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What happens when a natural history hobby turns into an obsession? Dylan Winter meets five different people whose love for all sorts of creatures has taken over their lives.
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1. Living with Adders
Sylvia Sheldon has spent so much or her time watching local adders that she knows them all by sight. She has photographed and named hundreds of individuals, using the head markings as inspiration for their names - 'Hockeysticks', 'Pawn', 'Knight', 'Spur'... To hear her talk about them is to understand the meaning of the word passion.
 Listen again to programme 1
2. Toad Story
Imagine spending night after night in the cold and rain, often staying out until 2am, to shepherd toads across a lonely stretch of country road. William Seale does this, a sort of toad lollypop man. He rides around on a customised tricycle, on the lookout for toads in need of assistance as they cross from one pond to another. Dodging the traffic is not easy for a toad, so William has devoted the last 15 years of his life to helping them.
Listen again to programme 2
3. Bumble Bees
Manfred Ingenthron is also up to all hours of the day and night, designing houses for bumble bees. An elderly German ex prisoner of war, Manfred has developed his garden in Kidderminster into a bee utopia. With over 40 carefully placed bumble bee homes crammed into his modest suburban garden, he has managed to attract over 1000 bumble bees at one time - more than all the bees in the rest of Worcestershire.
Listen again to programme 3
4. Don't fence Me In
To walk through Betty Clapson's tiny urban garden you need to walk sideways or bent double. It is heaving with trees and plants of every description, most of them in pots. It takes Betty several hours to water them every day, but she is well rewarded. Butterflies, bees, spiders, newts, hedgehogs, frogs, squirrels are all packed in. But Betty's work does not stop there - she photographs every insect and spider, catalogues it and saves the dead ones for investigation under the microscope. She has built a tiny network of motorways for newts to protect them from local cats and never disturbs a cobwheb, inside or out. Her terraced house is bulging with natural history artefacts of every shape and description, and the collection is still growing.
Listen again to programme 4
5. Adrian's Cockroaches
Did you know that ten cockroaches can live for a week off the glue on the back of a postage stamp? It's the sort of fact that has persuaded Adrian Durkin to devote his life to collecting these creatures.
Listen again to programme 5
These are all people whose interest in the natural world goes way beyond mere recreation. Their entire lives, and sometimes those of their families and friends, are sacrificed in pursuit of their extraordinary and often eccentric hobbies. Some are eccentric in other areas of their lives - Adrian Durkin, obsessed with cockroaches, spends part of the day dressed as a beefeater and Manfred Ingenthron hoovers his cat.
Whatever their circumstances, these are all people whose passions could never stay hidden. They were Born to Be Wild.
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大象传媒i Nature
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