is that mad?

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  No, it's not mad.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Yes!

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  Right. I've got so many starling stories. Like, I thought I was losing the plot. All I've been talking about is starlings for the last week. Um, right, so let's go with this one first. Uh, Chris Watson, right? Um, the, the sound recorder, recorder is for David Attenborough, just an absolute pioneer in the field of wildlife sound recording. Tells a great story, and you can hear it online, where he goes to, uh, I think it's called Call, it's an island in Scotland, and he goes to sound record there, and he finds an old bothy, like an old stone house that's long abandoned. And there's this starling still nesting in the eve of the house, and it's singing, and it's singing a memetic song, which they do by nature. And in this memetic song, he hears the sound of a two-stroke

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  engine, a very distinctive sound. Underneath the starling is a rusted old two-stroke engine, right? And so what he's concluded is, this is generational mimicry. So, in other words, the, the, the engine has- Long since ceased to be, but the the parents remember it or the grandparents, they pass it on. The this, you know, the the younger ones learn the song from their parents and they learn the song of the two stroke engine. And it gets passed down through generations. I have found this in Ireland, not in starlings, but in in in other species. So one example is, um, so the last species to have gone extinct in Ireland is corn bunting. It was abundant, it was all over the country.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  And it was alive in my lifetime, but I was too young to, you know, to to clock it. And they're gone now, but there's another mimetic bird. By the way, many songbirds are mimetic, mimicry is wild, like it's what I'm working on in the moment. And so this is a bird called windchow, it migrates to Africa and it comes back. The a great place to see them is Wicklow and I recorded this windchow in Wicklow. And it does its song and all of a sudden I hear corn bunting, I hear corn bunting in the song, right? Yeah, yeah. And like the only way, well, you know, it's possible that it learned it somewhere else, but I I don't think so. I I believe that it remembers from a few generations back, um, corn buntings and that's reflected in the song like, you know.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  So we're hearing the sound of an extinct bird.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, so you're hearing whispers of the past through the song of the bird, like, you know.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  It's a, um, cause I.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  I can play it, will I play it actually?

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Go on, yeah, please.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  I think I have it. Um, I've got twenty eight thousand songs on this laptop, so okay, just give me a second there now.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  So so this bird is called a what?

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  It's called, oh, here we go, look, it's called a windchow. Um, it's absolutely class. So this one now, this is the bird, this is the bird it's mimicking. So this is corn bunting, right? Uh, here we go. This is the song of a corn bunting. I obviously didn't record it in Ireland because I would have had to have been two years of age going out with a microphone.

• 1:16:56Speaker 04

  This is a Catalan corn bunting.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  Let's go to the windchow, right? Now, this is a windchow that I recorded in Wicklow. So first you'll just hear, um, an actual typical burst of windchow song. And then I'll isolate the part where it imitates a corn bunting and then I'll play a real corn bunting.

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  That's just one verse. They have verses, structured verses, just like humans. There's another verse. Oh, I'll pull out the part where it mimics a cornball thing and I'll play a real cornball thing.

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Windchash?

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  Cornball thing.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Wow. But that's oral storytelling.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  Oh, it is, yeah. And it gets wilder than that, like, I can't, I'm not allowed to speak on everything at the moment, but um,

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  I can show you so, I can, I can show you some things, right? Uh, oh, where do I go now? Okay. So let's talk about migration. So starlings are prominent migrants. And um, so a lot of the starlings that we get in the winter will have come from Scandinavia mostly. Uh, they can come from as far as Siberia even. Um, and I have a friend, Alan Dalton. Uh, if you're interested, if anyone is listening, look up Alan Dalton, by the way, he's a manic sound recorder like me, uh, but he's in Sweden. Um, so he's a friend who counts birds migrating in Sweden. That's a thing there because everything leaves in the winter. So even wrens fly out over the sea, uh, out over the, you know, the sea crossing to Scotland and over to us, tiny wrens.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  And so they count everything with little clickers. And let me just make sure I've got my numbers right. Oh, yeah. So autumn twenty twenty four, this guy Raoul, which is Alan's friend, counted two hundred and twenty one, two hundred and twenty one thousand, um, starlings flying out over the sea in the southern tip of Sweden, heading to Denmark and heading to mainland Europe. Some of those birds destined for us. Um, over that in autumn, on a peak, the peak day, he had fifty two thousand birds going out over the sea in one day, including one flock of ten thousand starlings going out, right? So these birds, they're, they're coming to us like, and when we see those enormous murmurations, the biggest murmuration in Ireland is about quarter of a million birds.

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  You'll have a lot of Scandinavian voices in those, in those, in those birds, like, um. So like, just going back to the same place, like Falsbury. In the southern tip of Sweden, they have gold crests flying over the sea. That's the one that I said, it weighs the same as about five or six paper clips, absolutely tiny, and they go out over the sea. I lived in Northumberland for a while, and so I used to actually intercept those birds. I would witness those birds coming in. To see visible migration, even if you aren't somebody who's massively into birds or nature, there's something really special about it to witness a spectacle like that where you're seeing tens of thousands of birds that are on a coordinated migration from one country

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  to another or one continent to another. And I used to love it in November, like you'd get tens of thousands of thrushes, blackbirds, song thrushes, redwings, field fairs coming in off the sea. And sometimes you'd even see the tiny little gold crest coming in off the North Sea. Some days it was heartbreaking because they were exhausted thereafter undertaking an enormous journey. And after coming all that way, sometimes you'd see them dipping down, down, down. I'd have a telescope and then they'd just plop into the waves and they'd never make it. They almost made it. Sometimes you'd get them at your feet, they're so tired, they don't have the energy to run away anymore. You'd have gold crests running around your feet. I've had, I've had gold crests running over my, my boots over there.

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  Another bird that turns up with, with this movement is a-

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Is, is that part of their crack though? Are they supposed to get eaten or they're supposed to die?

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  There's a fish that exists and a fallen gold crest.

• 1:21:01Speaker 04

  So, so all of this biological matter, like species that live down in the deep sea, their nutrients have to come from somewhere. So insects drown all the time, birds drown all the time.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  A whale, do you ever see, when a whale dies, it can create an ecosystem for like two, three hundred years.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So I'm sure they, they feed into that, like, but, but one of the birds that, that travels with them is woodcock. Do you know snipe? Snipe, you might even know woodcock. Woodcock is like a giant version of a snipe almost, and they're highly migratory. In the past, we didn't understand bird flight migration and people used to think, okay, gold crest arrives at the same time as woodcock, but gold crest is tiny, it couldn't possibly fly across the sea. Ah, it sits on the back of the woodcock. So people used to call gold crests woodcock pilots. And they're, they're amazing drawings of woodcocks wearing the old aviation goggles with gold crests on the back. And but so anyway, so the starlings, that they're all, they're all part of this big movement,

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  right? And at the moment, and I actually am genuinely very interested in starlings at the moment, and I've been recording them.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  I love the way you have to say that, like, we think you're lying.

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  No, no, because they might think that I just do it because you wanna, you know, talk about the starlings. I was actually, you know, listening to the Mac for the last few months, and I've been really interested in the mimicry. And I've been getting all sorts, like, so, uh, starling mimicking curlew, mimicking red fox. The fir-, actually, let me go back in further. The first time I sound recorded a starling was in Mallow in North Cork, and there was a starling nesting in the, in the, in the roof. And I was recording birds migrating at nighttime, but also I was kind of hitting two birds with one stone and allowing the recorder to run into the morning and get the song of the starling. Here's this thing about starlings, they're lifelong learners, which means they have the ability to constantly learn and constantly improve and update their song. And so I wanted to know,

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  if I listen to this starling every day for a year, would I experience and hear the updates in its song? And that's exactly what happened. So when the foxes started to get busy and started to scream in the garden, a few weeks later, the starling started to scream like a fox. And when different birds started to migrate back north to Scandinavia, golden plover, snipe, things like that, eventually it learned those calls. And then one morning, this starling started to speak to me in a Cork accent. I think you might have heard of before, and it started to, it started to say, "Come here, come here." And what was after happening was I was letting my dog out, and I was calling Toby back and "Come here," and this starling did it. Well, I play it for the benefit of the people that haven't heard it.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  So, yeah, like, I actually thought I was hearing things. I thought I had spoken over the track, but in actual fact, no, it's the starling. So it'll play a few times. Whenever starlings imitate human speech, they, they give it in a robotic manner. They sound a bit like R2-D2. So this is like me, but slightly robotic. "Come here," it says it twice. "Come here, come here."

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Isn't that mad like? So, anyway, currently I'm very interested in one particular group of starlings at Kinsale that I've been listening to. And all of a sudden, this sound jumped out. And it's a sound I'd only heard in one location in Ireland before in my life. And let me play it for you and see if you recognise it. So, here it is, look. It's a special sound.

• 1:24:52Speaker 04

  Does anybody know what that is? So, it's a very distinctive sound. That is what a red kite sounds like, right? And there's a starling in the old head that's been mimicking red kite. Um, let me find it there. Here it is. Here's the starling's rendition.

• 1:25:13Speaker 04

  Right? And so, red kites, there's only, I think there's less than 200 birds in Ireland, so they're not common. And a starling from Wicklow would not migrate south to Cork in the winter because the weather conditions are virtually the same. So, I knew that this starling had come from somewhere further afield. And I thought back to all of the migration in Sweden. And I Googled, I Googled "red kite, Sweden". I was thinking, is it there? Turns out that it is there. And even better, so the area where my friend counts the birds going out to sea, it's in Scania County, I won't try to pronounce it properly because I couldn't. And it's in the very south of Sweden. Their county bird is red kite, right?

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  So, I think that there's a good chance that the starling that I recorded in the old head of Kinsale has migrated to Cork from Sweden and is calling like a red kite because I heard it in Falsabra. Yeah. So, like...

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  This is astounding, right? But why, why, what's the point of starting, like, why did they mimic?

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's loads of reasons behind mimicry, depending on the context and the species. But the primary one is essentially, right? The more complex and varied a bird's song is, the more sexually attractive it is to the other half. Because it can demonstrate, hey, I've got a great memory, I've got a great voice, I can do all this stuff. I need good genetics to do that. And this is just an indication of how strong and healthy I am. And if you, you know, pair up with me, these good genes will be passed on to our young. And that's, that's what it is.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  Do, do you ever wonder about, have you looked into the, we'll say the human brain? And then what's, like, so we're humans and we're interested in this. But was there an evolutionary benefit for humans? Like, do you ever hear of augury, no? Augury was an ancient Roman religious practice where they would try and predict the future based on the behaviour of birds.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I did hear.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  And it was serious business, you know?

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  And there was probably a lot of usefulness in it. And if you're very attuned to birds, it's gonna tell you something about biodiversity, which would probably benefit our health in some way when it comes to when to plant crops. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  Like, what, what, what do you think? Like, why do we give a fuck about this stuff? What is about the human brain? Like, bird song calms us down. When bird song disappears, we get anxious.

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  For me, it's my autistic thing.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  Well, that's.

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  But, but for sure, like, there are many scientific studies done which show that, that listening to the sounds of nature, they, they completely calm us down. Look, let's, let's think about it logically, right? And we've evolved with those sounds of nature over many, many thousands of years. The sounds which we're exposed to now on a daily basis, the, the hustle and bustle. You know, the drone of a motorway, the jackhammer, the beeping, that's something unnatural. It's it's something that causes, you know, a cortisol spike. Uh, it's something that, you know, we've only been exposed to in the last, what, two hundred years compared to many, many thousands. Of course, of course, are, are, you know, we're going to feel uncomfortable hearing that.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  And I heard too, like, the the level of noise that we just take for granted by simply being i- in a city anywhere.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  The level of noise that we take for granted, that if you put someone from the sixteenth or fifteenth century into that, they go, what the fuck is this?

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  That's how I feel. That's how I feel when I go out there. I I I I can't handle it. I get very stressed. I become very irate. And I can become very snappy and to somebody who doesn't know.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  It emotionally dysregulates you.

• 1:29:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like to somebody who doesn't know me, they'd be thinking, why are you speaking like that? There's no need to go on like that. But actually, do you know what? It's it's causing me to be behave erratically. I have to get out. And Alva understands that, um, and she's like, she knows when I'm when I'm kind of getting really stressed in a situation, like really busy places, like really. And I also don't like touch. I don't like people touching me, you know.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  When that happens.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  I feel like a locust, like, you know, when the.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  So wh- wh- when you're in that overstimulating environment, because here the thing with being autistic, like you and me are both like level one.

• 1:29:43Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  And when autistic people are put in situations where we can't mask anymore.

• 1:29:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  And we're overstimulated.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  Then that's when, like today, when I was saying there was someone in fixing the electricity in the house, I become way more autistic.

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  Always, yeah.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean? I I my capacity to appear to be normal, to maintain eye contact, to do small talk. That disappears when I'm under stress.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  For you, it's noise. For me, it's proximity to lots of people or, you know, for someone else, it's lights.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  It's it's it's noise and and, yeah, like big crowds, especially when people are kind of bumping off me, like, you know.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  And does that have to be associated then with noise too?

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  No, but but the two together are even more intense, but like.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  What about the continual chatter of loads of people in in a crowded space?

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't like it. Yeah. So, um, but this is where the noise cancelling headphones, uh, like Alva bought them for me. Really, she's the most thoughtful person, like honestly, because I I she doesn't. She doesn't fully understand what this is, but she can see the impact that it has. And you know, some people might think, ah, come on, man. You're being, you're being dramatic. I'm not like, and she knows that and she sees it. And she reacts to it and she's always thinking ahead, like, you know.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  How, when did you start using the noise cancellers?

• 1:31:03Speaker 04

  She bought them for me, just, uh, she bought them for me maybe a month ago and it was, uh.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Wow. So in one month, you've no, and are you walking around the city just listening to nothing? Or are you playing something or just?

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  The thing is like, you can still hear voices. You can still, it just cuts out like the kind of, the, the drone, like the, the white noise, the, the. And it kind of, it frees my head up like.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Have you had any near misses, uh, crossing the road though?

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  That's why I had to stop using them. I got a bus, a bus went so close, I felt it on the tip of my nose.

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  I can't, I can't remember the last time.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  You gotta be really clear for crossing roads with the noise cancellers, seriously.

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, jeez.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  No, that's, cause, cause I'm like, I also enjoy nice cancelling headphones, not, not to the extent that you need them.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  But I enjoy them and I just had one, one, a few little city things on the road.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  Off that.

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. I've, I've actually got some more starling stuff for you.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. So.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 1:32:04Speaker 04

  Come here. There's another species of starling, right? Um, very closely related called.

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  Called spot. See, this is what Alba has to put up with now. Alba's delighted that I'm talking to someone else about birds. Uh, for, for an hour. Go on, go on away with flying by there for a while. Um, no, but there's another species called spotless starling, which is the European, the Mediterranean equivalent. It's called spotless starling because it doesn't have spots. Um, whereas European does. Um, but they're also mimics, but their mimicry is even more impressive. Come here. I was going through audio there. This is just a bit of crack now, right? Let me explain a few thi- I just came up with a tangent there. So, when you're out, when you're out sound recording, right? People, people obviously see me with something that looks like a satellite dish in my hand and they're drawn to you. And the last thing you want is someone coming up to you, talking to you when you're trying to sound record- Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  -Purple Sandpiper for the- Listen to this, listen to this. This is Alva. This is the stuff that she does for me. When I, when I was away working, when I had a, kind of a more normal job, I guess, she would put out my microphone on our balcony, because we lived in Catalina then, and she would set it up for me to let it run so I'd have bird sound to edit at night time when I came home. Here's Alva, look.

• 1:33:15Speaker 08

  Hala. That's it. Enjoy.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

  But, I got it- Is that, is, is, is, is that a human being or a bird? No, that's Alva, that's Alva.

• 1:33:30Speaker 04

  But, no, she was chatting into the microphone and setting up for me. Now, this is another one, right? And I have no idea what I was talking about originally, but I, I, this is a great time to play this. So, I was trying to sound record a bird called Purple Sandpiper, which is kind of rare. They don't really say a lot. Dunleary is a great place for them, and, and this, I, I, the moment had just arrived. The bird had just come up to me. Perfect, here it is. And it was gonna be a new bird for me. This is what I got.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  Are you listening?

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  I actually have an album of, of those kind of- He was really put out by whatever the fuck you were listening to. Camer, what kind of accent is that, actually? I've been pondering over that lately. That's da. That's, that's the sound of a da. It sounds like a Glen, a Glenro accent to me. Go for it. Let's go again.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Are you listening?

• 1:34:23Speaker 04

  He's not happy with what you're doing. That was really tele-ophy. I was crawling around with a satellite dish in my hand and a, a set of headphones on. Did you, did you, did you speak to the man? I, I had to stop and I said, "Well, I was trying to sound record the Purple Sandpipers, but they're floating away now."

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  I know, he meant well. But anyway, back to the spotless starling. So, this is where the tangent came from, right? Here's another one, right? Except, I'm in Catalunya, you know, I'm in this... If you ever go to Catalunya, right, go to this place, it's called Ciurana. And it's like this stone village on top of a cliff. It's incredible. But they don't see too many people with parabolas and headphones on, obviously. And I was there at the sound recorder starling that was mimicking a car alarm. And so I was camped outside this woman's house, pointing at her. Did someone have to tell you about it? Like, how did you know about that? How do you find out there's a stone village in the middle of nowhere and there's a... I was there for a specific reason. I was there for a bird called wall creeper, which is very elusive.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  And it had never been sound recorded, that's another story. Oh, this car alarm starting was a side quest? That was a side quest, yeah. I got sidetracked. I went on a tangent with the starling. I was like, "Oh, what's that?" So I went into this village and I'm setting up. And like, it's a real rural, quiet village, you know, people doing everyday things in there. And here I am outside this woman's house with a satellite dish, looking up at her aerial. This is her, right? I'll translate afterwards. She's speaking in Catalan to me. Gràcies.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  Buzzard, can you make me clear there, by the way?

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  Here she comes.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  She's banging on the window at me. Hey!

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  There she comes.

• 1:36:26Speaker 08

  Bon dia.

• 1:36:28Speaker 04

  Hola. Bon dia. Hola.

• 1:36:34Speaker 08

  Que estàs mirant, sòl?

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  So, bon dia is, you know, a good day in Catalan. And she, she said, "Hola", because it's all I knew. And then she said, "Que estàs mirant, sòl? What are you looking at, a little owl?" And then I hung up because I didn't know what to say. That's the most autistic shit I've heard in my life. You hung up in a conversation in real life. Yeah, yeah. Jesus. Yeah, I meant I turned off the sound recorder. All right. Come here. That's a new one now. But let's... Meeting someone in the street, sorry, I'm gonna have to hang up now and walk away. I'd do that. I'd do that. I've got something beautiful to show you and I've got something funny to show you, right? Here is the car alarm. Thankfully, I can use some sign language as a point at the vert, right? And she was like, "Okay", and she left me off.

• 1:37:22Speaker 04

  So here is a starling, a spotless starling mimicking a car alarm.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Isn't that good? So, the same starling mimicking a chicken.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  And, I think, I've got one more. Oh, right. You might not know this bird, but it's the most beautiful bird and you should know it, right? It's called, Google it afterwards, it's called golden oriole. It looks stunning, like, it looks like a vivid banana in a tree, right? But they've got the most amazing song as well. First of all, here, will I do the golden oriole first or the mimicry first? I'll do the golden oriole first. Oh, I can't find it. Here it is. Now, listen to this and tell me that this isn't beautiful. My god. This is Catalunya in the height of spring.

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  That's golden oriole there. It's lovely. Yes.

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  And that purring, that's a turtle dove. Now, remember that sound? Now here is a starling doing the golden oriole.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  There, that's it.

• 1:38:48Speaker 03

  And so when my, so when I'm in the bird shit district,

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  I, the starlings murmurate in the sky, they go into the trees and then just as the sun comes down, there's a cacophony, you're in the street and it is nothing but like starlings all around you. The sound of them chirping and then shitting and then splatting, splatting, shitting and splatting. But there's thousands of them. Like, obviously I cannot pick out individual voices in that thousands.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  But are they mimicking in that cacophony or is it something to do when they're on their own?

• 1:39:25Speaker 04

  Um, no, so they, they, they wouldn't go into the effort of doing really kind of stylish, mimetic song in, in that because a lot of it will be lost. So they, they do a thing called flock song. And I think it's just like a, like a team bonding exercise where all of the birds sing together. It's, it's quite common.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Um, but do they make a noise when they're murmuring?

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  Murmuring. So when they're murmuring, they're, they're literally, they're literally shitting themselves because they're doing that because there's, there's, you know, a peregrine falcon chasing them.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're trying to make themselves look like a larger bird.

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  And so they, they're not going to waste energy on singing when they're about to be killed or eaten alive, do you know? So they tend to be quite silent in that regard. Do you know something very interesting? Um, I remember like, so I don't know if you've seen Birdsong or not, um, but one of the scenes in Birdsong was filming a, a murmuration of starlings in Loch Enel Westmead, quarter of a million birds like, and like it looks, it almost looks like CGI or AI or something like that. I can assure you it's not, you can go there and see it, it's unbelievable. And there was a comment and somebody was saying like, this is definitely AI. Uh, how is it possible that they're not flying into each other? Quarter of a million birds. And, and I'll tell you how. So there was an amazing study done, right?

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Where they had multiple cameras down and they were able to 3D model the, the, one of these murmurations. And they were able to kind of slow everything down and break it down and they realised that. Each starling is watching roughly its its six to seven closest neighbours. And so like, if you think about it, we're in a busy train station. We're not watching the entire flock of humans, so we don't go into each other. You're looking at the few people closest to you, so that doesn't happen. And that's exactly what the starlings do.

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  And so is everyone else.

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  And they're moving a little bit faster, their brains are moving faster. And so they they they work in sync, like, you know, you get the odd person in a train station that will clock heads with another person, but it's rare, like, it's the same with the starlings.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Cause I I saw too that they were they were trying to look at mummations and that they compared it to when a large audience start clapping. So when everyone claps, it's chaotic and then a rhythm forms and people are and and it's just humans do it, you know. Um, it's an empathy thing that something I, one of the maddest things I noticed during the pandemic was, so when the pandemic was over and then you had those, remember the weird gigs that you were allowed go to where people were put into pods? So I did one of them in Kilmainham Jail. So it was this huge fucking field and there was like, maybe 500 people there, but there's

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  this massive field and they're all in people, like six people to this table, six people to that table, and there's a few meters between everybody. And what I found amazing was there were certain jokes that I knew if I told it to a crowd like this, I just know from experience, everyone laughs at once. But when people were socially distanced, jokes didn't work. Yeah, the the the empathy that, the things that we were doing to prevent a virus spreading, that prevented the empathy of laughter. So I'd I'd say a joke and it's like, there's a laughter over there, a laughter over there. But if there's a room like this, everyone just laughs at once. As an empathy thing.

• 1:42:43Speaker 04

  It's a social activity too, isn't it, laughing? Like, um, you know, like if you're if you're at home and you're, you know.

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  I could be watching a hilarious stand up comedy and I'm not gonna laugh as hard as I would if I was present in a room like this.

• 1:42:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, that's what I was gonna say, you'd seem a bit mad if you were roaring out laughing at home to yourself. Come here, I have another starling story for you.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  We're here to do starlings, aren't we? We can do whatever the fuck we want. Do you wanna hear another starling story? Right, and we're gonna go to Romania now, right? This is, this is actually quite funny. And so we go to Romania because we had done a few human holidays for a while. And I'm, but human holidays, I mean, like, we went to see, you know, things made by humans. And I wanted to see things in nature. So Al was like, right, it's your turn, we'll do a nature holiday. Where do you wanna go? And I was like, can we go to the place where we're far, as far away as possible from people? Road noise, plane noise, so it's just pure wild silence. And she's like, okay. So we went to two destinations in Romania, the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube Delta. And so it happened to my birthday when we were in the Danube Delta.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  And she was like, Shaun, what do you want to do? And I said, what do you think? And so we hired a two, a two, she knew, we hired a two-person kayak, right? And I said, right, with this now, we're gonna, we're gonna kayak into the heart of the Danube Delta. I was looking at the maps, there's no roads for many kilometres, there's no boats in there. And it's gonna be amazing, we're gonna leave a microphone there. And in 48 hours, we'll come back and we collect the microphone. We'll have 48 hours of pure wild sound and God knows what we'll turn up in it. And she's like, okay, how long do you think it will take the kayak in there? And I said, around two hours. And, Jesus Christ, Alba nearly divorced me. We were kayaking for 12 hours. Oh my god. And she said, Shaun, you, Shaun, you bastard, you tricked me.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  And I said, Al, I'm serious, I didn't have a clue, I didn't know it was gonna take this long. But anyway, we go in there, right? Now, this will get to starlings eventually. Is that two separate kayaks, like? No, we were in the, we're in the one kayak. But do you know, you have to kayak at the same strength. But Alba was so fucking angry, she was kayaking like a demon. So we were going around in circles, because I, because I couldn't keep up with her. And, but anyway, we leave. We leave this microphone out there, right? And it was just incredible. So when you go out there, like, all of a sudden, you've got these willows that are just seemingly growing out of nowhere. And the willows are just coming up out of the delta and arching over. And it sounds like it's perpetually raining. It's not. So the willows are constantly taking water up.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  And so they have excess water and then they excrete it back out. So the willows are literally weeping water. And it sounds, it sounds like a constant trickle of water.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  Is that where weeping willow comes from?

• 1:45:27Speaker 04

  I think, I think it must, or is it?

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  It'd be strange if it didn't.

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  The plant weeps over, though. Maybe it is.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's a good one, yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  So here we go, look, listen to this, though. This is just so beautiful. Like, you don't even need to know the names of the birds, the frogs here, but just, just, you know, you can instantly feel this, like, and you can hear the weeping willows, too.

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  Goes out of the clock and leaves the path of.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  Oh, man. So I have, I have forty-eight hours of this lovely stuff, right?

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Have you listened to all forty-eight hours of it?

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  Of course I have. But that was only one microphone. I had multiple microphones out.

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  Do you walk around the town listening to bird sounds?

• 1:46:19Speaker 04

  In the town? Um, depends, like, sometimes, sometimes not. But, but, hang on, there's actually, there's more to this. Uh, I was gonna say, oh, yeah, the starlings. So, you know, if you think about starlings, right, where do we see them? We al- we almost always see them closely associated to our stuff. Starlings are in cities, and you'll see them associated with farm buildings. They're, you know, they've become attached to us in a sense, and they use our buildings to nest in. Starlings also like really short grass. And one of the primary food items they get are leather jackets, the larvae of the, you know, the crane fly sometimes, people call them daddy long legs. They love those. And, and so all of a sudden.

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  They dig up gardens, yeah, starlings and dig the fuck up your garden, yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like, here I was, in the middle. Of this wilderness in a delta and there were starlings there and I thought, whoa, hold on a second, what are you doing here? And I was watching them and you know what they were doing? So this place had, I think, is it six or seven species of woodpecker in this, in this delta? And woodpeckers, they excavate a new nest every year. It's a pair building exercise, they do it together. And then next year they get a new one because there's a big parasite load. So they just build another one. So what happens? They create homes for birds that otherwise wouldn't have had a home. They're ecosystem engineers. And so all of a sudden, these starlings had big holes that they could nest in. And that's naturally where they would have, would have been, you know, in many places. And I wonder,

• 1:47:49Speaker 04

  now that we have woodpeckers, will we start to get starlings nesting in the woods too, you know? What, we've got woodpeckers now? Yeah, they've arrived, they arrived around 2007. On purpose, or? Yeah, yeah. So basically what happened- Did we introduce them? No, no, no, no. So what happened, right? I remember when it was, when it was happening, my, my friend was out in Cape Clear Island and he found a woodpecker there and it was the first record for cork in, God, was it ever? Then another one turned up on Great Salty Island and they started to turn up in coastal locations like this. It went quiet for a while. They were breeding, but nobody said it because they wanted to protect them. All of a sudden, they're everywhere. So now- Are they invasive? Are they a problem? No, no, no. So an invasive species is a species which has been introduced and is

• 1:48:31Speaker 04

  problematic. This is neither. It's a, unless you listen to the, you know, the madness that they've been spouting on national media of late where, you know, there was a problem where some woodpeckers pecked out a US, an ESP pole in Wicklow. But look, the thing about woodpeckers is that they peck wood. And, you know, we dominate the landscape with our stuff and woodpeckers are gonna, are gonna do that. So we need to find a way to live with it. Why did they come here? Like, why? So what happened? Why 2007?

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  That's a love of Rihanna.

• 1:49:07Speaker 04

  It was Brexit, they had enough of it. No, so basically they think that the population had come to a certain capacity. They were doing really well in the UK. And when that happens, you get natural kind of scouts.

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Carnization.

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they came over, yeah, and I think they did DNA testing and concluded that they were from the British population. Yeah, and so they're everywhere now. But here's the amazing thing about woodpeckers, right? They're in Nimerick too. You've got to listen to them, you're going to love them, right?

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  How big are they in real life?

• 1:49:40Speaker 04

  They're about the size of a large blackbird, bit bigger than a blackbird, I'd say, yeah.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  And are they, unfortunately, my vision of a woodpecker has been marred by cartoons.

• 1:49:49Speaker 04

  So, so, so think of a blackbird, lots of white and really lovely red on the head. A bit like, a bit like the same colour as your hat.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I know them, are they long, sharp beaks?

• 1:50:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, they've got a big, big, powerful beak, so.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  And have you heard them pecking wood?

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  You've got to hear it.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 1:50:08Speaker 04

  You'll hear it, I can give you some locations. So that they're widespread now, right? But this is the time of year when they start to drum. It sounds like a machine gun. And get this, right? The different woodpeckers have different preferences for resonances in the wood. And they have favourite trees that they like to drum on and they experiment between different trees.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Why are they doing it? Are they looking for something or is it just, this is what I do?

• 1:50:30Speaker 04

  That is their display, the drumming.

• 1:50:32Speaker 03

  Go away.

• 1:50:33Speaker 04

  Because it's so, it's, listen to this, right? I have a woodpecker in my local patch and it likes two different trees and the trees sound different and it swaps between one tree to the other to change up the sound. Watch this. Here's tree number one.

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  The same tree, no, tree number two.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  Isn't that mad?

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  Is that a sexual selection thing again?

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  Um, I don't know, to be honest with you. I think it's just personal taste.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  Do you know, so, so, so, birds are, are just dinosaurs, right? Do you ever go, fucking hell, where are dinosaurs pecking things? Or what did dinosaurs sound like? I mean, that's what birds are.

• 1:51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't go as far back as dinosaurs, I think. Um, but I do, I do, oh, that lays me on to something. I do, I do like to reimagine sounds of the past.

• 1:51:34Speaker 03

  I heard that T-Rex honked like a goose.

• 1:51:36Speaker 04

  I heard that too. Can I show you something class here? Right? Oh, you're gonna like this, I think. Can I tell you a story about Philip Ronan? Go on, yeah. Right, so I did, I put out some sound recorders in Kildare National Park. Oh, jeez, we're in Kildare. We are, yeah.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  I put out some sound recorders in Kildare National Park and, um, right, do you know, do you know, uh, in, in, in the lakes there, there's an island called, there's an island called Ronan's Island, right? That's my surname. And so one of the, the recorders was put out there and they did it for a laugh, like, cause it's my surname. And I was intrigued and I was like, what's the story there? And they said, well, there was this guy, Philip Ronan, uh, who was an aristocrat. He was a really well-known mathematician. He was friends with Isaac Newton. He didn't do so well in the human world. He found it hard to socialise with people and didn't really understand people. And so he had made his money and he'd had enough of people, so he decided to move out to this island and so it became Ronan's Island.

• 1:52:38Speaker 04

  He built this hut that he lived in. It was, the, the foundations can still be seen there. This was, um, he was born in 1683, by the way. So this was kind of the, the early 1700s. He moved out to the island and he lived off fishing, hunting, gathering berries. He had the fresh water there and so on and so on. And, um, He was basically like, he didn't want to be visited by anyone. And whenever somebody came out to the island, he would run out and he would be shouting expletives and throwing stones at them. He was like Man Friday a bit, like. And actually, my friend Harry would say, Shaun, that would have been you if Albert didn't discover you. And, um, but I wanted to know more about this guy and I started to look into him. And it turns out that Philip Roney was born in Cove, which is my hometown, right?

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  And so I did a bit of research and I think that the guy is actually related to me. I just, I'm obviously not an aristocrat and I'm awful at maths. Um, and so I became invested in this space and I, I, I loved hearing the sounds of this, this potential ancestor of mine, what he would have heard. And I started to think like, the last wolf was eradicated in Ireland in seventeen eighty six. And he was there, he was there in the, in the early seventeen hundreds. So there's a, there's a good chance that he would have overlapped and heard wolves. So I adopted this lovely technique that Chris Watson used in the British Art Gallery, Art Museum, whereby they wanted to increase engagement at each, at each painting by, um, painting the sound of the, of the pictures.

• 1:54:06Speaker 04

  So they would look at an old painting and he would, he would understand, okay, there's an oak tree there, there would be maybe a pied flycatcher scene there. I, I understand what the, the rustle of those leaves would sound like, there's a stream there. And he layered all the sounds back in and recreated the sound of this painting. And the, the, the, you know, interaction just shot through the roof. And so I, I do this sometimes and it's a lot of fun. And so I have an old painting of Roney's Island from that era. And I took the lapping waves against the island and I put in a wolf sound, which I got from my friend Melissa Pons, the, she's a brilliant sound recorderist. And so this is what Philip almost certainly heard at one point trying to get to sleep at Roney's Island.

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  They're just really confident dogs, aren't they?

• 1:55:30Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, where I am. My dog sounds a bit like them, but he's a...

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  Um, before I do audience questions, one question I'd love to ask you is...

• 1:55:42Speaker 03

  Could you ever deploy the recordings like into an ecosystem to benefit another animal?

• 1:55:50Speaker 04

  Um, I don't know. I mean, it's generally frowned upon.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  Is it? That's fucking with it too much, is it?

• 1:55:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, do you know, like, it's referred to as playback? And you can elicit an aggressive response from how the bird, like, you know, you'll be attacked by a chatfincher or a blue tailed if you play their song. Like, they'll come at you thinking you're a rival. Uh, robins can fight to the death, like, do you ever see a bald robin? They pull the feathers out of each other. Um, and so you could, you know, that's a stressful experience, obviously, you know?

• 1:56:25Speaker 04

  And so that's not something that I want to create. Um, do you know, I was actually speaking to a greatit the other day. Um, I didn't think that I was going to elicit a response because I thought that my rendition was very bad. I was just out with my little daughter Lyra, and I'm teaching her bird song. Um, she's only sixteen months, like, but, uh, she enjoys it. And so this greatit was singing, and greatit has a really distinctive song. And it's one of the easiest ones to teach kids because it tends to go, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher. So it's easy to remember, you know? Uh, and so this, this greatit starts doing this teacher, teacher, teacher song, and I start responding, teacher, teacher. And next thing the greatit comes down and it's like, eyeing, eyeing up me and Lyra, you know? So, uh, yeah, yeah. So generally playback is frowned upon.

• 1:57:07Speaker 04

  The only time it's really used is like, imagine you were going through like a dense marsh in the middle of the night and you wanted to find, is balons craic a really secretive nocturnal species breeding here? You might play it under licence to see if you get a response because it's the only kind of...

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  I met a licence.

• 1:57:25Speaker 04

  Under licence, yeah. So like for bird song, now our film, we had to get licences for everything, like, you know? Were ye playing and stuff? No, no, no, no playback, because I don't, the other reason I don't like it is because the response that you get back isn't natural, like, you know, it wouldn't have been saying what it's saying, it's like, F you, you know, yeah, and whereas if you're in, in, in, in the natural way, like, man, I really wanted to play some jackals for you, can I play some jackals? It's the last thing. Okay, are they, jackals like the, the dog animal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, jackals in the Danube Delta. And they also had a grizzly, no, not a grizzly bear. I didn't know there was jackals there. They've only just arrived, golden jackal, they've marched across, they're, they're, they're spreading. Like Mongolia or something?

• 1:58:10Speaker 04

  I think, did they come from Africa, Asia? I can't remember, they're, they're, they're. Oh, they're in Asia, right. We'll have to look that up, but anyway, here they are, look, golden jackal, I'll do that, and I'll very cheekily. They're hyena-ish. They are, yeah, they're gorgeous though. Do they laugh? They look, yeah, they look like a cross between a hyena, hyena, a wolf and a fox. Here we go now.

• 1:58:58Speaker 04

  Cool, isn't it? That's very intimidating. Oh, but they're, they're kind of slim, like, this is intimidating, right? Have you ever been in a wood where you're not the top predator, where something can actually eat you? No. That's like not something, like what's gonna eat us here, a cow? And, like, well, a red deer is pretty formidable, but like, we're in the, we're in the, the wood there, and you go through these pastures, like, you're in the foothills of the Carpathians, and the she- This is very wild. Oh, like, it's one of the, the last remaining true wildernesses. It's, it's not even like a national park, it's just like, this is- It, it actually is, it's just a very big one, like, very big one, and so you're, you're going up, and I remember like going through these pastures, and there are, there are shepherds there, you know, that, that's one of the things that they do, and their sheep

• 1:59:43Speaker 04

  roam over vast areas, and they need to protect their sheep from bears, so they, I don't remember the breed, but they have this dog, it's the most terrifying fucking dog you'll ever see, and they, they come for you, they'll come down the mountain after you, and they're- They're not, they're like a little horse or something like, you know. Um, but anyway, you, you get past them, you get into the forest and I remember like.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  And are the dogs accompanied by humans or do they just hang around the sheep?

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  Well, you, you, you, you hope that they're accompanied by humans because they'll take them away. And if, if they're not, you're in trouble like, because they're, they're.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  And they don't see enough other humans, they're not.

• 2:00:17Speaker 04

  And their, their, their instinct is to protect the herd, like, so they see you as a threat and they, they come for you like. Uh, you have to bring a stick, like not to hit them, but just to ward them off, like they're, they're, they're serious dogs, like. Um, but you get up there then and you're walking through the wood and, um, I remember seeing a bear shit like, and it's like. It looks a bit like a cow shit, but in a place where a cow definitely wouldn't be like, you know? And I, I remember seeing that and I was like, oh my God.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  Because they don't fuck around.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  No, and I was saying to her like, look at that, look at that, Alba. And she was like, Sean, do you want me to continue or do you want to go back? I said, call her, I don't want to say anymore. So we go in and we set up this microphone and we get out of there. The next morning, right, we come back, we collect the microphone and this is what was on it, like, this is the dawn chorus from that spot.

• 2:01:17Speaker 04

  Two bears like.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, uh, what are they saying?

• 2:01:20Speaker 04

  I, I, I said it, I said it to one of the, I, I showed it to one of the guides and he said that it sounded like, um, a kind of a, like. A sexual display, like the male, the male was showing off to the, the female.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  Not, there's a tasty cockman in the mountains.

• 2:01:38Speaker 04

  No, no, thank God.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  Um, here, I, I hope that clock is right. I wanna, I wanna take some questions from the audience. Uh, two thousands R and B singer Usher has, there's Usher, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, they're over yonder there.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  This is so the lights aren't in my eyes, it's not, it's not a strange.

• 2:01:59Speaker 04

  Hello. If you wish it also. Sunglasses.

• 2:02:02Speaker 09

  Hello, good night Sean, I have a question for you.

• 2:02:07Speaker 04

  Are you there?

• 2:02:07Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, because of climate change, have you noticed a change, a change in the sound of birds? Of a pattern of sound, behaviour of course, it might be noticeable, but on the sounds itself.

• 2:02:26Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess, I guess if you look, look at the soundscape as a whole, there have been some species which have turned up as a result of climate change and which are continuing to turn up. And so if you look at the dawn chorus as a collective, then yeah.

• 2:02:39Speaker 04

  So, like great spotted woodpecker, well, it's not, it's not, it's not climate driven. But there are some kind of other species that would be less tolerant of cold, that have turned up and are now established as breeding birds. And their song is a component of the, the soundscape now. So you've got bearded reedling, which is a gorgeous thing. You've got bearded reedling, Chetty's warbler has colonized, what else is there? There are other birds which are knocking on the door. And I think it's only a matter of time before we get the likes of night heron, potentially breeding, and black winged stilt. Like if you look those up, they're real gorgeous. So the water birds that you get in the Mediterranean.

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  And so yeah, for sure, like you can definitely detect audibly the changes as a result of it.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  But as you said earlier, right, like, so playback is frowned upon, right, because it's unnatural. But the presence of these birds is also unnatural.

• 2:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  Can this give other indigenous birds panic attacks or something?

• 2:03:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, sometimes you see it. And so I remember once, like, there, there's one kind of element of ornithology birding called twitching. And it refers to the fact that people get so excited when they see a rare bird that they start to twitch. And, and so I used to do a little bit of that. I didn't twitch like, but I used to do a bit of that when I was a teenager. Just the thrill of seeing something that normally you'd have to go to. Siberia, but here it is out the back garden in Cork, like, you know, so. And there was a bird called a rhinocer, which is a type of woodpecker, actually, that you get in continental Europe. And it it had turned up, it was looking a bit lost and the local jackdaws were were freaking out.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  Because they had never seen it before and they they they deemed it to be a threat, like. Whereas if that was back in Poland, where where they're abundant, that that interaction wouldn't have happened, like, you know, so they. Like, birds do pick up on these things. Albino birds get an awful time of it, like, you know.

• 2:04:38Speaker 03

  Albino birds.

• 2:04:39Speaker 04

  Albino birds.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  Does this raise the cortisol of all the crows?

• 2:04:42Speaker 04

  I, well.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 2:04:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  But like, mad things can happen. Like, one of the maddest things I found out last year was, I started getting into snails for a while.

• 2:04:51Speaker 04

  I have a snail book, I can give it to you if you want.

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  The snails and the the calcium in a bird's egg can come from the amount of snails that it's eaten.

• 2:05:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  Snails disappear, birds give birth to shit eggs.

• 2:05:06Speaker 04

  Here, do you know this one, right? Do you know Songrush?

• 2:05:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:09Speaker 04

  Songrush, one of its favourite food items are snails and they don't, they tend not to eat the the shell. But what they do do is, right, they have favoured stone anvils and they whack the snail off the stone. And they, you know, I guess they're almost autistic in a way in that they have this pattern and they keep going to the same place, eating the same thing. And you can find a mountain of snail shells next to their favourite store. Yeah, and that's how you you can walk through a landscape and say, oh, Songrush lives here, just by seeing that, like, you know.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  And you know the way snails would be hanging around a wall?

• 2:05:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  They are absorbing calcium from stone.

• 2:05:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  The calcium that's stuck in stones.

• 2:05:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  Ends up in a bird's egg.

• 2:05:52Speaker 04

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 03

  Isn't that beautiful?

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, there's so many kind of intricate little things going on that we we we don't acknowledge, like, you know.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  And and you can use the presence of snails to know whether a soil is alkaline or acidic.

• 2:06:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  That's why that that fucking snail, the one down in Doonbeg, that Trump wants to have a crack at.

• 2:06:11Speaker 04

  Vertigo snails.

• 2:06:12Speaker 03

  Very important.

• 2:06:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  It tells you about the time and it tells you about the health of that wetland.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  They they need really undisturbed, unpolluted wetlands, like, yeah, they're really rare.

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  I want to say thank you so much, Sean. If we don't watch ourselves, man, we talk all night.

• 2:06:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:27Speaker 03

  And that was an incredible, amazing chat. Thank you so much, Sean Ronayne.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  Thank it to ye for being so lovely and for giving us an amazing night. I've really, really enjoyed that. Dog bless, this was the Blind Boy Podcast.

• 2:06:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Yes, it was. I agree with you there, Blind Boy. Welcome to the end of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed that. I'll be back next week. Possibly with something potato related. I can just feel it in my bones. In the meantime, rub a dog. Gen you fleck to a swan. Wink at a maggot. Dog bless.

• 2:07:28Speaker 10

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