Climate action for Spring with Collie Ennis

I chat with Trinity College biodiversity officer Collie Ennis about rewilding, building ponds and biodiversity 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?

  Tickle a Vincent, you jaundiced morus. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a first time listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. I've been getting acquainted with a weighted blanket this week. It's like a blanket that's made out of chainmail. It's covered in a soft fabric, but it's exceptionally heavy. It's 10 kilograms, the 10 kilogram blanket that I wrap around my body. It had been recommended to me as an intervention.

• 1:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or no, I suppose, an accommodation because I'm autistic. For ages, I thought, that's a lot of bullshit. How could a heavy blanket help me in any way? That sounds like nonsense, but I have to report. It's fucking magnificent. I don't know what it's doing. And I don't know what it's helping. All I can say is that it definitely fucking works, whatever that is. I can't put words to what that is. When I wear the weighted blanket, if I'm just sitting on the couch.

• 2:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  After about 10 minutes, I don't know, I get the feeling of, the feeling you get when you've just had a really, really good stretch. I get that feeling. So I have difficulty switching off. My mind is consistently active. My body is consistently active. The example I always use is, I work in an office building, and in my office building, there's loads of other offices in my corridor. And to save money, the building doesn't allow light switches in individual offices. So instead, the lights turn on if you move. And on my corridor,

• 3:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  there's, there's some people who sit down at their desks, and they remain so still that the lights just turn off. And they sit in their offices, not in darkness, just with daylight coming in, but they're so still that their lights don't turn on in their fucking office. And I marvel at the impossibility of that. Like, do I have one of those lights in my office? Do I fuck? I had to have a manual light switch installed in my office, because I can't stay still. I'm consistently stimming, moving my fingers, moving my legs, getting up, walking around, non-stop movement, which meant that my, my light was on all

• 3:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  day long, because I kept waking it up. And I had to get a manual light switch installed, and then a, a soft light in my office, so that the bright lights wouldn't over stimulate me. And it wasn't easy getting that light either. When I went to the, the company that owned the building, and I'm like, I'm autistic, I need to have a fucking light switch. They were like, fuck off. So then I had to, I had to threaten them with the Employment Equality Act of 1998, which is what you can do if you are, if you're diagnosed autistic or neurodivergent, and something in your workplace is over stimulating you, and fucking with your capacity

• 4:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  to do work, your employer is, they're obligated to do what's called a reasonable accommodation, and that's under the Employment Equality Act. But I'm, I'm consistently moving, consistently flicking my fingers, stimming.

• 4:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  A way to, that's how I relax, that's how I feel normal. Some neurotypical people, obviously, they just don't need that, as I can observe in my office. They can just sit still for hours at their computer, so still that they don't turn on a sensory light. But for me, I gotta move all the time, which means rest can be difficult. Just like having a nap, sitting down, that can be difficult, unless I induce full-on meditation. But when I wear that weighted blanket, it's whatever about the pressure, the pressure of it all over my body, whatever the fuck it does, it takes about 10 minutes to kick in.

• 5:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  It appears to soothe the part of my brain that wants to move. It appears to soothe that, and I'm able to sit comfortably with stillness, with not moving, with not needing to move, with just being fucking still. And then I begin, I experience the feeling of rest. See, I don't get rest, I get sleep, but like rest, I'm gonna lie down in the middle of the day, I'm gonna sit down in the middle of the day and recharge and do nothing. I don't, I don't get that, I don't have that, due to being neurodivergent. The weighted blanket allowed me to have that.

• 6:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, the thing is, there's no science behind it, there's no evidence behind weighted blankets. It's all anecdotal, it's artistic people, neurodivergent people saying, this thing here really helps me. And my sleep then as well, I've been putting it on when I've been sleeping. And I've got a sleep-tracking device, which is, I don't know how helpful it is, because when I wake up in the morning... I get a report on how I slept and it's always like, well done, you just had a shit sleep. So I wake up with a feeling of failure before I've even had my breakfast. So I'm not sure how I feel about sleep trackers, but I use them. But since I started wearing

• 6:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  the fucking weighted blankets, I'm getting the same amount of hours of sleep as I would have gotten last week, but the quality of sleep, and I can see it, is way better. So I'm not sponsored by weighted blankets. I'm not selling weighted blankets. I haven't been compromised by big weighted blankets. I'm just saying, if you're neurodivergent, or if you just have trouble switching off, maybe consider getting your hands on a weighted blanket. They're not very expensive. I'm really shocked with how fucking good it is. So anyway, I have a wonderful guest for this week's podcast, which that's like a little week off for me when I get to have a guest on. Although I'm being a bit harsh on myself

• 7:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  because for other podcasters, that's the job. Most podcasters just have a guest on every single week. But when I have a guest on, it means I'm not doing like three or four days of research and writing to write a monologue podcast. So it's a bit of a break when I get a guest on. And I have two gigs this week, so it's the end of my Irish tour. So I'm very grateful to have a guest.

• 7:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was in Vicar Street last night. Lovely, intimate, quiet, Monday night gig. You could have heard a pen drop. Lovely audience. And because of the time of year, it's mid to late April, which is a really, really important time of year for biodiversity, for the ecosystem. Now is the time for individual action, to act, to create meaningful change through individual action. We're at the beginning of spring. The soil temperature is rising, there's increasing daylight. Animals are coming out of hibernation, flowers are coming up. Those flowers need insects to pollinate them.

• 8:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Our food crops, which are under stress because, as I mentioned two podcasts ago, the price of fertilizer went up. So, right now is the time to build a tiny little pond, to plant some real native wildflower, to not mow your lawn, to place bits of wood out for insects to live in that wood, to put cardboard over some grass so that insects can live underneath that. Now is the time, if you want, to plant a little bit of your own food and you don't even have to have a garden. It can be as simple as, instead of throwing the top of that carrot in a bin,

• 9:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  you grow it in a flower pot or a potato. You could look at how you can impact your own city. Find the vacant lots and put some native wildflower there. Build a little illegal pond. Now, I understand that there might sound a bit dangerous because that could be a drowning hazard for tiny little children. But as the guest who I'm about to bring on explains, a pond doesn't have to be something that's even... A pond can be a bucket of water that's left alone. So, I had the most wonderful chat last night with Collie Ennis. Collie's been on this podcast a few times. He's one of my earliest guests back in 2018 and I've had him on a few times since.

• 10:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Me and Collie just click. He's another guest, I've said it before.

• 10:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's been multiple guests on this podcast over the years and when I've really, really clicked with these people and they've become friends,

• 10:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  about 80% of them, it turns out, they find out that they're autistic or neurodivergent and Collie is one of those people. I was just like, this fellow, when we chat, we fucking click. No issues whatsoever with small talk, we just go straight into it. And it's that example of what's called double empathy. And double empathy is a beautiful theory because it...

• 10:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  It posits that it's not the neurodivergent people that are defective or wrong when it comes to social rules and understanding and communication. It's not autistic people struggle with small talk, autistic people struggle with eye contact, autistic people struggle with this and that and all this social communication. Instead, it's, no, it's a miscommunication because a lot of neurodivergent people don't report these issues when they're speaking to another neurodivergent person. And that is 100% my experience. A lot of guests on this podcast who've been recurring, there's a couple of others who

• 11:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I won't mention because I don't know if they're public about it yet, but people who I've clicked with and then they mail me and go, turns out I'm autistic, not just this podcast, in my fucking life. Quite a lot of the people who I'd end up, I'm out in a pub, I'm overstimulated, I fucking hate it. And then there's one person and I can chat to them for hours and it's grand and I feel okay. Those people, they end up getting diagnosed as neurodivergent in some way. And that illustrates double empathy for me. So neurotypical people can communicate brilliantly with other neurotypical people, whatever

• 12:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  set of rules that is, and then the neurodivergent have a different way. So it's the communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic, it arises from a mismatch rather than the deficit solely being located with the autistic people. It just so happens that there's way more neurotypical people and it's a neurotypical society. And I just like that reading of it and like the weighted blankets. It's all anecdotal, it's just a theory, there's no evidence behind it, but it's something that aligns up my experience. But anyway, look, I had an unreal chat with Collie last night and we, Collie is the chief

• 13:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  biodiversity officer in Trinity College, but he's big into science communication and citizen science.

• 13:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Collie goes out into communities and teaches people about biodiversity and how to build ponds and the importance of insects and frogs. And he's so passionate about it and so deeply interested in it. And his passion is completely infectious. And Collie's the person who got me into biodiversity. He's the person who really got me thinking about it and caring about it and understanding it, you know? So have a listen to this and hopefully you'll come away from it wanting to build a pond or plant some wildflower or ring your local council and get them to stop mowing lawns or destroying habitats.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  I don't know what to start with this, Collie. I suppose the first thing I want to ask you is, the first time you came on this podcast was about 2018. And you were in Trinity College but working as a security guard. And you were there as like a very, very passionate man about biodiversity. Now you're the biodiversity officer. You have a completely different fucking job. How were you finding this?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's weird. I mean, like for me, working full time in a regular job and then doing the conservation work on the outside, research associate in zoology and then working with the herpetological society, building ponds and doing all that was fantastic, but I could always step away from it. But now I'm kind of full time in it. It's a very different energy. It's deadly, but it is a heavy industry to be involved in. And you're constantly having to kind of communicate this message that nature's wonderful and nature's brilliant, but also things aren't great and we need to do something about it. So that kind of, it being full time now, it's taking a little bit of getting used to, if that makes sense.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Because what I wanted to, something I've noticed in the eight years I've been doing my podcast, right? There are certain guests that I have on a lot because when I speak to these guests, I just click with them. We have Crank. You're one of them.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Every single one of these guests has also found out that they're artistic.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Including you.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  I found out a long time ago. I was in tech as an electrician and I couldn't get colours right. I couldn't do any maths. I couldn't do anything. I was just all over the shop. But I could tell you who beat Batman up in issue 27 of DC Comics from 1974. Do you know what I mean? So I had a very weird kind of a mind and I could tell you like the, you know, how to breed giant African horn frogs at, you know, a certain time of year or whatever. All these weird stuff that I was mad into. So one of the lectures actually in Kevin Street was really sound and he gave me a test.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Read this, look at this, how many cows here, what's all that kind of stuff, you know? And he came back to me a couple of weeks later and he said, you've got ADHD with autism mixed in and dyslexia. And the only thing I remember about it was dyslexia because I was thinking, well, that explains why I'm shy at maths. So that was it. And I never really thought about the other thing because it didn't mean that to me. Nobody talked about it. Like I was only in my early twenties at the time. So it was the dyslexia was the big thing. But it was only years later that I was reminded by my wife that I had the autism and ADHD.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  What has me thinking about it is when you were working as a security guard, right? And then the biodiversity was a passion. Security guard is a great job for autistic people because there's so much fucking time by yourself.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  But now you're going out into schools every single day. You're speaking to people all the time. You're having to perform being a human being. Like that's my job and I go mental after a while. You know what I mean? After a while of doing that, how's that on your nervous system?

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Eh, it's, like I said, it's been a mad year and like, there's a lot of downtime that I would have had in the old job where I could read or listen to, you know, people talking about Bigfoot or whatever. It's just something that I'd be absolutely nothing to do with the heaviness, the conservation work or just communicating with people all the time. So like, I'm lacking that. So I have to literally deliberately go out of my way to pick up the fishing rod and go down the river and get lost. I go up to the woods and look at tadpoles and all the stuff that gives me a bit of peace. And so I'm really having

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Thank you, narrative and battery, does that return?

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. It's like spinach to Popeye. It's fucking brilliant, you know, it's like, as soon as I get it into me.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Being alone with tadpoles.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  It gives me a great energy and a great set of, it like, sense of peace. And it's just, it's a lovely little thing. It takes me back to being a kid, especially like when I, when you had no worries. And it's just, it's one of those things that really settles me nerves. And

• 18:22Speaker 03

  When, when you were a small child, like when did you start to become obsessive about frogs or insects? And, and how much of that obsessiveness made you like weird to your friends?

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Um, I always got on with people. I was good. I was good with people, like, you know, I've, I'm, I'm, I never had that, that problem.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  But they always

• 18:45Speaker 04

  They always

• 18:45Speaker 03

  With this.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  They always thought I was a weirdo.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Like in a nice way.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  He was mad in it. But, um, yeah, I, since I was about seven or eight, I would have been mad into like, me dad built a pond in the back garden in Crumlin. And back then, like, you know, we, there wasn't pond liners running around at the time. Well, not, not where I lived. But he made it out of a bin liner. He just got a load of layers of bin liner and took a hole and put it in and then put the water in.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Was it bad doing that just because he wanted a pond?

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Eh, yeah, I think he saw on like the Staples Sunday Night viewing would have been Gardener's World and the Antiques Roadshow in my house, so yeah, and I still watch Gardener's World, I love it. And eh, yeah, I think he saw on that and he was like, that'd be deadly, because I was already reading books and obsessed with Attenborough and eh.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  On the subject of ponds, Rice, I went to, I said to you recently, I sent you a video of a fellow who was, he had a pond out his back garden and it was in, it was self-contained, so there was no pump, there was nothing, and it was aquaculture.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  So what I liked was, you can just have a pot, there's fish inside there, there's plants, and it filters itself, and you leave it the fuck alone, and there you have it. And you said to me, that's a great idea, but can you do it without the fish?

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  And I was like, why? Why are fish a bad idea?

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Because there's plenty of space for fish everywhere in Ireland. They have the canals, the rivers, the lakes, there's loads of homes for fish. If people want to keep fish in an ornamental home, that's brilliant and fair play to them, but it's not a wildlife pond, because anything that lands in there or tries to eat the fish are going to make a meal out of. So most of the aquatic insects that we're trying to give a home to, they won't be able to survive. So when you take the fish away, what you're doing is recreating these old areas that used to exist in Ireland for them to live. For example, you know, you drive around the countryside, if you're sitting in a train in particular and you're looking out the window, have a look out the window as you're passing along, and you'll see lots of troughs, metal troughs, for cows and sheep and animals,

• 20:53Speaker 04

  horses to drink out of. Before then, they had farm ponds. They had farm ponds all over the country, little wet patches on the grass, and they were all filled in on the instruction of better farming practices by the government.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Were they dangerous to kids?

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Like? Well, I mean, it it was more to give more land for grazing.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  But these, these were ponds, didn't have fish in them, but these alone were sustaining flies.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Dragonflies, amphibians, which is my obsession, um, diving beetles.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Uh, all the kind of the, the, uh, small aquatic midges that come up that feed bats. I mean, these pond ecosystems are so rare nowadays that like, there's no fresh water, small freshwater bodies without fishing them. Is the numbers just absolutely crashed? And what we need to do is kind of rethink, um, what, what you'd like to have in an attractive pond in your back of herden. And, and everybody should try have one and it doesn't have to be a massive thing. It can be exactly what your, your, your may have done.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  The, the thing is there, right, is so first off, I, I just, when you told me that, I found it fascinating. I found like the introduction of troughs on farms, how that could like eliminate so much biodiversity. But the big thing is you're speaking about water beetles, you're speaking about, uh, mosquitoes, things like that. Why should we give a fuck about them? That's most people go, who gives a fuck? I don't give a fuck about water beetles, Collie.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean? I do. I know now. Like you're the person who got me to care about water beetles. I didn't, I, I was just like, why, why would anyone care about insects? And then you were like, wait, no, hold on a second. This is about, this, this is about food systems.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  This is, so what's the importance of the type of biodiversity that you would see on an, an Irish pond that doesn't exist anymore? What's the benefit of them?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Well, you see, everything is connected in this food web and the, the likes of, especially water beetles and the aquatic beetles that are quite chunky and large. So they're feeding the bigger bats and the bigger birds that are feeding on the wing. Because the water beetles, even though they're called water beetles, actually can fly like all beetles. They can flip, come up to the side of the pond, flip open their, their, uh, outer cases of their, their back. And then these origami wings come out and off they go. And some of them are like little helicopters and they'll take off. And the gas thing is, so your auntie gets her lovely, um, glass table from Woody's. And she's sitting there having this cider of an even, this has happened loads of times I've, I've gotten contact over.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  And people think next minute they hear a helicopter and a big beetle crashes off the table. Now, why is that happening? The beetle thinks the reflection on that table is pond war. Oh. And it happens all the time. I think it's hilarious because people are like, there's cockroaches attacking me outside the canal. But it's actually just beetles coming out of the canal, looking for a new place to breed. Uh, new places to kind of set up new colonies. But if you get rid of them and all their numbers go down. Because they struggle in canals, for example, and that's the only thing. And their numbers go down. Then you're taken away from swifts, diets. Mm hmm. They need these uh bigger, bigger chunkier insects. The larger bats that we have would need these chunkier insects.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  So it's not like, uh, uh, you know, everybody's played kerplunk. Yeah. And you know, when you're playing kerplunk and you pull out the straws and you're thinking, I'm getting away with mortar here. And you can just pull one straw. It doesn't have to be any particular one. Uh, anything looking special about it or anything, you just pull it and everything goes. And that's what happens with food webs. You know, it can just disappear overnight. Uh, if, if just a particular species and you might know which one it is. So everything has this value for the food web. Also, from a kind of a moral point of view. Mm hmm. Beetles have every right to be here. They've been here for a hundred, for three hundred million years. Let them get on with it. And it costs us nothing to give them home.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  And from a selfish point of view, it's really cool to observe their life cycles. Their young, their larvae are called water tigers and they look like something out of aliens. Yeah. They're the ones with the big fangs. And they sit there in the water, like with their arse is uh what they breed through, which is hilarious. Like your man in the shower, but uh, they, they have this tube where they sit up in the water. And they have this really ominous position where they just kind of have the jaws clamped open. So you can imagine these big, huge curved, curved jaws. Now, these things are the length of my finger. And he's sitting there in the water and Mr. Tadpole or Mr. Stickelback comes along, having a lovely day out. Butchum. Like, like, just like a bear trap.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Have you witnessed this?

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Oh, I watch it every night. It's like battle dome at my back garden. It's like crazy, they're like.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  And so, and that beetle then is keeping an eye on the tadpole numbers.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And then, like, like, so that all keeps, he's keeping them in check. And then it was gas. My daughter screaming one day, because she didn't know what this thing was running across the driveway. And it was the beetle larva coming out of the water to form a cocoon to toward to a beetle. But as he was running, do you remember Star Trek, the rocket?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Do you remember the thing that came out of his ear?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Terrific. It looked exactly like that. It looked like, and it was.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  So that's the transitionally phase.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Transitionary period, they wrap themselves in a cocoon and then they turn into this beetle called the great diving beetle. And they're huge, they're absolutely huge. So one of our biggest beetles, but they.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Are they very vulnerable in that exact moment?

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Very. That's why they're panicking.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  That's, yeah, tiny moment where they're going from larvae to, and they're exa- and, and it's somebody's job to eat them at that moment.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, big time. So they're completely exposed. But then, once they get into a bit of mud, they can cocoon themselves up. And then just begin this transformation. And look, they're not as pretty as a peacock butterfly or more, but they are as fascinating. And very important and fascinating to watch. So, and there's a couple of reasons I, I, I hope I convince you why you should keep these beetles around. And give them a little bit of space, which, you know, they'll make use of if you give some space for. I was really proud today at Trinity College because I was walking along with a delegation of people from American colleges. And we were bringing them through our wildfire meadows and we started a thing called Logs for Life. I came up with the name.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  It's a bit of an unfortunate name when you think about it, but, because it's, the students made fun of, but. What we're doing instead of getting rid of the trees, to fall on campus and giving it to people to carve up. We're leaving them for nature, as nature intended.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Mushrooms, are you getting class mushrooms?

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Mushrooms, we're getting all sorts of beetles coming in to feed in the centre of the city. And today, while the delegation was there, I saw a, a, a very rare, um, minor wasp. It's a single, it, it, they, they do solitary nesting. And it was great to see it in the middle of the city, with all these people there. And I was telling them about it and it's just, again, we left a bit of space for nature. We managed the habitat with nature in mind and it's really walking.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And how often, cause like, most of your waking life is looking for insects in a way that I can't even imagine. You know what I mean? And if you're saying you saw this particular wasp and it got you excited.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  No, but it's, it's stuff that you'd see maybe in the hills or around, uh, Wicklow or, or, or down in the, the Burn. But when you start to see it in the city centre, that's what really excites me. We're seeing frogs back in Trindie hopping around the front square. We've got newts, we've got dragonflies that are freaking students out, flying around the pav in the summer. That's fantastic. Like compared to like 20 years ago.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  So what I love about that in particular, and you were the person who got me into planting wildflowers. And I, I had a, it's, it's, it's, it's not just about seeing cool things, right? It's, when I first planted native indigenous wildflower, which is fucking hard to get unfortunately. There's one website and it's very difficult to order that seed. It's quite difficult. He wants you to write a cheque and send it in the post. But like, it's the real deal native. When you go to B and Q and look for wildflower seed, it's not like native wildflower seed. It's from Poland or some of it's from America. And what I learned with that is when you plant this, you do get wildflowers, but they, they might die that season and not regenerate.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  But if it's literal indigenous wildflower seed, you, you can personally help an ecosystem. But I had wildflowers up my back garden, only about six foot. And a year later, I started to see insects that I had never seen in my fucking life, that I didn't even know existed in Limerick. And there they were in this tiny spot.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's brilliant.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  And it was, the fact that they showed up gave me hope. That's what was important. When I felt. Doing something about the climate is pointless when you see nature appear spontaneously. It's phenomenal, like one of the most beautiful facts you ever told me, and I want you to tell the audience. You were saying that if I had a pond out in my back garden, eventually a fish might show up in it. And I was like, go and fuck off. How the fuck in Limerick City is a fish getting into my fucking pond when I didn't put him there? How did the fish get in?

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a a Starling or a a similar board will go down to an area where fish have spawned. And when fish spawn, they spawn en masse. Or like sticklebacks, for example, they make little nests, which is really cool to to to watch as well.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  What's a stickleback?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Stickleback is a small, they used to call them pinkies um back in the day. They're small, little native fish that used to be super common. And the males have the red kind of underbelly and they have spikes on their on their back. Uh the dog pond in the Phoenix Park still has a great population of them. But say, uh Mr. Starling is down at the dog pond and it's a hot day and he goes for a a wash in the spring. And it washes his feathers and washes his legs. Some stickleback eggs can stick to the legs and he'll fly off and maybe get thirsty again later on in the day. Land into your little pond and then one day you're there going, how the hell did the stickleback get into my pond? Or how the hell did the roach get from here to here?

• 31:30Speaker 04

  And it's just purely down to this evolutionary trick that um the the fish came up with to help them disperse naturally. It's it's really cool. Yeah, lots of stuff like that. Daphnia, which is a type of waterflea, blows on the wind. So you can just put a bucket there in your back garden and then wait. And if you're anywhere within a pond, miles of pond, eventually you can look into the water and you'll see these little creatures darting around. And they're daphnia, which are like the real, the kind of plankton of fresh water. And they start off on the wind as eggs blowing around.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  And what do they do? Like, do they go to the surface of the water and and reveal themselves and then get taken away?

• 32:12Speaker 04

  No, no. So say if they were in a a bucket or a pond or a a puddle and it dries out. And that their eggs are in the dust, yeah, it's mad. Or the edge of a pond as a reservoir goes down and there's dirt there, the eggs could be in that and as it dries up and gets dusty, they're off it goes. And as soon as they get wet again, I think everybody would have had, what's it called, sea monkeys?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  When they were younger.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Do you know that they were made by a Nazi and were used to fund the Ku Klux Klan?

• 32:41Speaker 04

  I did not, but there you go.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  No, seriously, look into sea monkeys. You remember sea monkeys, don't you? You buy them in the pet shop. The fella, they're brine shrimp.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  But the fella who figured out, oh, I can make this into a kid's tie, he did, but he used those millions to fund the KKK. That's a fact.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Well, we'll stick with the Daphne then.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Um.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  What were we fond of them?

• 33:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's have a small little Ocarina pause now before we go back to the chat with Collie, because I loved even listening back to that there now. I'm going to play the Ocarina and you'll hear an advert for some bullshit, all right? I'll try and play it gently so that I don't, you know, some people like to go to sleep to this podcast and I don't want to wake them up with an aggressive Ocarina. And the purpose of the Ocarina is to warn you that you're going to hear an advert and it might be someone with a loud Dublin four accent. So we play the Ocarina to warn you. I'll play it gently.

• 33:56Speaker 01

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• 34:26Speaker 00

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• 34:54Speaker 05

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• 35:38Speaker 05

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• 36:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bit high pitched.

• 36:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Way too high pitched. What can I do?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  75% of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering what's happening to your body ends now. Midi is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs Midi. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. That's join M-I-D-I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market. Home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Do you snore? Did somebody hand you a CPAP and did you quietly stop using it? The mask that never quite seals? The hose tugging at you every time you roll over? A machine sitting abandoned in a closet? Excite O S A works a different way. It treats a root cause instead of managing the noise, and you use it while you're awake. 20 minutes a day, while the coffee brews, while you set your fantasy lineup. An FDA-cleared prescription device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. Then you go to bed like a person. Nothing strapped on, nothing plugged in. In clinical studies, 90% of patients saw a reduction in snoring.

• 37:59Speaker 05

  No sleep study required. Prescribed online, shipped to your door. Excite O S A at springsleep.com/sleep20. Code SLEEP20 for 20% off. Excite O S A is an FDA-cleared prescription-only device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. Not for everyone. Individual results vary. Risks and benefits at springsleep.com.

• 38:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the Ocarina Boss. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindboypodcast. If you like listening to this podcast, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, mirth, merriment, education, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page, because this is my full-time job. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I purchase all my equipment. It's how I have the time to deliver a podcast each week, to write it, to go on the road, to do gigs. This is all possible because of direct listener funding. All I'm looking for is the price of

• 39:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Just listen for free. Listen for free, because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. So that's patreon.com/theblindboypodcast. And also, it keeps us fucking independent. Advertisers come here as guests on my terms. That's very rare. Usually advertisers come in and they're like, well, we're advertising on your podcast, so therefore you need to get more listens. Here's some ideas about how to

• 40:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  get more listeners. And if you don't, if you don't do what we ask, then we're not going to advertise on your podcast. Have you tried being more controversial? Have you tried speaking about things that you don't give a fuck about, just because these things are popular? And I've worked in television. I still work in television. That- That infrastructure, that model, that way of creating right there, that what fucking destroyed television, destroyed it. Ideas, creativity, originality, risk-taking, passion, all out the fucking window. Let's aim for consistent mediocrity just to keep the advertisers

• 40:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  happy. We don't have to fucking deal with that. This is listener-funded. No advertiser has any say whatsoever on the content of this podcast. I show up each week and I speak about what I'm legitimately passionate about. That's what I've done every week for eight years and that's what, that's what I love doing. That's what gives me a sense of purpose and meaning and it's what has me consistent in my output. So just a couple of gigs now. I'm really happy to be at the end of my Irish tour. I loved doing the gigs and getting to, to be in a room with people who are listening to this podcast and have the crack, that bit is fantastic. But getting home at four in the morning, once or twice a week,

• 41:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  that bit is not fantastic. So I'm really looking forward to a couple of months of quietness. But this Saturday, I'm in Galway. I'm in Galway at Lazerland. That's that gig that was rescheduled because I got the chickenpox. Come along to that if you want. There's very, very few tickets left. That'll be good crack if you're on Galway. Then on the fifth of, ninth of May, daytime gig, right? 1.30 in the day up in Maynute, at Maynute University as part of the Arts and Minds Festival. I've got a cracker of a guest for that. That'll be really interesting. So if you're doing fuck all at 1.30 on a Saturday, come along

• 42:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  to that one. Then on the same day, at around five o'clock. I'm at Wellfest, which is at the Royal Hospital at Kilmainam. A lovely fucking venue, wonderful venue. Wellfest is at that and I'm gonna do a live podcast. Even though I'm aware that I just spoke about needing to take a fucking rest from gigging. And now I just told you I'm doing two gigs in the same day. But that's the last of it. That's the final ejaculation, if you will. Then I'm chilling the fuck out. And my next gig isn't until the middle of June, where I'm in Berlin for two nights. Uh, where, where is that in Berlin? The Babylon Theatre on the 19th and the 20th, I believe.

• 43:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  19th is sold out and a small amount of tickets left for the 20th. Looking forward to Berlin. Apologies last week for calling the Czech Republic Czechoslovakia. A few of my listeners from the Czech Republic mailed me to correct me. And I apologize for that because that's, it's like someone calling Ireland Britain. All right, so sorry about that. I know what the Czech Republic is. It's just, I'm old enough to remember when a country called Czechoslovakia existed and it's just stuck in my head. Sheffield in July at the Crossed Wires Festival on the 5th of July. Then October, big tour of England, Scotland and Wales.

• 43:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  So we're talking Brighton, Cardiff, Warwick, no, sorry, Coventry. The Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, Bristol, Beacon Hall, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. And I know those gigs are a long time away, but a lot of them, London and Glasgow. I think, I haven't gotten official confirmation, but there was people saying they can't get tickets anymore for those. So if you are coming, don't wait because those tickets will be gone, even though it's months away. So that's that tour. Now back to the chat with Callianis.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  I don't wanna say you've moved away from dangerous insects. But you've become much more like about biodiversity. But how I first came across you is you were the fella who had, I had to ask him to stop eventually. You came to a gig in Cork, man, with the most poisonous spider in the fucking world. Inside in a Chinese takeaway container.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  And you said that three or four times. I'm like, it's a lockbox. It had specific locks on it.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  It wasn't just that, but it was.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  It looked like a Chinese takeaway container, but I would not bring the most dangerous spider in Ireland to your gig in a Chinese takeaway box.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Okay, that might be my anxiety.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  I don't blame you.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  My anxiety, but it was the six-eyed sand spider.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  Yes. And look, come here, it's, they, the claim is that their venom is so strong because they're desert creatures. And desert creatures tend to have this really funky venom. Because if you live in a desert, everyone wants to eat you. And anything that passes by you that might be a meal, you have to be able to kill it quickly. Hence the massive amounts of either poisons or venoms that they carry in their body.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  And you also introduced me to two wonderful lads in Galway. Who work in what's called the Venom Lab.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Which it's, it's an amazing thing, like.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Sounds like a dodgy nightclub.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  It does. It sounds like a dodgy nightclub, but.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Jesus, they opened my eyes up to how important venom is to medicine. Like even, like the most revolutionary drug of the past three or four years is Ozempic. Like we all know Ozempic and GLP drugs. That comes from the bite of, is it a gila monster?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Gila monster, yeah. It's based on their venom. And venom has so many uses in general. I mean, everything from breast cancer to strokes to erectile dysfunction, all sorts of shit that venom can sort out. And so, and these animals, again, it's kind of like, we're kind of putting a, a, a, a human dimension onto what they're worth.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  But they're just living their lives. They're just trying to get by and survive like they have for millions of years. But. Again, if you're gonna quantify it and look at it in a human centric way, if we get rid of them, if we lose rainforests, if we wreck deserts, if we kind of lose all these important habitats where these creatures have been home for millions of years before we were around doing what we do, and we're selling ourselves short with these potential cures for all sorts of stuff.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  But it's, I guessed I had on this stage, the last gig I did here, I had Professor Jane Stout, who you work with, and what I boss, what I was chatting to Jane about was how i- i- in your field, in order to get people to give a shit about this stuff, you have to make the argument for capitalism. So when we're speaking about, you know, venom, it's like, well, well, they're not just insects, they can cure diseases. And the other thing we were speaking about was, it was the UN's, was it the biodiversity report that the UN did? The UN did this huge report where they had to use the language of finance, no, it was water.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  The UN said the world is approaching water bankruptcy, that because of how we're exploiting the ecosystem, that fresh water is disappearing. But all the language that they used was they had to go, this is like having a bank account, and you think the money is there, but it's gonna disappear. And they had to do this because of, they need politicians and people in finance to care about this stuff, because these are the people with the necessary power to try and stop it.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Which is bleak.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  It is bleak, and I mean, when you're kind of trying to do science communication, and I'm talking about the importance of dragonflies, it, it's hard to get it across to somebody who'd be very financially minded, and that'd be their foremost thoughts about, well, what's it worth? But you try and get the message across as best you can. Now, I find the best way, I, I reach out to people, and I'm doing a lot of work with the Trin D access program at the moment, which is a great program where Trin D goes out to less fortunate areas and tells people, look, anybody can go to Trin D and make a go, if you're interested in stuff and.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  When I go out to these communities, I'm, I'm, I bring a jar of tadpoles. And I'll sit down with the kids and talk and the parents will come in and they'll go, I haven't seen tadpoles in twenty years. Yeah. And I go, and I remember there used to be a little pond in the park over there. And there was those tadpoles and we caught them and we watched them turn into frogs. And you can see that childlike wonder coming back into them in, in adults. In adults. And then, and then when you reach the adults, because the kids, the kids are brilliant. There's a couple of things about kids, like, I mean, kids are naturally curious, all of them. And they're naturally into nature. They are, they all are. Some of them are naturally afraid of it, but into it at the same time. But we were digging a pond for the Trendy Access Programme. I went to, uh, school in Drimmna.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  And we were digging a pond and these were fifty, fifty year kids. And as we were digging it, I was getting them excited about, we're gonna put the tadpoles in, we're gonna put in native plants and explain all to them. And next minute, they all jumped back and said, what the fuck is that? And it was an earthworm. Oh. And I said, it's a worm. And they went, it's not real. And I'm like, yeah, it's an earthworm. Have you never tried to pick it up? So the pond was dug and it was gorgeous and all that, but there's more photographs of the kids holding an earthworm. Because, and I actually was talking to the teacher afterwards, and she was saying, I said, I thought you were taking the Mickey out of me, you know what I mean?

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Um, but, but what it is, is when they go home from school, most of their gardens are plastic grass or paved over. Most of the parks around are mown with an inch of their life, or they're just blank greens. And when they're even playing with their mates, they're online on headphones. So they've no access to nature, they've no connection. And that earthworm set them off on this whole thing. Now, now I'm gonna go back to school, hopefully. Um, very soon and help them with a bit of gardening, a bit of just getting a bit of dirt under the, the fingernails of the kids.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Fifty year kids. But when I was a kid, there was no fucking internet. So what we did is we hung around on an old building site. There was a building site and there was a dump and beside the dump, there was a pond.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Like I have kids now and I keep saying, I can't believe it. Like I, I did something today that you'd fucking hate. My two little kids were in the garden and there's a bit of long grass and I didn't want them there barefoot. And I said to them, stay out of there, there's spiders, they'll bite you. Oh, for God's sake. And I fucking. Everything. But I had to, I had to, because they're too small. I had to. And then I thought, Cali will fucking, I am doing that thing. I, I'm, I'm, they're so young and I told them be afraid of spiders rather than be curious because it was so inconvenient for me.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And now they stay out of the tall grass.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  You know, but when I was a kid, we just played with noots and frogs.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  We went to the building site, went to the pond and we were all playing with frogs and noots because there was nothing else.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Now I know that the kids who were my age then, they're not doing that now.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's that, it, it like, it's a digital disconnect is a, is a really way, a good way of looking at it. And, you know, the, the, the concept of getting out and, and finding things like the, that it's kind of a running joke with some, me and some of my friends. Is that real? Like, and that's literally what they say when you showed them a caterpillar, a frog.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean? They're thinking that's reality is a YouTube video.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  So if they saw that earthworm on a YouTube video, they're going, is that real?

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm, yeah. And it's, you know, to try and get them more involved in it and using digital. Media, there's wonderful stuff out there and I recommend all yous to get into this as well. And I'm sure when we were going down the lockdown route, everybody got into walking and got into looking at nature. But a lot of people got into Pokemon Go. We would have, we would have, yeah, out doing the Pokemon Go. So there's a real life Pokemon Go called iNaturalist and it's a free app you can get. And not only are you out there looking at, you'll get your head in some nettles and your arse will be up in the air. And people think you're a weirdo, but stick your head in some nettles this year because there's all sorts of little creatures in there.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  You're walking past them on your walks, you're walking the dog, you're looking after the kids. Stop, have a look in the nettles. Nettles are brilliant, really, really good plant.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  Loads of species depend on them, especially our butterflies and caterpillars depend on them to finish off their life cycle. But also there's all little predators in there from crab spiders to harvest men, they're all in there hiding away. If you have this little app called iNaturalist, which is free, you can take a photograph. It will educate you, will kind of give you a couple of ideas of what it is. Some scientists will identify it for you.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Oh, go away.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  And the data from that goes into a big, huge, massive data system. So if you're doing research, like if I'm researching a certain species, I can look at the maps, the date, the timeline. They're doing well, they seem to be dropping off. The more people are adding data to it, the more information we have about animals that, to be honest, which are pretty hard to study. If you're, if you're.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  So it's citizen science.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Citizen science, man. And it's fun.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  And it's ethical too, because you know what Pokemon Go was for, don't you?

• 54:26Speaker 04

  I don't have any, it's a few clocks can game with it.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  It's not far off it, man. Now, I was on this, if you're, if you've been listening to the podcast since 2018. I did the Pokemon Go episode in 2018. I went deep at the time and I looked at who was funding Pokemon Go. There's a company by the name of Inqutel. Now, Inqutel are, and they're an American venture capital company that get billions because they are the venture capital wing of the CIA, like fact. They funded Pokemon Go. Do you know what Pokemon Go ended up being used for? So have you seen, we don't have them in Ireland yet, but in America, do you know the, you can order food now and it's not a human that arrives at your door.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  A robot thing, yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  All the data of Pokemon Go, it was a way to train those.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  No way.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  So it went into training and you'd send people out into the streets and you effectively become a data harvester, a map for the streets. All that data was then fed back into these robots and that's how they can walk around. So with this, it's not bad. If you're harvesting.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  All the robots are creatures going into the knells.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  That's it, that's it?

• 55:35Speaker 04

  There you go, yeah. Or into ponds.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Um, speaking about invasive species, so

• 55:44Speaker 03

  these fucking, there's worms from New Zealand that I don't like the sound of at all and they're very recent, they're from garden centres. The, the New Zealand flatworm, apparently they're quite disturbing when you see them in real life as well.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  They look like a, a living board shit.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  What? Have you, are you coming across a lot of them?

• 56:00Speaker 04

  I, I abso- every time I see them, I nuke them from space. Um, they, they, they are everywhere. They, the land of gentry actually kind of brought them in.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Oh, so they're not as recent as they are?

• 56:11Speaker 04

  No, they probably were here for a long time before they started to really reproduce. So, um, ferns would have been brought over from New Zealand to Ireland and to the UK, to big centres. And then of course, the more exotic plants and stuff you had in your house, the richer you were. So people were getting these huge tree ferns and all, all these kind of posh exotic, uh, plants from, from all over the world. And New Zealand's temp- uh, climate is quite similar to Ireland.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  That it's, have you, have you been there?

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  There's parts of New Zealand where you're walking around, you think you're in fucking Dublin or think you're in Limerick, even the walls.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. They, that's what the, that's what the Brits wanted to do was to bring it to, in New England.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  I, I don't, I hate having a lash at the Brits every single time, but

• 56:58Speaker 03

  oh Jesus, they did some fucking terrible things to eat. Do you know what the Brits did? No, but seriously, like this is destroyed the arrogance of it, right? But when they colonized Australia, they literally looked around and said, this is a bit like Africa, this is. Let's get some African animals and put them here for the laugh. And now you've got wild, rabid flocks of camels.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  In the middle of Australia.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  That were just put there because some man called Sir Chumsley Wamsley decided it'd be a good idea.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Did you ever hear about the, uh, the story about the dung beetles in Australia?

• 57:34Speaker 03

  No, go on.

• 57:35Speaker 04

  So there was a point in Australian history where humans came over with all their cattle and the camels and the exotic animals. But there was no bovines naturally in Australia, ever. There was only marsupials and marsupial shit is very dry and crumbly. So every dung beetle, and dung beetles are hugely important species. They, they take shit and bury it and recycle it into the soil.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  They give the nutrients.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  For their young. So their lifecycle depends on the poo ball and their baby eating it and then coming out as an adult. So anyway, the Australian dung beetles are smelling all this cow shit and they're landing and they're drowning. Because it's not, it's not the marsupial dry shit. So what happened then was there was nothing around to bury the cow pads. And there was.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 58:29Speaker 04

  There was Australians who couldn't go out to have a beer outside because there were so many flies. The flies just multiplied and it was a massive problem. So I think he was a Hungarian scientist. And he came up with the idea of, right, we're gonna have to sort something out in Australia. So he went to Africa and he picked out every kind of dung beetle you could imagine from over there. And he systematically tested with very scientific methodology, not like the cane toad, he didn't just book them out there. He really, he really tested his theory and tried out different species. And eventually he found a few species that he could let go.

• 59:10Speaker 04

  They started going around burying all the cow shit and the beetles save the population of Australia from disease, from all sorts of horrendous conditions of flies just taking over the country.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  That's fucking so. So for a while cow shit became like plastic, it couldn't be decolled.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Get rid of it.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  That is amazing, isn't it?

• 59:30Speaker 04

  So the beetles came in and rescued it, but thanks to a crazy Hungarian, I think he was Hungarian, but anyway, um, uh, scientist over there. And like, it goes to show, like, if you're careful about putting invasive species, not invasive, potentially invasive species into an area to solve a problem. Nowadays, we call it nature-based solution. So say for a species of plant, like rhododendron, um, or for Japanese knotweed, um, which people have big problems with. Now, in their local areas, they're controlled by species that are in there. But the problem is, you could release a species into Ireland and go, it's gonna take over, it's gonna take care of the Japanese knotweed, but it won't, it might kill everything else.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Do something very different, yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you have to really, really look at it carefully. I know in the UK, they're doing a lot of work with certain fungal diseases that will affect, uh, certain plants. Uh, but you know, these, these invasive species, they're no joke. I mean, we have the alpine newts in Ireland.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  I don't know about these guys.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Ah. So one of my, one of my brilliant students, Aina, uh, back in the day, he was working for, uh, doing survey work in the, the Midlands. And he took a photograph of a newt and he goes, I think this is a bit of an odd looking newt. And it was an alpine newt in this middle of a bog, in the middle of nowhere, in the Midlands. And I'm like, what the hell is that doing there? That's not good news. Um, so anyway, we went down in the Frogmobile to investigate and, um, we, we discovered that the population of alpine newts were so dense in some areas. So say if you had a puddle this size, the size of this table, right? Just, you know, the way there's ponds like that in, in bogs that

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  have been walked on. And you dip your net in and you couldn't lift the net. And I'm quite strong.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  But you couldn't lift a net for the weight of them, like they were absolutely packed in.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  And that's way too many.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  Not only that, we didn't find any dragonflies, we didn't find a single frog. We didn't, like on a bog, that's insane. When you're on a bog, you should be walking and just frogs are going everywhere. So we didn't find any of them. So what was happening, and then we discovered like in certain areas, the alpine newts, because we check out their stomachs to see what they were eating. They were, they were turned into like a Komodo dragon type setup.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Um, do you know? That unnatural, they were getting larger than this.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no. Komodo dragons, sorry, they're not, they're not going to turn into giant newts, yeah. But Komodo dragons, before people brought, uh, uh, you know, domesticated animals onto the roost. They roost and they'd eat their own young to grow big.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  So a Komodo dragon in, in, in a state where there's no buffalo or goats around, how they get massive is by eating juveniles. And they gang up on them and kill them. But they lay so many eggs that all the juveniles go up into the trees. And they'll feed off bugs, stuff that wouldn't satiate an adult. But will feed and make a young one grow and then it comes down and then they predate on that. And the biggest and toughest survive. Not mad. Now that's, that kind of same stuff.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Unnatural, that, that is an unnatural system.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  That, that's a natural system for Komodo dragons, but what was happening with the alpine newts in these ponds, where they'd eaten everything. They were eating their own young, eating their own eggs, and they were just, just turning into these massive amounts of it. It's crazy. So, um, now we're in this kind of position where we really have to get them under control because.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  But how do you do this?

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Uh, New Zealand eradicated them using, um, traps with pheromones in it. So we'll have to look into something like that.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  That's better than bringing in a wasp.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Exactly. Now, the, the gas thing about the alpine newts is, and another one is the white too true, which is in the country and it's bullying our, our, our pygmy shrew out of the country. But the gas thing is those two species live with the same species in Europe and they get on fine. So you think to yourself, well, if we release, in theory, if we release them out here, there'll be no problems. But in Europe, you have also lots of other creatures in the food web. You've grass snakes, you've adders, you've other big newts, like the grey crested newts. So it's a completely different system. So Ireland is, is a really odd little place in Europe when it comes to biodiversity, because

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  a lot of the animals here are what we would call quite naive. As in, they wouldn't have experienced heavy competition from their European cousins ever before. So that's the risk you take when you're, you know.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  So they just, they freak out and get, I, I don't, I've never had to learn how to fight.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, never had to compete for food or space. And what's going on? Who is this fella? Do you know what I mean?

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  And is that an island thing?

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  It's very much an island thing.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Cause I'm thinking of the fucking, the dodo, like merameous.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, rats and anything like that, onto the island. Stoats, stoats being released onto, eh, eh, New Zealand by, you know, chumly wumly.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  But I heard too, who's the, mink aren't great in Ireland.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  They're terrible, but that was a disaster done by so-called environmentalists.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  So like, we have a mink problem in Ireland, right? But what I heard was there were environmentalists in the seventies. Who cared about the earth, who thought they were doing a good thing. Mink was being farmed in Ireland and they were like, well, this is particularly cruel. You have an industry where you're killing this little animal for its fur. So in the seventies, environmentalists said, well, free the fucking mink. And they did, and now we're fucked.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. People have gone into, eh, restaurants and taken out lobsters. Ran outside and I'm freeing the lobster and let it go. And it's a completely different species to the native lobsters. And it breeds and it kills everything off. So in Ireland, eh, no, it's happened, it's happened nationwide. You can't just take an animal, even though it might be horrible and cruel. And I couldn't agree more that mink farming shouldn't have been happening the way it was. It's a horrible system, especially for, you know, mammals are active and smart creatures. But you just can't let things out and just hope for the best. I mean, the massive problem we have in this country, like, and it's not just mammals.

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  I mean, the main one, anybody would tell you who's trying to do something good for biodiversity is like, and there's a lot of talk of rewilding and that's in a really noble pursuit. And it's hugely important, but it's rewilding, but you actually still have to manage the land for nature. You have to pull up the invasive plants because no matter what you do, you keep the deer out, but the plants will come in. You'll have to, you'll have to look, make sure that the, you do something to keep them out. Because if you just left it as is, as is, to just rewild, you would get cherry laurel in, in, in, in growing. And then that will smother out all the, the other plants. And, and that's a, that's a nightmare plant to get rid of.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  So just, so I made you about this a couple of weeks ago. So there's an area in Nimerick that I know, near a river. And they're trying to build houses there, but they can't because it's a fucking floodplain. So what they did recently is a lot of bulldozers came into this wasteland and they laid it bare. It's just soil. And then they found out we can't build here. Great news, but now it's just soil. But I'm going, fuck, yes. So I'm going down there with proper indigenous wildflower because they just till the land for me. And I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna change the ecosystem. I'm gonna rewild it with native Irish wildflower. And I think that's a, is that a good idea or are they doing?

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  It's, if, if you were to leave that as is, and hopefully, you know, it, it will be left and not built on. Because there's a massive problem in this country with, because we are desperate for houses. And I want people to be able to be home and all that. But you can't be building on floodplains. It's fucking ridiculous. And you see people with their hearts broken because they're in a gaff and they have their little kids there. And they're like, we've been in this house for 10 years. But you go through their historical records and it's like, it floods every 20 years. It's a floodplain.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  Why do you just get permission to build a gaff here?

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  Well, I got the brown envelope, you know.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  And I'm seeing it before, like, it's like, we know it's a floodplain, but they're there every year trying, each year they want the result to be different.

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  You know, and it takes people to complain and ring the council and go, they're trying to build on a floodplain.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  Keep the pressure on. If anyone is trying to do that in your area and you know it's ridiculous and make, kick up some noise about it and talk to media, but say, look, this place floods all the time. Why are they looking to build houses on it? It's, it's, it's crazy. But to get back to you, uh, carpool and, uh, wildflowers in there, um, the best thing to do for nature is to, to, to let it reseed itself, if you can.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  But will that not just get, like, I know there's Japanese knotweed there. If, if that's left as it is, yes, in, in a couple of months' time, it will regrow. But is that growth not going to be a lot of bullshit? Or is it better for me to go in with those difficult seeds that I had to get, had to get off the old man and the entrails?

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Well, well, first of all, floodplains are quite rich. In, in, in all the, the water that don't there.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Very little to see.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. So there'd be a different type of soil than you'd need for wildflowers. They're like kind of poor soil. So they might.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  If you were me, would you be like, just fuck off?

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  Just lead it along, let nature take its course. If there's Japanese knotweed down there, somebody asked earlier on, I believe, about tackling Japanese knotweed. Call someone in for that because the danger is i- i- in trying to be a good person and trying to do it yourself, a tiny little piece of that gets moved somewhere else and it takes over. You know, it, uh, maybe an important wilderness site or something. But call it in, make sure you call it in because councils are paranoid about that. They want to make sure that it's under control. But, you know, the best thing we can do for nature sometimes is leave it be with a little bit of hard management when it comes to evasives. Does that make sense?

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  It does.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  So you let nature do her thing, let the native plants and the thing about the native plants and it, you're right, it's hard to get the seeds.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  But sometimes if you just leave it alone.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  They'll show up. I mean, the great success story we had was the rare orchids coming up on the front square of Trinity College. Oh, tell us about that. Yeah, so we stopped cutting the lawn in the inside gate. So the outside gate of Trinity College, we stopped cutting the lawn a good few years ago. We went to a vote in the college. We asked the college community, would you be interested in doing something visual for nature to say, look, we're in a biodiversity crisis and we're going to try and make a difference. And 90% of people said yes, which was very shocking to me. I was delighted. So we planted it out. It's not all native, but it's very wildflower friendly and it served the purpose of making a statement at the time. And we're learning as we go. Now, the next phase of

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  that, we said, we're not putting in anything non-native. We're going to let native plants seed themselves, naturally, with a little help from a wonderful plant called yellow rattl. And yellow rattl is a parasitic flower that eats other root systems around it to help with nutrients. And they call it the meadow maker. So we threw a bit of that in. Cut, let the grass grow. What is that doing? Is it taking care of like? It's taking the grass away mainly. And that allows patches for the dandelion seed, for the comfrey, for tree foil, for all these little plants, native plants to get in and get a bit of light on and start growing. But when we did this, Jenny, you had Jenny on

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  the podcast, who was a brilliant botanist from Trinity. She was passing by and just her eye just went, oh my God, that's an orchid. What's it doing here in Trinity? And just because we provided a habitat, again, it gave it the space to grow. Do you know where that seed came from? We have no idea. Do you think it could have been dormant for years? It could be dormant for ages. It's the same with the... You know, when we were talking about the ponds earlier on, and you know, I was saying you're going past areas on the train and you'll see all the troughs there. But also when you're going past areas and fields on the train, if you see massive, do you ever see the massive amounts of reeds? They're like the short green reeds, but they're real thick and they're like in fields. If you fall on them, they go in your eye.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're spiky. And but they are usually an indication that there used to be a water body there. Go away. It's a wet patch in the ground. And so it's a really good way of kind of noticing. This was once a pond and now it is not a pond anymore.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Maybe or maybe not. Then you go to the uh OPW maps or the old maps. So there's a great project in the UK done by some of my colleagues called the Ghost Pond Project. And yeah, and it's it's not a hard news coming out in the middle of the night going, woo. And but uh what they did was they they went around ponds area, they really trialled it out in Norfolk. And Norfolk would historically had a lot of these kind of farmyard ponds. And what they did was then

• 1:13:18Speaker 04

  looked at patches, looked at the kind of the war, the wet loving plants like reeds. Said, okay, and they marked them all out. They went back to the old OPW maps and the old maps going back generations and they'd find a pond. Then they'd get permission from the landowner with grants from the government, which is important because they are giving up a bit of patch of their land. And what they did was they got in with a digger and very carefully went down to the original mudline of the pond, which will still be there. Does that make sense to you so far? Now, when they're digging out the ponds, what happens is the water level finds itself naturally. Fuck off. So it reforms. But not only that, the best thing about it is they were finding some seeds in there.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. That had been extinct locally for generations. But the seeds were kept there waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years for somebody to come along and give them a bit of sunlight and some air. And the whole ecosystems came back to life. Is mycorrhiza in the soil part of that too? All the stuff, everything, all the different bacteria, all the, all the, you know, uh the fungal elements, everything would have come back because it was all sitting there dormant, waiting. For a chance to grow again.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  And are these are natural ponds that are old or are they manmade ponds that are old?

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  Natural ponds that were old, probably used for, again, for watering cattle, watering sheep.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  And did they have, is it, is this, what do you call them, fens? Is it groundwater coming up?

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Some of them, some of them would have been, some of them would have just been a wet patch in the field. Like, you'd often hear, you know, do you remember, uh, um, the fast show, Ted? I'm gonna, I'm gonna drain the wet patch in the field.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  But that was always a thing.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

  Draining.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  People draining it for tillage to put the cows on it.

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  So these, these ponds are in Ireland as well. So there's a, there's an opportunity there to kind of, um, do work like that. I know there's a few places around that are doing really good work, like Hares Corner is a good, is a good little society in Ireland. But like, to incentivize people to say, look, it's great for biodiversity, it's great for, uh, to, to bring back potential species that might be extinct.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  You, you can, the beauty of that, right, is you can tie folklore and stories into all of that because it's the, you can find old stories that would have mentioned a body of water that doesn't exist there anymore.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  I knew you were gonna talk about folklore.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  It's true, absolutely. Fucking, but the names of Mayo, Mayo up in, in, in there on the top left. Like, it means plain of yew trees.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  But the yew trees are gone.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  You know, so we have this here and.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  It's one of the most annoying things when I drive around estates in Dublin.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  I know, but the fake names, you cunts.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Oh my god, Oak View.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  And where are the fucking oaks, you pricks?

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  Who came up with this, some property developer?

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  Badgers ball bag, where, what's going on?

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  But I was glad, in Limerick, there's a place, um, they built a, a new estate in Limerick and fair play to them. They called it Towlerton. And if you go back into the language, Towlerton means like a burial place.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Ah, cool.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  You know, so at the very least, they built, they built a new hospital there, they built everything. But you can at least see the name is there and I know what this once was.

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Even though it destroyed a river.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  Scary going to a hospital named after the dead place.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, they didn't, yeah, actually that's true. Um, what I'm adoring about the pond information you just gave me is how similar it is to, so Mang Con when he was alive, God rest him.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Rest him, he was a great guy.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Um, fucking magnificent person. For Mang Con, he used to work with, uh, Home Tree. And Mang Con was all about rewilding forests. But what he said to me was, you can't just get an oak and plant it in the ground. He had to try and go and find ancient forest because what he was after were the microbes in the soil and the fungi. And where he used to find the best forest was hedgerows.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  It's between land where no one has like a foot long.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  No one's fucked with this for thousands of years. And if you go into this hedgerow and dig, and if you find a tree, you get that fucking soil and that's the start of your forest.

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Has all the, the, the microorganisms and all that will help out because hedgerows are essentially the remnants of our old forests. That's what they are.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  No one is bothered with.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  No one's bothered with them because they've been serving a function. And another way to look out for old forests is you see, do you ever see the lords and ladies, the plant that comes up? It's like a, it looks like berries on, on a kind of a, a stick. Um, Dog's Mickey, I think is the Irish name for us, okay, that, but, um, but, uh, you know, if you've spot all these things, and again, it's the importance, we're losing our hedgerows, they're so massively important. Now, another, a great study we're doing, um, hopefully this year is a study on, um, the traditional dry walls of Ireland, the stone walls.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Nobody looks at them and they're, they're, they've turned into ecosystems, they're extensions of the burn.

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  Do you ever think of that? No. So all the plants that live in the burn that are kind of stuck down there can move along these dry walls all over the country and get blown on the wind. Because they're damp, they're stony, you have all kind of, uh, lichens growing them. I know personally that our native lizard absolutely loves them. Um, frogs use them in the winter to hide down in sort of newts. So I get massive migrations to my ponds from the, from the dry stone walls. But it like hedgerows.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  When you say dry stone, what you mean like the old.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Old school, the people that were, that were built by hand.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  Thing of them too.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  And they're big, they're coming back as well from a folklore point of view.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Well, you've got fucking David Keown down in Waterford lifting the big stones. And the thing is too, well, a lot of old stone walls. They could, that could have been a castle a thousand years ago. And they would have gotten, you know, or a mound or something and they took that and then made the wall out of it. So you're talking about real ancient stones here. Yeah, and, and, and again, important habitat. I mean, lichens and mosses are something that people don't look at, but they're, they're incredibly important. I really started getting involved in snails recently, right? Good. But I tell you, I tell you, like, well, there was first, so when I was a child, right, I was friends with these Yanks. Um, about six or seven years of age and my neighbours were from New York.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  They'd, they'd come over and visit their grannies and they, they had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a year before we did.

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  So they would come to me and they'd, they'd have their ties of Donatello and this and like, look at these. I'm like, this is fucking amazing. I've never seen the cartoon. This is Yank shit. This is astounding. And then they'd leave in the summertime and I'd have nothing but the memories of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Okay. So I'd just get snails. And then paint the bandanas on the snails, you know, and give them Donatello or Raphael, that's what I used to do. But that was the last time I seriously engaged with snails. And then recently, what made me fucking love snails was.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  The reason they're on walls and on stones is those snails suck minerals out of stones. But then they put like calcium in their shells. But then the birds eat the shells and that's what goes into eggs. So if we lost snails, birds wouldn't be able to lay, lay eggs. Like. Yeah, it's. But like, come on, like, is that not astounding? You know what I mean? But the snails are the ones, because birds' eggs are, are calcium and, and they're getting that out of the ground. And the other thing I found out about snails too is, is. Because they are looking for the limestone in the soil, you can use snails almost like

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  like litmus paper. You know, if there's plenty of snails there, that means that that soil isn't acidic. Am I talking out of my arse?

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  I am a bit.

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  A little bit, but.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Go on, correct me, correct me.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  No, no, no, it's, it, it, look, it just goes to show that everything is important in the food web we were talking about earlier on, and snails are great indicators of a.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Is the egg thing, am I going a bit far with the egg thing?

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  Maybe a little bit far, but like, they, they, they do provide great nutrients and, and, and, and like a great lesson with eggs with was with birds was the, the DDT.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  DDT, yeah.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  I mean, um, I said that to me kid once and he thought it was a rap band from the eighties, but, um, the, the DDT was a, a, a, a general poison that was used to, to nuke everything, plants, bugs, mosquitoes.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Forty's and fifty's.

• 1:22:01Speaker 04

  Forty's and fifty's, and it was a wonder spray. But what they were doing was when they were spraying it then, it was getting into it, snails, beetles, bugs, all sorts of creatures. And it went up the food chain to, to birds. And then what was happening was because it was so toxic and it would affect their ability to produce calcium, when the birds were sitting on their eggs, they'd crush them.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  And it was particularly birds of prey, wasn't it?

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  Birds of prey, because they were at the top of the food chain. Any pollutants will always end up in higher levels in, uh, animals that live longer, but particularly predators. So all of your tuna in the sea, for example, tuna, the big sharks, um, all those big predators are very heavily loaded with.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  They heavily can't eat tuna a couple of times a week because of the mercury and the top of the food chain.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. Whales are the same. When they test whales and they're washed up, they have massive levels of, of these things. But like, you know, to, to, to round off that point, I mean, it's, it's great that we're kind of copping on to the fact that these, these chemicals that are so freely available, um, shouldn't be used and Roundup should be gone off the face of the earth.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  That's the one that may be responsible for the bee collapse, isn't it?

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's death by a thousand cuts, but it's definitely not good. And it's like, it's not good for them. If animals are dying around you.

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  You should be worried about the chemicals that they're using on the animals. We're the only species that I know of that sprays poison on their food to keep other things from eating it. And then eats the food. Like, it's madness to think. And I understand, like, you have to. We really need to think about, like, rejigging our food systems over here as well. Because we've become so reliant on, on bringing food in from abroad that, wait and you see, in the next couple of weeks, things are gonna get pricier because of the orange dope, you know?

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  And ju- just as an aside there, because I went researching into the DDT. You know that one of the solutions to the DDT was a man had to train a falcon to have sex with his head? See, then, that he agreed with that?

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that the falcon population was, like, almost to the point of extinction because their eggs were falling apart. And then they had to invent a falcon sex hat. You can buy them online, they're sixty euros. It's a fucking hat where they had to, a falcon has sex with your hat. And then it has loads of these little holes in it, and that's where you collect falcon comp. But that intervention allowed them to bring the falcon back.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  That was a very strange and ingenious man to do that.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  I mean, fair fucking play.

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And now, one of the top predators, natural predators for rodents in New York, for example, are the peregrine falcons.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  They're bringing them back for that, are they?

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  Massive population. It's the biggest urban population in the world. There's so many of them now, that, like, they're just everywhere. And they're doing really well because the DDT isn't in the system anymore. Now, the other things we need is to kind of reconsider our rodenticide. There's a lot of stuff we need to work on still.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  I'd love to chat to you about fertilizers because, so I did the podcast last week about the fuel protests, right? Now, I was supporting the protesters because I just fucking support protests. I was making the point that some people were like, that's not how you protest. If you wanna protest, just go out onto the street and march. There's no reason to be stopping the traffic. The point that I was making was... The social contract has eroded. So back in the days, those farmers would have had a really, really strong fucking union. So they could have protested politely and then the union would have spoken with the government and, and conversation would have happened. But because all that has been dismantled, now you end up with protests that has to

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  be really, really disruptive. And that's because unions have disappeared, you know? Toothless crocodiles. That's it. So the other thing too is, so the, I think it was the UN did a report and they reckon that 40 million people are now at risk of famine and poverty because of the past month. Because most of the, 20% of the world's nitrogen needs to come out, is, is being made in the Middle East and it needs to escape the strait of hormones. So that's 20% of the world's nitrogen. So 20, that's fertilizer. 20% of that did not leave. The growing season was missed and now as a result, a load of food was not grown

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  and prices, we're going to experience it as higher prices come September, but people in the global south would experience it as famine and debt. And that's what the UN had to say a couple of weeks ago. And I got really pissed off and I said to myself, the fuck is going on? Why is all that fertilizer being made there? And the reason is unfettered capitalism. Ireland used to have like a national fertilizer company. We used to make our own fertilizer and it was run by the government, like electricity, like trains. To avoid this specifically, it's like fertilizer is so important, we need to make it in Ireland so that this doesn't happen. And then, once the Berlin Wall collapsed, you had unfettered

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  neoliberalism, the Gulf countries, because to make nitrogen, you need to have natural gas. So it all became there, but it's like, we can make it really cheap there. However, there's this thing called the strait of hormones and Israel and Iran might have a scrap at any point and all of it has to come out of there. They put profits before the needs of people. They put profits before food security. And now this is where we are. But at the same time, fertilizer is shit.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  Because fertilizer has created huge problems. Is is there a way for for Ireland to grow enough food that we need without relying upon fertilizer that destroys the environment?

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  Not my field of expertise.

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  I know, like, I'm sure you've thought about this.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  Well, I do think about it all the time. I'm an avid gardener, always have been. And I've always had an allotment or somewhere where I can grow my own veg. Try to do it all the time, try and get enough, especially during the summer months, get me spuds up and and and a few other bits and pieces, like practical stuff that's easy to grow, they grow. And I'm trying to teach my kids about that too. I think it's a skill set that has been lost in so many people. To be able to grow your own food is massively important because you don't know.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Are you doing your own fertilizer? You're mulching and composting? Okay.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, not creating it myself, but the chickens are. So, yeah, so all the scrap goes into the chickens. And I use I use the cockroach poo.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Oh shit, you've got those brilliant Japanese cockroaches, haven't you?

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, Madagascan's hissing cockroaches and I have them in big drums. So all the kitchen waste goes into them and then fill it up and make it into guano. And then that goes on the on the plants as well, so.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  And they do hiss when you open?

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  You do, they do. And people look at you strange when they go, this tomato is delicious. And you say, yeah, fed on cockroach shit.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  And how are those? Would you recommend I get some of them?

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  Well, it depends and.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  But that's the thing, like, if I like, I want to start composting. If I want to fuck a lot of cockroaches into it, am I gonna destroy Limerick? But you know what I mean? Like, they're from Madagascar.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  They they're not, they're not potentially invasive because they need a very heated area.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  They can't survive, okay.

• 1:29:44Speaker 04

  The practical thing to do is do a warmer. It's really easy to do.

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  And that's what our earthworms.

• 1:29:50Speaker 04

  Earthworms, yes, and that's a fantastic way of doing it. If if if you can keep a couple of boards or something like that, I think keeping chickens is a great thing to do. Lots of battery hands need rescuing. It's a great way of getting a bit of knowledge up. If you live in a very small back garden like I did for 60 years.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  You doing it in the city? In the city in Tala, were you growing chickens?

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  I couldn't grow chickens because you just couldn't.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  Both of us are saying growing chickens there now. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I couldn't keep them, but I kept quail. So you can keep quail who will give you eggs. And I was under seventy seven, eight, eating quail eggs, going into work in the morning, thinking I was getting notions. But you could keep them, you can keep them in a, in a, like a, a guinea pig container. And you can, they're essentially the same as chickens, but a lot smaller.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  And using their poo.

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  Use their poo then for fertilizer. My, my big thing, a- a- as well as biodiversity and, and, and, and nature and getting involved and getting out there and doing the real life Pokemon. If you can, try and get into a bit of growing your own stuff and push for community gardens. Push for community gardens in your own, they've taken all that space that was once open to people to have like, uh, market gardens. That's all gone, you know, and if you were the suspicious type, you'd be thinking, why is that? You know, the ability to be able to grow your own food, even to like sustain you for a little while.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Was a market garden a market you go to and the food is grown by your neighbors?

• 1:31:21Speaker 04

  By your neighbors, yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And like it, it, it, you know, places that, uh, in, in times of war, like the, the, the English did a great job.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  Victory gardens.

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, dig for victory. In Cuba, when they went through hard times with blockades, they turned every Castro got them to grow on every shelf, every roof. They'd have gardens growing stuff. So it's really doable and achievable. And I think again, as well as everything else, you're getting connection with the soil, you're getting out in nature, it's great for your head.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  It's great for the head and again, again, it's like even something simple, I find with, like spring onions. We all use spring onions. No one wants that bit at the end with the haircut. You can just get that and put it into a pot and it grows into a new spring onion or another one. And I found this out yesterday. Do you know the way you buy the basil in, in Donzeraldi? And you buy that fucking basil plant and you go, excellent, basil forever. And then it dies after a week. And you're like, what's going on? Like, I knew it was planned. I knew it was deliberate. But I found out the reason the basil plants die is it's not a basil plant. It's like twenty basil plants in one pot and they just kill each other over, over competition.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  So what, what, what you can do is get your Aldi basil plant, take them all out and then put them into little pots and then you have forever basil.

• 1:32:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Split them all over. You just, you just tweeze them all out and put them in a row and then just repot them all. Keep them on a windowsill. Fantastic.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  I mean, that stuff is great. I'm, I'm doing the, I'm growing spuds for the crack. I'm doing whatever I can.

• 1:32:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:32:58Speaker 04

  I got blight this week.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  Go away. Did you fair fucking play to you?

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  The earliest I ever got it, and I came into the house and I was like, there's blight on the potatoes. And my son is like, you're so old. And, and I was really disgusted because I was like, what the fuck do you do? Like later in the season, you can still get them out. But like, this is mad early to be getting blight. So I'm just like, I bit this heart and bush. I have Jerusalem artichoke, so they'll get me through if I, if I'm stuck.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  I heard a good, a good solution for blight in Ireland would be not to spray it, but to go to Peru. Bring a fuckload of, like, because they have loads of potato varieties where it's indigenous.

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  But even the ones that we can't eat, because there's potatoes we can't eat. And if you grow loads and loads of those, that can protect against blight. Now, I know you're bringing loads of non-indigenous.

• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  And also the whole flying to Peru thing is a bit difficult, but.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  There's that, but you know, I always say to people too, the famine is the original climate collapse. We brought in.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  An invasive species.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  An invasive species. And it, but the other thing too is, is it was a monoculture. And when you were speaking earlier about the, the newts and the newts are doing so well. That's actually what happened to Irish people when the potato came in. Because when, when the Brits, like, so post Cromwell, they're really like serious about the colonization. And they kicked the Irish off the land and said, fuck off over there to Connacht, right? The farmers that were brought from England, this is actually interesting because this, this, you can explain why there's orange marches because of the type of crops that were grown. So the colonization of the South was mostly English farmers, like from England.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  They were growing wheat. The wheat wasn't doing very well here. So those farmers that were colonizing were like, fuck this, this isn't working. So in the South, they said, I'm gonna sell up and I'm gonna go back home to England. And they sold their land to giant farmers. So that's how you ended up with the massive landlords down south is the wheat wasn't growing effectively. But up north, they were Scottish Protestants and they grew oats. And the oats grew brilliantly up north. So you ended up with a community of people there who were able to remain solid. So that's one of the reasons why the colonization was so effective up north. Was because oats grew better and the English ones couldn't grow the wheat.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  But at the same time, the Irish are over in Connacht and they're growing this new thing, the potato. And the plan was, I think it had something to do with the fucking penal laws.

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  In order to effectively stop the Catholics.

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  If you had land, you couldn't give all of that land to one son. You had to divide your land equally to all of your kids. Smaller and smaller. Smaller and smaller and smaller. So Catholics couldn't have power. But the fucking potato stepped in. So what was designed to try and starve the Catholics. Cause if you have fuck all land and you have to grow grain, you're fucked. But now the potato is there. So unintentionally, the Catholic population exploded. So that's how we went from, I think it was about three million at the end of the 1600s to nearly eight million by 1840. It's the amount of calories that the potato could give to people with super food.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. But then of course, it's all one type of potato. It's all, they're all related. And then the blight comes over from, on bird shit. Hmm. Guano. Came over on guano, from Panama and from Peru. And that's how the blight got to Ireland, but then everything's gone at once. Yep. You know, so, so that is a story of climate collapse and it's there in our fucking history. Yeah. You know? But I'd love to, before I take questions from the audience, why I brought you out is, we're in the middle of April. This is the fucking time of year for action, for everyone here to do one small little thing. What would you like to leave people with? What piece of advice?

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  Just to give people a little bit of hope for starters, because there could be a lot of grim stories about nature and climate and everything. But there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of practical actions you can take, no matter where you live. If you're fortunate enough to have a bit of a garden, please, please consider putting a shoebox sized bit of standing water with some native plants in it, a couple of stones.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  That's not even digging the ground.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  You don't even have to dig the ground. You can build it up around if you want and try it out. The great thing about ponds, and I'm always, I've been pushing ponds for 20 years on people, they're very addictive. When you see how effective and quickly you can bring some life into your garden, and how fascinating it is, you'll want to step it up a little bit.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  Here's a tiny question, Ollie. So I have pots of water at the back, right? I haven't fucking gone near them. It's just rain, right? At what point does that stop being a bucket full of rain? And when does it become a pond? But you know what I mean?

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. So there's a lot of different types of pond. And the classic description of a pond is something that sunlight can get from the top to the bottom. So it could be the size of this whole vicar tree. But if it's shallow enough, you'd call it a pond as opposed to a lake. But there's also ephemeral ponds, which could be the size of this table, or like I said, a shoebox, that tend to dry out during the summer. They're really important habitats. Then there's other ponds that are just covered in leaves, and they're swampy, and they're stinky, but they're brilliant for dragonfly or hoverfly larva called rat-tailed maggots who breed through their arse. And they're fantastic

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  little bugs. So all these different things, to answer your question, there's all sorts of different ponds. So that bucket.

• 1:39:07Speaker 04

  That's sitting there and if it's holding water and it has some algae growing in it and it has some daphnia in there is essentially a pond.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Is that a pond though, as soon as it's been assumed?

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  Essentially a green wall pond. So we had a great movement we were doing for a while, we were called the micro ponds and we were taking, when the flowers come out into your florist shop, they come in these black, you've seen the black plastic tubs, all them get thrown out. They're not recycled or anything, they're just thrown out after the flowers are out. So we were taking them and doing pond building courses. So people could dig a hole in the ground, stick it in, put a bit of substrate on the bottom of the pond, put a stick in it, put some, we'd give them some hornswort, native plant, throw it in and everybody was buzzing off it. And then of course they'll put another one in and another, or they'll just enjoy what they're after doing.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  The point of it is you can fit it to your budget, you don't have to make it massive, you can do it, if you have young children, you can cover it with galvanized steel mesh if you want to, or just do one that's shallow, you know. They're very easy to do, they're incredibly good for nature. On top of that, anywhere in your garden, you can't leave a bit of a mess, leave some rotten wood, leave some piles of leaves, leave some stones. When you just go out to move the wheelie bins to put it out for the lads to take away, I guarantee if you look down, you'll find woodlice, slugs, a worm, something looking for a home.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  So leave a permanent spot for them because they'll find that spot, but you're also naturally feeding the blackboards, especially at this time of year, the blue tits and all that. They're looking for bugs in those places. So it's really easy to do. If you can't do it, if you haven't got the opportunity to do it in your own garden, encourage somebody who has a garden to do it, or go to your community space and see if they'll let you do it.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  One we said the last time is if you're working for a giant company, one of the multinationals, right, they're always trying to do some type of woke HR shit.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  They are. Go to them and instead of them taking your whitewater rafting, you go, what about we all have a biodiversity garden? What about we all have a pond?

• 1:41:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  The cunts aren't paying taxes, you know what I mean? And they'll do it. You know, HR people are sound. They replace the unions, but.

• 1:41:37Speaker 04

  And there's plenty, there's plenty of people out there who are really good at teaching these kind of skillsets. Wild acres down in, in, in Wicklow's a great place as well. There's lots of places you can go on Google online, nature courses and stuff like that. Leave a mess for nature, leave some piles of stones. Get interested, get invested, see what's there. Just, just try and give it a bit of breeding space and I guarantee you it'll be great for your head. It's good for your soul. And, and I'm, you know, over the years, we've been talking about this for a long time. And I get messages from people all the time about they've done this. And how much joy it's brought to their life and thank you very much. And it really is, because it is a hard gig.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  Sometimes talk about this all the time, but that is just, it, it brings me a lot of joy as well to see people getting a kick out of it. And giving a home to some creatures that we need in the world.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  And the subject of, of good news, right? One of the first things you woke my mind to, and I'd never thought about it, as you said to me back in 2018, do you remember when you were a kid and you'd drive out the country? And the windshield would be full of insects. And at that moment I said, oh yeah, fuck, remember that. And that was really sad because I'm like, I do remember that. I thought it had something to do with the cars we had back then. Oh shit, the insects may not be around anymore. But when we drove up to Dublin today, I saw a bunch of insects on the windshield. Like, I was speaking to Jane Stout and she is responsible for the All Ireland Pollinator

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  Place. And so this is why if you go around the country, your roundabout is messy and not being mowed. Now, I was asking her, I'm like, look, come on, is it working, is it working? But she's a scientist, she's like, can't tell you that's why.

• 1:43:27Speaker 04

  Jane's a lot more cagey than me, and rightly so.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  But you, you said something last year where you said, I've seen more pollinators in the first month of this summer than I saw all last summer.

• 1:43:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a bumper year for them. And that's anecdotally, it's my own experience. But I've been looking at this stuff for years and, you know, I think I have my eye in and I do kind of take notes of what's around. And it was a bumper year, it was a really good year. Just like this year for tadpoles has been incredible, incredible. Like ponds, I've been monitoring. And they're just full of life. And that's the way nature goes. And you do get ups and downs. And that's what Jane was talking about.

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  You've got to be careful.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  You have to be careful.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Working.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it's the first time in 10 years I've seen splats on cars. Like insect splats on cars, loads of them. And I've noticed on my own car, and it's great to see. It's a bit, like, maybe it's just a blip, maybe it's, it's not, but.

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  But at the same time.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  It's good to think that we're going in the same direction.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  And houses are doing this All Ireland Pollinator thing and people are listening and we're seeing wildflowers there. And this is what it's supposed to do.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  Yep. And like, it makes sense to me that if all this habitat has been created for them, and they get a good year with some good weather, then they have somewhere to go. As opposed if it wasn't there. And Jane doesn't take enough credit for what she's done with this. Like, it's a really, really unique way of promoting. And of course, pollinators were used as the, the kind of the mascots for. But Jane's a scientist, she wanted to get every insect in there. But when you're trying to appeal to the masses.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  You've got to go with bees. You can't go with someone breeding out of their arse.

• 1:45:06Speaker 04

  You can't go.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  Or a fucking thing crawling along.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:45:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even though I need to see one of them, I need to see that.

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  I'll show you, I'll show you a video, I'll send it to you later.

• 1:45:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Please do.

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, so we went with the pollinators, but it's to bring everything, carpenters, beetles, dung beetles, everything along, because all the habitat.

• 1:45:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Spiders, you don't want to talk about the spiders.

• 1:45:25Speaker 04

  Spiders, I love spiders.

• 1:45:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know you love them, but a lot of people, like I just did, like I said, I did it this morning, I said to my kids, spiders, stay the fuck out of the long grass.

• 1:45:33Speaker 04

  Imagine the all Ireland spider plan, that wouldn't get very far with the kids.

• 1:45:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  The all Ireland spider. It's quarter to eleven and ye have buses and homes to go to, right, so I'm gonna say goodnight to everybody. Callie, thank you so much.

• 1:45:46Speaker 04

  Very well.

• 1:45:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Callie Ennis. Um, that was a beautiful chat, I knew it was gonna be gorgeous. Thank you to all ye for coming along, what a great night, go in peace, dog bless.

• 1:45:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  There you have it, that was a great night, that was my last vicar street of this year. I'm not gonna do another vicar street now until twenty twenty seven, assuming I haven't been assassinated by Limerick City Council by then. The Starlings will be returning to the Bardshit District, lads, in, I'd say maybe three weeks, three or four weeks. That's gonna be a big event for this podcast, I'm gonna make sure I record it. More than that, I'm after getting a special type of microphone called a contact microphone. And it doesn't, it doesn't record sounds in the air, it records the vibration of surfaces.

• 1:46:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what I want to do is when the Starlings return to the Bardshit District and they congregate in the trees, I want to record their song as it vibrates through the wood and then use that signal to control an analog synthesizer. And I'd be very, I've tried it already with Terry Wogan's head. There, there's a statue of Terry Wogan, a brand statue at the end of the Bardshit District. And I was putting the contact microphone on his head and hitting it with a pencil. And then I was able to use that to control an analog synthesizer, but with the birds.

• 1:47:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I just, there's gonna be hundreds of them in the tree. And I just wanna see, is a hundred, is hundreds of little birds cheeping? Is that enough to vibrate the wood so that I can pick it up on a contact microphone? I don't know, and I really wanna find out. And if I can get a signal, I can then input that into an analog synthesizer and make some weird shit for fun. Because I know there's gonna be more bird shit tourism too. There's gonna be very serious bird shit tourism happening in Limerick City this summer. All right, wink at a cat, dig a little pond, plant a bit of wildflower, genuflect to a nettle.

• 1:48:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'll catch you next week with a hot take. Dog bless.

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