´óÏó´«Ã½

Bill Oddie is attempting to charm out what Charles Darwin considered to be the most important animal on Earth: worms. He is not just being silly or showing off here, there is some science to this. You see, his recorder playing will be sending vibrations down into the earth and the worms respond to good vibrations, as it were, by coming to the surface. Actually, it doesn’t seem to be working for Bill but the birds are much better at it. They don’t use their voices to send vibrations down, they use their feet. When you see blackbirds going across the lawn, they often look as though they’re listening, since the head will go to one side and then to the other. But they’re not listening, they’re actually looking to see if they can see the slightest movement. And then they use the vibration method, paddling the feet to send vibration down into the earth - and hopefully the worms will come to the surface. But for Bill to show you some worms, he's just going to have to dig ‘em out. Now, worms do not have a head as such, they’ve got no eyes. But they are sensitive to light and that’s exactly why all these guys are trying to escape: they want to get somewhere dark, understandably, ‘cos they’re used to living under the ground. The sex life of earthworms is a little bizarre. They are all both male and female; hermaphrodite would be the posh word for it. But they do need a partner to actually breed, so if they were mating they would tangle themselves up rather like this. This is the collar, it’s known as. The eggs will be deposited in there along with the sperm and eventually after a few weeks’ time the little tiny worms will come out. And why did Darwin think that they were so important? Well, because they do a fantastic job aerating the earth, recycling waste material and so on and so forth. Your garden simply would not be as healthy as it is if you didn’t have lots of worms under there. And there are a lot. An area the size of a football pitch can have something like two million worms. So, even the littlest of gardens has probably got an awful lot of worms down there. Don’t hate them, do respect them, they are wildlife and they’re doing a fantastic job.