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IN TOUCH – Birds and Gardening

TX:Ìý 07.06.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý We’re always saying, on this programme, that we want you to dictate the content and tonight’s edition is a classic case in point.Ìý No use saying it if we don’t mean it and your responses after last week’s In Touch was very clear – more nature.Ìý Well, last week we concentrated largely on gardening and we asked for your own techniques and tips for visually impaired gardeners but also, we wanted to know more about your relationship with the outdoors generally and particularly how you got up close to wildlife.

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Well, you didn’t disappoint us, you never do, so tonight we’ve brought together some of you.Ìý Martin and Jackie Brown live in the small town of Meghera, just a few miles from Belfast.Ìý Martin’s devoted to his garden.Ìý One of Jackie’s biggest interests is listening to birdsong.Ìý And later Beth Hemmings has been looking at some of the apps that can help you identify the birds you’re hearing.Ìý Meanwhile, Natalie Doig is from Biggleswade in Bedfordshire and her solution to getting up close to nature, despite deteriorating sight, is photography.Ìý And they all join us to tell us about their enthusiasms and how they pursue them.

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Let’s start with you Martin.Ìý You’re in your garden, I think, as we speak, which I know is your pride and joy.Ìý Just describe, first of all, the garden itself to me, it’s quite a big one.

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Martin Brown

Yes, yes quite a big garden, Peter, it’s probably somewhere in the region maybe five or six hundred square metres and then, of course, I have – well I must have at least maybe a dozen varieties of apple trees, pear trees, plum trees.

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White

Well, let’s come to the apple trees first because I know that they are something that you’ve got a passion for.Ìý And you planted these, yeah?

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Martin Brown

Oh yes, yes I bought them from nurseries in England and I’ve planted them.Ìý I think they’re maybe about five years old now.Ìý They have been producing fruit for about – well two, maybe possibly three years.

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White

Right.Ìý Now you had quite a lot of sight at one time, now very little, how have you adapted your methods of dealing with these trees because there’s quite a lot of technical stuff to do isn’t there?

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Martin Brown

Yes, there’s quite a bit Peter.Ìý I suppose I use my mobile phone quite a bit now, I use it for labelling – the WayAround app.Ìý I use a couple of apps for scanning the likes of my packets of seeds.Ìý If it wasn’t for that sort of technology, I would find it quite difficult and possibly, in some ways, maybe, I couldn’t do some of it I think.

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White

Well, because some of the techniques are quite tricky, sharp knives are involved, I think?

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Martin Brown

Yes, I’m into grafting at the moment, I’m not sure it’s a very good pastime for someone severely visually impaired or not but I’ve always wanted to try grafting.Ìý I would have been a nursery man, I think, I love plants, I love being around trees.Ìý And yes, grafting is quite technical and you do have to use knives and – well, you do have to be extremely careful.

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White

Have you had the odd accident?

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Martin Brown

Yes, I’ve had a few but it doesn’t put me off.

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White

And just for those who don’t know, I mean what is grafting exactly and why is it so tricky?

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Martin Brown

Yeah, well, grafting is – you’d have a root stock, say an M27 or an M26 – the number designates how vigorous the tree will grow.Ìý And then you have scion, which is the top of the tree, that is the part that will produce the apples and you have to take the tree, of course, and graft them together and of course, that’s where the sharp knives come in.Ìý You have a lot of different type of grafting.

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White

I guess you’re slower perhaps because some of the experts on this are really quick, aren’t they?

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Martin Brown

Oh yes they would be – they would put me to shame.Ìý I do it as a hobby, I’m not doing it professionally and I think this year now is my first year to actually do some grafting and I had, I think, 25%.

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White

That’s 25% that take, is that right?

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Martin Brown

Yeah, yeah.

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White

And just in a word, what does this garden mean to you?

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Martin Brown

Ah, it means just a pastime that I can get involved in and it relaxes me and it gives me a purpose.

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White

Okay.Ìý Stay with us.Ìý Let me bring in Natalie, Natalie Doig, who also got in touch with us about last week’s programme.Ìý Now you have some vision Natalie, albeit it’s blurred and lacks depth, your description, but your way of getting up close to nature is by using photography.Ìý Just explain what you do.

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Doig

Yes, my vision, I describe it as being a bit like a Monet painting, that – if anybody has seen a Monet painting, there’s very little detail and I’ve been like that all my life.Ìý So, when digital photography came along, about 15 years ago now, I thought well maybe I should give this a go because photography up until that point really was quite difficult for me and digital photography’s just changed the way I see the natural world because I can go out with my camera or even my phone and I can take pictures of things and then zoom in and be able to see stuff in detail.Ìý And for the last sort of 10 years, I’ve been trying different lenses and different cameras and just really immersing myself in nature and taking lots of photographs and helping me to see the world and then share that with others.

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White

Now, presumably, flowers and plants are a bit more cooperative than wildlife, do you prefer to do that?

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Doig

Primarily, yes – flowers and plants and you know to a certain degree buildings and people are a lot easier to take photographs of in that sense that you know where they are and hopefully they’re not going to move.Ìý What I discovered very early on was that just by complete serendipity I’d be taking a photograph, let’s just say of a dandelion, and I’d get home and there would be an insect on that image and I hadn’t even seen it while I was taking the photograph.Ìý When that first happened, I thought well why don’t I have a go, why don’t I take my time when I go out.Ìý It was interesting that you were just talking about things being slower when you have to take things slower, I think, sometimes when you’re visually impaired and take in that time to use my ears to listen for buzzing or for birdsong, if I want to take photographs of birds.Ìý I mean I take hundreds and thousands, probably, of images and there might only be one or two that are in focus and are useful to use but I don’t care, for me it's all part of being out there in nature and listening to it and being – feeling like I’m part of it.

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White

But you are keen on photographing birds as well but they don’t stand still and pose for you do they, so how do you cope with snapping them?

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Doig

So, I get [birdsong] ooh we just heard some birds then, it sounded like.

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White

I don’t think this was completely planned.Ìý Hold on there, Natalie.Ìý I think Jackie can possibly, from indoors, explain what’s going on.Ìý What is happening, Jackie?

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Jackie Brown

I have a bird clock in our living room and it just gave one of its hourly calls, every hour there’s a different bird goes off, you can buy this clock from the RSPB and every hour it emits a different bird.Ìý They’re all MP3 recordings and there are pictures of each bird on the clock and that was the Great Tit that just went off.

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White

Hang on – ooh I was going to try and stop you saying, I wanted to see if Natalie knew what it was.

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Doig

That one, I’m not sure, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not brilliant at identifying birdsong but what it does help me do is kind of judge the direction that the bird’s in and maybe if I’m lucky and it’s winter and there aren’t leaves on the trees I might be able to see the bird and get some photographs of it.

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White

Well, I’ll tell you what, we’re going to try and make that bit of identification easier for me, we’ll come back to you in a minute Natalie.Ìý Let me just stay with Jackie for a moment.Ìý Photography not really an option for you, being totally blind, but birdsong is, just explain, at the moment, where you are in the Brown garden.

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Jackie Brown

Ah, well I’m actually sitting on the sunny seat outside and it’s fairly quite out here, we call it the sunny seat, it’s just a bench and it catches the sun.Ìý I love to come out here and sit, just listening to the bird sounds and…

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White

And apart from your clock how do you identify the birds that you’re actually hearing?

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Jackie Brown

I’ve got a couple of apps.Ìý If I want to capture birdsong, I just sit where I am but it’s quite difficult to get the ID of the birds from the trees.Ìý So, I just guess.

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White

Okay, we’re trying to help with that.Ìý We’ve asked producer, Beth Hemmings, to give us a bit of a rundown on what’s available on the app front and which are particularly good for visually impaired bird enthusiasts.

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Hemmings

I’m at a park in Salford, I have two bird identifier apps downloaded on my smartphone – BirdNET and BirdUp.Ìý So, both of these apps claim to be able to tell me what bird I’m hearing above me by recording a snippet of its song.Ìý So, I wanted to only try apps today that are free and these are the two that came up as the top results in my android app store.Ìý So, I’m going to get as close as I can to where I can hear the bird call.

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BirdNET app

BirdNET bird sound identification.Ìý Recording stopped.Ìý Click the select button at the bottom centre.Ìý Click analyse to submit the recording.Ìý Detected species ranked by probability.Ìý Coal tit, Periparus ater likely.

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Hemmings

So BirdNET is telling me that it’s the coal tit that I’m hearing and next to the results there’s a little arrow button…

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BirdNET app

Unlabelled button.

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Hemmings

Ah helpfully unlabelled, so let’s double click on that to see where it takes us.

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BirdNET app

Loading, coal tit, Wikipedia, MacCaulay library, air bird.

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Hemmings

Okay, so it allows you to learn more information about the coal tit from three different sources that appear as little buttons at the bottom of the screen.Ìý So, this is an app that’s developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and it can identify around a thousand different species of bird but the developers are planning to expand it to around 6,000.Ìý This app also has an explore your area feature, this uses your phone’s location signal and it tells you what birds are most commonly heard in your area.Ìý But what’s quite good about this is it’s specific for the time of year, so, for example, it’s June, it’s summertime, and Salford’s most common birds are:

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BirdNET app

Common wood pigeon, Eurasian blackbird, white wagtail, common chaffinch…

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Hemmings

Now let’s have a look at how BirdNET compares to the other app I have downloaded BirdUp.Ìý So, BirdUp can identify around a hundred different bird calls from around 60 of the species that are most commonly found in gardens, parks and woodlands around the UK.Ìý So, I’m in exactly the same spot…

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BirdUp

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Hemmings

Ah, you actually have to press a button to begin recording on this one.

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BirdUp

Unlabelled button.Ìý Matches – blackbird alarm call, match, 43%.

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Hemmings

Okay, so apparently, I’m hearing a blackbird alarm call, which unfortunately is not a match to what BirdNET suggested.Ìý But quite a good feature of this app is it has a section where you can listen to samples of songs and calls from the birds that you’re most likely going to hear in your garden or your local park.

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BirdUp

Birds, selected, black cap song.Ìý A varied song of 20 to 40 [indistinct words] notes often confused with garden warbler.Ìý Sample [birdsong].

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Hemmings

So, both of these apps that I’ve randomly selected have given me different results, it could be a blackbird alarm call, it could be a coal tit or it could be both, that is pretty plausible.Ìý There are so many bird apps out there and unfortunately, I’ve not come across any that are fully accessible or solely developed for bird lovers who are blind or have low vision.Ìý I have heard of other apps, though, which do have some good access features, one is called Chirp!, which is only available on iPhones and BirdNerd.Ìý I’m really quite fond of that name.Ìý Right, well I’m going to pop back into this bush and see if there’s anymore birds that I can identify.

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White

Right, that’s left Beth in the bushes.Ìý Jackie, I’m just wondering how many of those you use or do you have any others to add?

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Jackie Brown

Yeah, we’ve tried BirdUp, which is quite good because I’ve discovered a new bird that’s been around for a while in our garden and it’s the goldfinch, it’s a lovely sound.Ìý So, I’ve got a nice little app called Birds of Britain, which lets you know all the different sounds of the birds and it gives you a description of them, in terms of its habitats and the Latin name for the bird.Ìý But it doesn’t identify the bird.Ìý I have great difficulty identifying birds because I’m often quiet a way from the trees where they are.

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White

And that seems to be the problem in a way, synchronising hearing them and then checking them, by the time you work out which app to try, which phone you’re on, isn’t that all a bit difficult?

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Jackie Brown

Yeah, it’s not the most foolproof way because a lot of the apps just have the word button, they’re not labelled and it can be quite difficult.Ìý And then if you want to listen to one particular bird it could be that you’re going to get a lot of other birds in the background, so it doesn’t really know what to tell you.

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White

Can I just nip back to Natalie, because I think you use Chirp! don’t you?

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Doig

Yes, haven’t used it recently but my memory of using it is that, again, it’s not one where you can record what you’re listening to, so it sounds a bit like the Bird of Britain or British Birds one, that Jackie just mentioned, which I know my mum uses sometimes.Ìý It’s one where you have to have an inkling of what the bird is you want to listen to and then that’s great, you can select the bird and you can listen to its call and you can hear some more information about it.Ìý I have to say, Beth, it was definitely a blackbird singing its little heart out in the background of…

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Jackie Brown

It was.

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Doig

…yeah and then I think it was doing its alarm call, which sounds very similar to a coal tit because it’s a kind of [pee pee pee….] noise.

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White

My head’s in a whirl about all this.Ìý Are you still with us Martin, over by your apple tree?

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Martin Brown

Yeah I am indeed.Ìý

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White

Could you get involved in this because you’ve got android and Jackie’s got iPhone hasn’t she, so presumably there’s a sort of competition going on between who’s got the best app.

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Martin Brown

I wouldn’t be as interested, I do love birds being in the garden but I downloaded that app BirdUp and it is quite good for identifying birds, I find it quite useful.Ìý

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White

There’s clearly a lot more we need to find out about this so any listeners who can give us anymore information, we shall continue to try and find out what the best way to do it is.Ìý Natalie, if I can come back to you because you’ve been to Australia where there are some pretty exotic birdlife, what were your highlights there?

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Doig

Oh it was amazing.Ìý The birds over there are so different to here, they’re bright, they’re colourful, they’re big and they’re incredibly noisy, the majority of them.Ìý And they also have fantastic names.Ìý So, my highlight was seeing a superb fairy wren and it was a small bird but luckily it was right in front of me, at a wildlife park that I went to, and my friends, who were with me, were like – look, look, it’s there – and they were able to show me exactly where it was and it’s bright blue.Ìý And then the lorikeet, the rainbow lorikeets are, again, another of my favourites because they’re just so bright.Ìý It was much easier to be able to photograph birds in Australia than it is over here.

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White

Right.Ìý I imagine, Jackie, you’re feeling a bit envious, although how do I know you may have done something even more exotic.

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Jackie Brown

No I haven’t, I love birds but the irony is that I don’t like to get too near them, I don’t like the flapping and stuff.Ìý I’m happy to sit on my sunny seat outside and let the birds do their thing in the trees or on the telegraph poles, that’s fine by me, just don’t come near me.

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White

Just one final thing, again, I want to go back to Natalie because I think people with some sight, the whole business of what you can achieve with photography, the way it can give you definition, sounds quite exciting.Ìý I mean what would you say to people who perhaps haven’t tried that or have only nibbled at it?

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Doig

Oh, definitely give it a go, there are so many different techniques that you can use.Ìý I mean I talked about using my hearing to help me identify direction of where things are but also just going out with someone else.Ìý So, my dad is a really good spotter for me and so is my husband.Ìý And then even if it’s maybe wanting to take photographs of stuff that isn’t moving, like plants and flowers, there’s some great techniques where you basically use string.Ìý So, you tie a piece of string to say the rosebush or the apple tree that you want to take a photograph of and you use that string as a way so that you don’t lose where that thing is that you want to take a picture of.Ìý And then with modern computers today you can enlarge that image, you can zoom in on what you want.Ìý So, if you’ve got some useful vision, and you’re able to use that type of technology, it really makes a difference.Ìý I didn’t realise, I’m – what – 48 now, so I was about 40 when I realised that birds’ eyes, they have this little like stitches around them and it looks like their eyes have been embroidered onto their faces and I had never seen that.Ìý It was absolutely amazing and it’s something I would never have seen before, if I didn’t have digital photography.

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White

Did you know that, Jackie?

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Jackie Brown

No, I didn’t.

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White

Nor did I.Ìý Well, look, we’ve learnt an awful lot today and there’s much more, so we’d like to keep this going and I would like to invite people to tell us more about what they do, either in terms of gardening or indeed birdwatching or following wildlife.

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That’s it for today.Ìý Many thanks to the Browns – Martin and Jackie – for inviting us into their garden and Natalie Doig for giving us a sound peep at her photographs.Ìý

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And pursuing our theme of access, very shortly we’re planning a programme about museums and how close up you can get to things there.Ìý Tell us your experiences – satisfactory and not so satisfactory.Ìý

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Email intouch@bbc.co.uk, leave your voice messages on 0161 8361338 or you can go to our website bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings – still in the bushes – and studio managers Colin Sutton and Jonathan Esp, goodbye.

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