Nature Tripping

This episode is a departure from the usual format and is an immersive listening experience of the sounds of Dobarz.  Earlier in the year Jo and Cathy visited Eastern Poland, returning to an area near the Biebrza Marshes with an intense abundance and diversity of birds and other wildlife. Made from a series of continuous soundscapes recorded by Jo in a variety of habitats around the hamle...

Jo and Cathy meet with Ashar Aslam, a post-doctoral climate researcher at Leeds University who studies tropical storms. They discuss Jo and Ashar’s 2025 collaboration as part of Leeds Cultural Institute’s Creative Labs programme.  This brought scientists and artists together to think about climate change: Jo and Ashar decided to explore what happens if you recontextualise the climate as...

Bryophyte curious?  Join Jo and Cathy in this episode of Nature Tripping for a walk through Hardcastle Crags in Calderdale with bryologist Johnny Turner.   It might just look like green stuff but get close-up and the trees, rocks and streams are home to specialist species of mosses and liverworts indicative of Atlantic rainforest, as well as more common species once lost from the wo...

Jo and Cathy meet Bailey for an introduction to Regenerative Farming and a discussion about the experimental field work he has been doing with the University of Oxford on the impact of different types of grazing management on biodiversity.    Three different scenarios - conventionally grazed pasture, mob-grazed pasture, and passive restoration (where land is left untouched) -  ...

In this episode Cathy and Jo travel east to Poland.  Join them along the way as they cross borders and head into the primaeval forests of Bialowieza and the vast marshlands of Biebrza - both complex ecosystems, alive with the sounds of mammals, birds and amphibians.  The variety and abundance of species they encounter are astounding but also give them pause to reflect on what Britain has...

Jo and Cathy spend this episode with National Trust project officer and ecologist Steve Hindle on the slopes of Calderdale, in what looks like an ordinary field… but isn’t.  They discuss the fascinating lives of fungi and their vital but often overlooked role in the ecosystem, not only as decomposers or parasites, but also as symbiotic partners engaged in a range of very sophisticated relatio...

If you go up to Calderdale’s rough pasture and moorland during the spring and early summer you might encounter a variety of breeding birds – small ones like meadow pipits and skylarks and larger ones like oyster-catchers, golden plover, snipe and lapwings. There is perhaps none more distinctive though, both in its look and sound than the curlew – a large, elegant, brown wader with a very long curv...

It’s always a pleasure to hear from our listeners and on occasion people have asked for an episode dedicated purely to nature sounds. This is one such episode.  It’s a compilation of ambient field recordings made around the coastline of the Hebridean island of Tiree.  Slow radio indeed, and we recommend listening on headphones. This is an energetic and vibrant landscape.  You can im...

A stone’s throw from the river in Hebden Bridge town centre Jill and Kathryn make a discovery under their eaves: House Martins have arrived. A summer of ups and downs follows and we track events over the year to learn more about the lives of these ‘epic’ little migrant birds, and how to love a ‘pile of poop’. We also find out more about Britain’s other Spring arrivals swifts, swallows and sand mar...

What does rewilding in the British Isles mean, how do you start it off, and what happens when you do? In this episode we visit the 3000 acre Broughton Hall estate in Yorkshire with Rewilding Britain’s Alastair Driver to see how nature is bouncing back. A wide range of interventions and actions are now underway on land that was conventionally farmed for sheep and crops until very recently. Whether...

In an episode centred on climate change and community resilience, Jo and Cathy stay in their local town - Todmorden - to chat with Barbara Jones, a pioneer of natural building methods. Sustainable materials including clay, lime, wool, wood fibre and straw as well as stone and timber come into their own. We find out practical steps we can all take in our homes, whether they are old or new, to impro...

In this episode we visit Gronant and Talacre dunes with Mandy Cartwright from the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust to investigate the only Welsh population of Natterjack Toads, re-introduced after the Second World War. The shallow pools (scrapes) and sandy burrows provide a perfect habitat, but development pressures, predation, human activity and climate change mean life for these small, y...

What does the future hold for the ancient trees of the New Forest?  Join us inside the Forest, at Denny Wood, for an in-depth discussion with ecologist Adrian Newton and naturalist Lynn Davy.  Long term ecological monitoring of the woodlands is revealing the rapid and dynamic transformation of much-loved habitats that have existed for thousands of years.  Why is this happening? &nbs...

Cathy and Jo join wildlife biologist and hare expert Carlos Bedson on location in the Dark Peak to find out more about the only mountain hares in England. Their ancestors arrived on a train from Scotland!  500 metres up on the moor looking out for ‘white fluffy blobs’ Carlos explains more about the likes and dislikes of this amazing creature, his long-term survey work to map the extent a...

Join Jo and Cathy for a Gaelic adventure to find out more about one of Britain’s rarest bumblebees – the Great Yellow Bumblebee ( Bombus distinguendus ).  We meet ecologist Janet Bowler on the dunes to discover more about what one small island has done to keep its special bee buzzing.  Charlotte Vale and Molly Knowles contribute readings in Gaelic from Beataidh Banrigh Super-Bee, a story...

“Come, summer visitant, attach to my reed roof your nest of clay”.  In this episode Jo and Cathy look back to the Victorian era with poetry scholar Clara Dawson.  Clara introduces us to poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Christina Rosetti, Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, and the interweaving of human and bird worlds. What is revealed about the poets’ relationships with na...

This episode takes Cathy and Jo to Shropshire to explore a church graveyard. Harriet Carty, from the charity Caring for God’s Acre, explains all about these oases of species-rich grassland, and how to manage them.  As well as meeting some of the plants and other creatures that make the graveyard their home - bats, rooks, butterflies, bees - they have a close encounter with an ancient yew tree...

Following on from Episode 15 Jo and Cathy make a return to the peatlands, this time to a lowland raised bog on the outskirts of Manchester and Salford.  Little Woolden Moss formed over thousands of years but was almost totally destroyed in the 1990s by peat extraction – it became a barren, lifeless place, swirling with clouds of black dust. Jo and Cathy meet Jenny Bennion from the local...

Jo and Cathy venture into squelchy upland territory in search of sphagnum moss, a key species of the peat bog. Discovering that a third of the UK was once bog or fenland, and that most has now been degraded, they find out what needs to be done to restore these watery wonderlands and their carbon capturing powers. Up in Galloway they meet environmental artist Kerry Morrison and learn all about a ta...

Jo takes a trip up the west coast to the Inner Hebrides to join Cathy who is helping with the RSPB’s annual corncrake census on the Isle of Tiree. Locating these elusive birds involves listening for calling males in the dead of night. Join Jo and Cathy on a midnight journey to track them down, followed by an in-depth conversation with RSPB officer John Bowler who shares the story of the corncrake,...

Jo and Cathy resume learning birdsong in lockdown, this time tuning into the calls of the blue tit, great tit and coal tit. With Spring fast approaching, gardens, parks and woods are alive with the sounds of these three common UK tit species, but it’s easy to be confounded by all their chirping and tweeting, and treat them as background noise. In this episode Jo and Cathy set about investigating t...

Setting out to explore the River Colne, Jo and Cathy start at its source on the edge of the moors and journey downstream through urban West Yorkshire to its confluence with the River Calder. Their trip takes in weirs, walls, abandoned mills, industrial pollution, combined sewer overflows, liminal space and river life. As well as exploring the historical and present day human impacts on the river,...

Vast swathes of Britain's upland are currently managed for grouse shooting. As the official start of the shooting season kicks off (12th August) Jo and Cathy finally decide to confront this controversial topic. Listen in from their local grouse moor to find out about the history of this peculiarly British pastime, the ecological and environmental consequences of managing the moors in this way, the...

In this episode we take the opportunity to meet the warblers, millions of whom travel thousands of miles every year, returning to the UK to breed, and sing - possibly in a tree near you! We then reveal the often overlooked acoustic charm of the long tailed tit. [Timings: Willow Warbler @ 2mins 19secs; Blackcap @ 13mins 45secs; Long tailed Tit @ 25mins 03secs]

As lockdown continues Cathy and Jo go out to explore their immediate locality: a post-industrial valley cut deep into the South Pennine hills. They survey the landscape from the moor tops, with the skylarks high above them, then journey down to a small wooded valley to investigate what’s living in the stream. The episode wraps up with a visit to an area of nearby upland fenced off some 20 or 30 ye...