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The planet’s losing.
We’re in a hole. Climate, nature and social inequality crises. Story with a swerve gets us out. It’s the shape of all our lives. Up-down, down-up. And this shape of slantwise story, it creates hope and agency.
In this podcast, we hear from culture leaders and wanderers, the crossers of boundaries, the story-tellers. They share their ideas on how we get out of holes. Good story is not just a hiding place. It’s a finding place.
The podcast vibe is the warm-dark daguerreotype photograph, invented at the start of the industrialised era, before human-induced carbon pollution of the atmosphere.
My guests are writers and poets, artists and scientists, environmental and business leaders, farmers and landowners, local and national activists, festival directors, therapists, religious leaders. All are storytellers too.
The music clips at the start and end of episodes were recorded at public dances in Punakha and Thimphu (Bhutan).
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027. It is called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformative Stories for Climate and Nature Recovery."
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17 Dave Goulson on the wonderful world of insects, and why they’re only just clinging on
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In his wildlife-friendly garden in East Sussex, I’m chatting with author and scientist Dave Goulson about insects, and especially bees. “They’re clinging on in little fragments of habitat.” Across the world, there are one million species of insect, and perhaps another 4 million awaiting identification. But they’re in severe decline. The land has become hostile to insects, particularly from the use of insecticides and herbicides by farmers, gardeners and urban authorities. “It mystifies me,” he says, “why we allow the sale of poisons for our gardens.” We talk of the dreaded neonics – and how the poison spreads from fields into wild plants and thence to insects. Dave observes, “The system of pesticide regulation is fatally-flawed.”
He also talks of nearby Knepp estate, the great wilding transformation, and how it’s become fabulous for nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. Surprises happen, when nature becomes abundant.
Dave is proud of having established the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and of the role his research group played in getting neonics banned.
He has written many books. The most recent is “Eat the Planet Well.” Others include “Silent Earth”, “Insectarium” and “The Garden Jungle.”
He says, “There are simple things that people can do in their gardens, a gentle steer, don’t be over-tidy.”
Dave’s fine “ramblings on the wonderful, vital world of insects” are on his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@davegoulson6831.
His science website is at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p126217-dave-goulson.
My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."
It's the worst places to be. I love seeing here, I have to say.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Well, real pleasure to be the home of Dave Gouldson in East Sussex. Lovely day in summer. Thank you, Dave. And we're going to talk about insects, conservation in ecology, the state of play for insects and also what we can do a little bit in the face of long-term decline. So welcome to the pod, Dave.
SPEAKER_00It's a pleasure to be to be invited. Thank you. Brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Do you want to say a little bit about that that thing, this the you know the state of the world of insects?
SPEAKER_01It's kind of what I've been focused on for 30 or so years. My speciality of bumblebees, so let's start with those. I mean actually we it's for I suppose I should start before that by saying there are lots of knowledge gaps with regard to insects because there are so many of them and it's they're really hard to identify. We know of more than a million species. Um there are probably at least another four million waiting identification. So we don't know anything about them, we haven't discovered them yet. So it's hard to say with any certainty what's happening to their populations, particularly at a global scale. But in Europe and North America we do have long-term studies, and so to come back to the bumblebees, um, we had 27 species in the UK, three have gone extinct. About 10 have declined massively to the point where they're clingy on in you know little fragments of habitat here and there. Um so there clearly there's been enormous declines in abundance. Um, butterflies we've been monitoring since 1976 in the UK, and their populations are roughly down about 50%. So I'm slightly embarrassed to admit when I was a kid, uh, in 1976 I was collecting butterflies and putting pins through them. Uh something I would not do today, obviously. Um but I I learned a lot from that hobby actually, and it helped you know get me into insects.
SPEAKER_02Sometimes when you look in the in the identification books, they say, oh, look at the second vein on the wing of such and such to discover what it is, and you think you can only do that when you pull them out.
SPEAKER_01Butterflies, not so much actually. I mean you can identify most of the all of the UK butterflies without needing to look at them, you know, look at down a microscope or whatever, but for most other insect groups, you it's almost impossible to identify a lot of the species with certainty without having them dead under a microscope. Anyway, so butterflies have sorry we're gonna be interrupted by the delivery, ma'am.
SPEAKER_00I've got very little day.
SPEAKER_01That's brilliant, thank you. Just plop it down unless you need it.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Have a good day.
SPEAKER_02Thanks. That's the modern way. Yes, I know. So here we are, recording a podcast, the wind's in the trees, and and the visitor is just delivered.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's uh actually a birthday present for two birthday presents for my two sons. Both have birthdays in June, and they're they won't hear this podcast until after the birthday, so we're alright. We're alright. It's uh they're chocolate um pellets. Um they're both kind of in real foodies, so there's two and a half kilo sacks of uh chocolate for using cooking. Fantastic. Or not. Um completely lost track.
SPEAKER_02So insects, so bees, bumblebees. So you were bumblebees, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I've I've talked about butterflies are halved in abundance for which is you know, it's just sad to think that my kids are growing up in a world with roughly half as many butterflies in as the one I grew up in, and that raises the obvious kind of question, you know, what will the world be like for their kids? Will there be any butterflies at all? Um there's lots of other evidence. Uh uh perhaps worth mentioning, one of the biggest and sort of strongest studies is from uh Germany where they've been using Malaise traps, which are these kind of tent-light structures, to monitor uh f flying insect abundance since 1989. And they um published the first 26 years of that study back in 2017. Um, that describes a 76% decline in the in the sort of aerial biomass of insects. Right. So actual numbers of insects, numbers and species. Well, all they did in that first publication was weight literally weighed buckets of insects. I know, so um they they are still working through counting them and identifying them. And and the and the trapping is ongoing, so there's a new study coming out soon which describes what happened post-2017. Um and it's still going down. Yeah, um, you'll perhaps not be surprised to hear.
SPEAKER_02The next question has to be really well, what what is it that that is driving it all? Well driving that all. Habitat change will be part of it, but it'll also be certain compounds, insecticides, herbicides, things that we put on our agriculture, yeah, and and use in gardens and in urban spaces. So pick up pick up those that would be the two main things, isn't it? Is habitat change, average amount of land that is has got.
SPEAKER_01Certainly historically it's it's been massive, the habitat loss and and still continues, particularly in in the tropics, which which is where most insects, most of life lives, and we're still you know chopping down rainforests left, right and centre. Um in in in the UK things happened much earlier, you know, we we lost most of our natural habitat thousands of years ago. Um but um the way farming changed in the 20th century um is the real driver of of insect declines in in the developed world. Um, you know, the the move towards industrialised agriculture with bigger fields, mechanisation, artificial fertilizers and the adoption of pesticides, which sort of really started in the 1940s. Um and that sort of changed farming has gone from being a a system that produced less food but was um fairly hospitable to to life, wildlife, um, to a system of you know large monoculture cropping which which makes the land completely hostile to almost everything. You know, you're basically the farmer is trying to to to create a landscape with just one species in it, the crop, and nothing else at all. And we've become pretty good at that. But it you know it's it's it's devastating for wildlife. Um there are other drivers of insect decline, I should, you know, for completeness mention it isn't just um the way farming has changed. Um climate change is starting to have impacts, particularly on my bumblebees, which are kind of cold climate creatures. Um light pollution is recently emerging as a significant problem, particularly for nocturnal insects, but also for some day-flying insects because it's confusing the timing of their life cycles. So, how's it affecting night nocturnal? Well, the the most obvious effect of lights at night is it disorientates moths and other night flying insects, you know. It's the one time you do sometimes still see a few insects flying around is when they're bashing themselves against a light at night. Um it's it's kind of interesting as to why they're attracted to lights at night. You know, they don't try and fly to the moon, so why do they fly straight to lights? Um, but anyway, there's theories about that, but um perhaps not entirely relevant here. But anyway, it does draw lights draw them in, and you know, they basically waste their energy flying around and round in circles, bashing their heads against the bulb, and often they're picked off by bats or spiders or whatever, and so that's clearly not helping. Um but as I say, the the disruption of timing of life cycles is possibly much more significant because that affects all insects, which most of them in temperate regions have to time their life cycle with the seasons. Um many insects are only on the wing for two or three weeks, and there has to be the right time of the year. If they get that timing wrong, then they're in big trouble. Um and if they're near a light at night, then that may well lead them to misjudge the the day length. Think it's spring when it's still winter, for example, which is catastrophic if you're an insect and you pop out of your pupee in January or whatever.
SPEAKER_02There's nothing to eat.
SPEAKER_01Well, yes, and it's freezing cold and they're dead within an hour, probably, poor things. Um and the invasive species are having an impact and uh uh and so on and so on. So it's kind of like a perfect storm of of all these kind of um adverse factors. They're all man-made. Yes. Um, but we're making life pretty you know insects have been around for they're amongst the oldest creatures on the planet, you know. Their first insects arrived about 480 million years ago, which is like twice as long ago as the oldest dinosaurs. So they've survived several mass extinction events already. Uh the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the insects sailed through that and uh without trouble, but now they are in trouble when it's you know, it's us, basically.
SPEAKER_02So is it it is one way to see insects is as being this kind of connector within ecosystems that they're the food for other things, but they're also doing lots of jobs as you've described. Yeah. Without night moths, moths, mostly fine, without them there's no bats. You know, without bumblebees and bees, there's no pollination. So there's this kind of consequences that then roll for.
SPEAKER_01The rest of life on earth, on land I should say, would be devastated if insects were to continue to decline. As you say, I mean actually insects are food for a huge number of not just bats, but birds and freshwater fish and reptiles, amphibians, they all eat, well, not all, many of them eat insects. So that alone would, you know, if insects decline, and we're already seeing it, you know, things the decline of insectivorous birds has far outpaced the decline of other types of bird in uh in Europe. So, you know, swallows, swifts, house martins, uh, nightingales, cuckoos, all specialist insect predators, and all of them undergoing massive declines, fly catchers. Spotted flycatchers when I was a kid. We had them in our garden, they were common garden birds. In my lifetime, I think if I remember correctly, they've declined by 97% or something ridiculous. And I can't remember when I last saw. No, me neither. Even in the last 13 years, you know, we've lived here for 13 years. The first two or three years we were here, this spiral here. Um first two or three years we were here, um, I heard cuckoos. Yeah. Haven't heard one for a decade now, not one. But we can hear the sparrows in the background here. We do at least have lots of high sparrows.
SPEAKER_02Which is wonder, which is a wonderful thing. I mean I know we're jumping topic here, but they were we were fearing their decline in numbers over a 30, 40 year period. I can remember them being part of my childhood of just sparrows all the time, but they've declined. But now in the last five years?
SPEAKER_01They seem to be come back. Yeah, we've got them little packs of them, hyper-local ones. Well that's the odd thing, is that they disappeared from most of our cities apart from these little tiny pockets of just like a few gardens or a hectare or whatever, where there'd be a thriving population now, and nobody. I I recall somebody put out a reward for anyone who could explain what was going on, and I don't think it's ever been claimed.
SPEAKER_02I think there must be 10 or 15 major factors, roofs, um food sources, maybe you know, toxicity of certain products.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we published some research which showed that um it was on garden pesticide use. Um and gardeners who use pesticides and particularly who use glyphosate herbicide, on average have fewer high sparrows in their gardens. Whether that's cause and effect is uh, you know, debatable. We don't know. Um it's not an experiment and it's very hard to actually do that kind of experiment, but but it does it does, I guess, highlight that gardeners use a lot of pesticides, it isn't just farmers. And I I it mystifies me why we allow the sale of poison. You know, anyone can go into a supermarket or a DIY store, they're they're available everywhere, or buy them online and and buy gallons of stuff that is toxic to people, to everything, more or less. I mean, almost all pesticides are not just poisonous to the target. So, I mean, glyphosate is a is a classic, the active ingredient in Roundup, and it's become notorious, and there's a huge body of evidence showing that it it's a carcinogen in humans. Um World Health Organization classes it as a probable carcinogen in humans. Uh, and yet it's the most widely used pesticide in gardens. Um is that because they've rather cleverly called it a herbicide?
SPEAKER_02I mean, it is a herbicide, it's supposed to kill physics. Well, it does kill plants, yeah. But the mechanism of the the metabolic mechanism is one that kills bugs. It kills microbes as well. Kills in the soil, in our stomach.
SPEAKER_01Indeed, so everyone's worried about their gut health. So they should really be concerned about the fact that there's glyphosate in most bread samples that have been tested. Breakfast cereals, crunchy, you know, cereal bars. Because and that's only organic ones. Well, yeah, that's obviously one solution. Yeah. Um and the glyphosate is used by farmers commonly as a they call it a pre-harvest desiccant, but basically it's sprayed onto the crop to to kill it and dry it off at the farmer's convenience, which which you know is useful, I I'm sure, if you're a farmer. But it means that just before you harvest the grains, you spray them with herbicide. So it's hardly a surprise that there's still herbicide in it when it's been through the mill and made into a loaf of bread, which there is, and that then affects your gut flora. Yeah. And people are spending fortune on probiotics to try and boost their gut flora while eating bread that's full of stuff that's killing their gut flora. It's all a bit dumb, really.
SPEAKER_02It is. And I having studied various pesticides over a long period, I don't think there's any class that that came along, organochlorines, organophosphates, so on onwards to neonics and so forth. There's not one that didn't later on be found to be really bad.
SPEAKER_01There's the side effects. The system, the pesticide regulation system just seems to be fatally flawed because it, you know, if you just look at history, as you say, there's this endless cycle of, oh, here's a new pesticide, it passes the regulations, you know, it supposedly just decided that it's that was a meadow brown butterfly child. Oh good. First I've seen this year. Ah, right.
SPEAKER_02Um symbol of death, manners.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02Crossing the bridge. Yes, I'm not sure. No, I I I didn't mean to continue that line thinking, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, and and every every group, as you say, after a few decades, evidence starts to emerge from independent research showing that you know there are unanticipated side effects of one sort or another. Um, and you'd think we could learn from that and improve the regulatory system, but the the industry that produces these chemicals fights tooth and nail to stop that because it would be more expensive for them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um let's come back to bees then and just close off this conversation about insect size and talk about neonics and and bees because credited neonics. Yeah, the the again, you know, lauded, the new generation comes, appears, lauded as hugely efficacious and kills the right things.
SPEAKER_01I can't deny that. But yeah, so they the the in 1995 they were the newest generation of insecticide. Kind of lab variants of nicotine, as you might guess from the name. Um the neurotoxins they attack the brain and nervous system of insects. Um incredibly poisonous to I mean, so roughly 7,000 times more toxic to bees, for example, than DDT, which you know is notorious for the um one teaspoon of of one of these Nenex is enough to give a lethal dose to one and a quarter billion honey bees. And we were applying, you know, hundreds of tons of it to the landscape, enough to kill every insect on the planet. More than a few teaspoons. Yeah, exactly. Um anyway, the the the there are it was an interesting, quite long story. I'll try not to try to give you the short version, but um they were mainly used as seed dressings, so they were stuck on the outside of the seed before the farmer even bought it. So the farmer didn't have to do anything, he just sowed the seeds in the ground, and they were used on almost every major crop in the world, still are used on outside of Europe. Um and the idea is that basically the farmer sows the seed, the seed coating dissolves in the damp ground, and the little seedling as it germinates, sucks up the pesticide and it's systemic, it goes to all parts of the so it was hugely successful, took off what became the biggest selling insecticides in the world. But almost immediately French beekeepers started complaining that if their hives were near sunflower fields which were treated with this new chemical, they were all dying. And the explanation is pretty obvious, but it goes to all parts of the plant, including the nectar and the pollen. So, and it initially they were completely ignored. It took years for any momentum in the sort of campaign against Memics to build. Um, but eventually scientists started to look at it and confirmed that actually, yes, you know, there was an issue. And we did some work on it, on bumblebees, and found that if we we mimicked the dose bumblebees would get from feeding on the treated oil seed rape crop, which is the main flowering crop in Britain. And the treated nests grew much more slowly and produced hardly any queens, and there was this huge effect. Anyway, lots of other labs did similar work, and the European Union banned them for use on flowering crops in 2013 and thought that would solve the problem. But it turned out it didn't, because actually this neat system was nowhere near as neat as anyone had described it. We've it was kind of assumed the pesticide was all taken up by the plant, but it turned out only about 5% of the active ingredient was going into the crop, and the rest was going into the soil and leaching into streams and rivers, all being taken up by hedgerow plants, which have their roots, obviously, they can suck up pesticides from the soil just as the crop can. So it turned out that all the field margin plants on farms, all the and the blossoming hedges, things like the hawthorn when it flowered, was all full of pesticides in the nectar and pollen.
SPEAKER_02So is that an aha moment? Is that one that goes, oh crakey, we hadn't thought of that mechanism of coming from the crop over here in the roots through the roots and up into the wild.
SPEAKER_01So it was a bit of a revelation there. And and actually, to be fair, you know, it's it is an example where, at least in from a European perspective, action was pretty quick. So in 2018, Europe more or less completely banned near Nicks on all crops. There was the few derogations were allowed, but those have since been closed off. So Europe is Now essentially neonic free, at least as far as arable farming is concerned. We still put in one of dogs and cats, which is another story. But it's just this endless saga of you know, great, we've stopped farmers using neonics, but they've been replaced with other pesticides, and I'd bet my bottom dollar that it's just a matter of time before we realise the harm they're doing. It may be different, you know, probably they won't be going into soils and nectar and so on, but they'll be poisoning something somewhere. You can't blanket the landscape with poison and not have collateral damage. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I live in one of the national landscapes that used to be called AONBs, so areas of outstanding natural beauty in in Suffolk on the Suffolk-Essex border, the Stour Valley, the Deadham Vale, vegetable country. And there were three years in that patch of time that you spoke about there that we didn't see a single, a single honeybee, not a single one. Wow. And so it's not a big sample, because it's what I saw and observed in in our gardens and in the village and in the surroundings. And then the year after they were banned, they were bad. So we don't know the numbers, but they are plentiful now, both honey bees and bumblebees.
SPEAKER_01That does highlight insects can recover, you know.
SPEAKER_02Well, there is that then.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't take long if they're given the opportunity. Um, you know, unlike pandas or rhinos or whatever, which are magpies magpies at the back here having a word to say about it. Yeah, there's some young magpies, they're noisy. Lovely.
SPEAKER_02Um well uh let's let's go back a bit then, Dave, to to what was it? How did you get interested in insects? Back a bit. Back a back a lot. Back a lot. Um because I think there's something about um uh the thing, the the thing we study in our um adult life has got antecedents that begin quite a lot earlier.
SPEAKER_01So I mean quite directly in my case of that. I've no idea why, but when I was a little kid I l I loved insects and was just strangely fascinated by these funny little things, you know. When I was at primary school, I can't remember exactly how old I was, but I was probably only about six. Um I remember I having emptied my lunchbox, eating it, I then would wander around the edge of the playground looking for caterpillars and shoving them in the lunchbox and taking them home. And I I probably killed countless of the poor things because I didn't really understand that you had to have the right food plant for the right caterpillar, but I eventually learned. And I just I I remember the first time I had some cinnabar moths that you know, the famous sort of yellow and um orange and black stripy caterpillars, and they turned into these beautiful red and black moths. And it was just kind of magical, I thought. And I was hooked and it is magical, it is, it's just one of life's really, you know, amazing things that I I would never tire of watching a butterfly or a moth emerge and stretch its wings out. Anyway, so I I've been hooked from an early age and I collected butterflies, you know, when I was older. So I mean I you know wouldn't recommend that to anyone today because there aren't that many butterflies around, but it was sort of a common hobby when I was a kid in the 70s. Um and but I learnt a lot from it, and um I'd I mean I guess I'd just been really lucky that I managed to make a career out of my hobby, you know. Um I don't know what else I would have done with myself, to be honest.
SPEAKER_02I've not got a clue. So that was something from home, that was just something you picked up at home that you in the way you just got home in school?
SPEAKER_01It wasn't obviously from anyone I can think of. Um, you know, my parents weren't particularly into natural history. They're both, well, dad was a history teacher and mum was a PE teacher, so no obvious link there. So yeah, who knows where these things come from?
SPEAKER_02But a teacher, a sch a school teacher who's very good at taking us rather than giving cla classes in the class, he took us on long walks. Ah yeah. Um and um I ended up being an expert in these things, grasses. Oh really? Um because he knew every grass, and so I learnt all the Latin names of grasses, and I have my brain sucks them up when you're a cupboard's book at home, and I I learnt every and I've got a dry collection of every species in Britain. Oh really? So I can so I and and it stayed with me. I've not forgotten that. Um something. But that was a teacher, that's often a teacher, but your experience was the idea of it.
SPEAKER_01I I had a in the last year of primary school I had a teacher, Miss Scott, who was took us on nature rambles and the like. But I think I was already hooked by that stage, and I I I loved what I learned from her, but uh I don't think that was where it started.
SPEAKER_02But uh jumping on a bit, um, a lot, uh a number of wonderful books on bees and insects in general, the insect decline. Um but talk a little bit then about you've you've got a very successful YouTube channel of um instructive, if I can put it that way, videos on what we can do to reverse the decline. What we can do about nature recovery. So moving through the science into the public engagement, which you do really well.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I I enjoy it, and I guess that perhaps that shows.
SPEAKER_02Well then maybe that's the key actually.
SPEAKER_01Um but it I did get quite frustrated by academia uh in the sense that I I had a sort of big research group studying bumblebees and their declines and what we could do to help them and which flowers we needed to supply them with and uh and so on. But no one was actually acting on anything that we published. You know, you publish these academic papers in, I mean, to most people, pretty obscure journals that nobody reads apart from a handful of other academics, and it I thought, well, what's the point? You know, we're not actually helping bees here, we're just you know generating more and more bits of paper. Anyway, so I I've started trying other routes to get something to happen, you know, to try and translate what we knew into real-world stuff that benefited bees. So I I started a charity, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, back in 2006 now, so it's 20 years old. Um Crikey. I just realised that. Um that's gotten real successful, it's been yeah, I mean it's got 60 odd staff, it's it's created habitat for bees, meadows full of flowers and so on. It engages lots of people in making their gardens more bee friendly. Uh that that's that's I I'm no longer directly involved at all. Um but for the first five years I was sort of in charge. Um that's been great, and then I I started writing books hoping to kind of get to a bigger audience. There's always this thing you feel like a bit like you're preaching to the converted, you know. Whatever you do, the people that tend to read my books, join the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, watch my YouTube channels, channel, um they they're they're mainly people who already kind of agree with everything I'm saying, they've probably already got a bee-friendly garden. But so there is this sort of challenge as to how do we reach beyond that.
SPEAKER_02If they if each of those people who watches a video or reads a book talks to one other person or two other people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well that's the hope, isn't it? Or or just that occasionally the algorithm messes up and sends someone a one of my videos which to someone who didn't want it, but who gets perhaps gets drawn in occasionally, yeah. You've got a hope. But yeah, it's I mean I find it it's just quite good fun and and rewarding, you know, because you get you get interactions with people and and they have questions and or they'll just send me a message saying, you know, I've tried planting this that you suggested on your video, and now I've got hundreds of bees on it or whatever, and you know, and they're really chuffed, and you feel like it might be quite small, but you're doing something positive and it adds up, you know, there are there are millions of gardeners. Um yeah, well kind of 20 million gardens, I think, in the UK. Um which is it's a lot of lands, isn't it? I think well I've heard the estimates of how much land it covers seem to vary quite a lot, but something like 500,000 hectares, but maybe quite a lot more than that according to some people, but I don't know. Um it's a lot of land. Yes, yes. Um and and just am I, you know, that my sort of goal is for them all to be full of bee-friendly flowers and pesticide free and with a pond and you know a shaggy unkempt lawn and all the kind of simple things that people can do.
SPEAKER_02Well this gnomo no moi. It was a it's a relatively recent idea. I mean we're sitting here in long grass in the uh with the um what we've got walnuts here.
SPEAKER_01This is a cherry direction. Yeah, the mulberry there. Yeah. I do have a couple of walnut trees. I've got I've got loads of fruit trees and nut trees, and it's a sort of wildlife slash food garden.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So you could, you could, or the the sort of norm for a lot of people is to cut your grass back to. I mean we you need open areas to walk around and to mix the garden, but to one bit of advice to people is to leave your lawn not perfect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I mean you you can't um if you if you if you stop some people think that the best thing to do is just to completely stop doing anything, but you you'll quickly well if I did that here I'd end up fairly quickly with a bramble thicket and then eventually a forest, which would be fine, but probably you want for your whole garden. Yeah. Um so you did and it I don't think we yet know when is the best time to mow, but it's probably fairly safe advice to suggest if you stagger mow and do a a bit at a time, you know see if you've got a tiny garden that might not work, but if you've got a big lawn, cut some of it early in the year, some of it in the middle of the summer, and some of it late in the summer, and then at least there's always a long, shaggy bit for the grasshoppers to hop into and so on.
SPEAKER_00Yes, exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But uh yeah, no mo May has been hugely uh popular. But I don't I think they only use they only came up with May because it sounds, you know, no mo May, it kind of rolls off the top. There's a slight danger that people will think that there's something vitally important about May. It's not there isn't as far as I'm aware. Certainly no evidence that there is, and it worries me slightly that people all get their mowers out on the first of June and chop everything flat, which probably wouldn't be good. Because the plants haven't set seed yet, and that's the trick, isn't it? Yeah. But uh but it is nice that there are simple things people can do or not do.
SPEAKER_02Well pick a pick a couple of things that that that you would say if people have got a bit of garden and they've got birds lots of people have got, lots of people feed them and encourage them. Um what sorts of things can they do for their because as you've described, you you've got to kind of manage and intervene in some sort of way.
SPEAKER_01You do, yeah. You need to gently kind of steer without being ideally without being overly tidy, although you know, even even a super tidy garden, if it's got the right plants in it, will will you know have can have a lot of wildlife. Um but simple some simple things, grow some native wildflowers. Um there's there's lots of evidence that native plants tend to be better on average than than exotics. Um I I've got lots and lots of foxgloves, for example, Comfreys great, marjoram I've got big patches of, and they're really wonderful, pretty flowers, native wildflowers, but they look lovely. Yeah. Um don't use pesticides in your garden. I mean you just don't need why would you spray poison where you your family sits out or has their takes their lunch or your pets play, or it's just madness, and there's no need in the garden. So And don't believe those kind of rosy adverts that kind of paint herbicides, particularly in a particular way. I mean I was told, yeah, and it drives me nuts. I was told the other day that someone had watched one of my YouTube videos and the the advert break in the middle was selling pesticides at some point. Oh no, paranoid. Really? I mean obviously I've got no control over what they should do.
SPEAKER_02So the algorithm had picked up something about pesticides. Yeah, and something like that. Oh my goodness. There's not much you can do about that, but that's an irony.
SPEAKER_01It is, isn't it? Isn't it just? So where were we? Native wildflowers, don't mow too often, don't use pesticides. If you haven't got one, make a little pond. It doesn't have to be big, but even a tiny pond, it's amazing how many insects and other critters it'll attract. Um otherwise, I mean that that's the those are the main things. Um a bee hotel is always fun. I've got loads of them over there, they're sort of hidden by the wisteria at the moment, but uh you can obviously need it. Um I think they're a brilliant tool for engagement. I love just sitting in the spring and watching the comings and goings of well, mainly mason bees, but we get a few others as well. And uh they're really sweet and they're good pollinators, so they're worth encouraging.
SPEAKER_02So what you're describing is a kind of wilding of the garden environment, and maybe we have a I mean farmers are now through public policy and financial support, is all tied to environmental outcomes rather than food outcomes, which is a welcome change. So farmers are farming for food and also for wildlife, increasingly. The local nature recovery strategies are going to you know, they're going to link up places in new ways. There's some encouragement around that. Um and there's also been kind of larger scale wilding habitat. So in your county in Sussex, is NEP. And you were there last night, you said.
SPEAKER_01I I was, I gave a talk in their wilding kitchen, they called it, um, which is the latest addition of NEP. But it but NEP, if people don't know anything about it. Yeah, tell us a little bit about NEP then, as well. Um it's it's a three and a half thousand acre estate. It was seven farms, but all owned by one family who'd been in their family for generations. And it was intensive farmland and had been for hundreds of years, well, yes, no, not hundreds, since we started intensive farming. But it was on a heavy clay soil, the same clay soil we're sitting on here, actually, which isn't very productive, you can't get good crop yields from it. And the estate was running at a small loss every year. Um so rather kind of radically, 25 years ago, they decided to basically turn the whole lot over to nature to re-wild it, which is a slightly different concept to conventional conservation, in that the idea was to do as little as possible and just let nature do its thing. So they ripped out all the internal fences, put a big fence around the outside, chucked in some sort of surrogate large herbivores to replace what naturally would have once wandered around giants. Thousands of years ago, yeah, and the the ponies that used to the you know, tarpan, I think they were, and so on. Um, and pigs to replace they weren't allowed wild boar, which is kind of frustrating because there's lots of wild boar roaming around Britain already. But anyway, yeah, and they are a native species. Um anyway, so and then they just basically step back. They because there aren't any large predators, they do call the the the animals every year, which they have to do, or else otherwise the population would shoot up and then they'd all starve. But otherwise they basically do nothing and they've done nothing for 25 years, and it's I just love wandering around and seeing how it's you know nature just can transform somewhere if we just leave it in peace, you know, stop doing anything, stop messing things up. Yeah. And it's what's really interesting is how varied it is, you know, some of the some of the fields are still open fields and haven't changed dramatically. They've got you know flowery sort of meadows. Some have developed these kind of great mounds of thorny scrub, but it's it's it's not a sort of contiguous mass, it's little little islands.
SPEAKER_02Little islands, oh it's interesting.
SPEAKER_01But you can see, if you look on Google Earth, you can see this sort of weird structure, um, which turned out to be fantastic for nightingales amongst other birds. Um and some bits of dense willow forests where they just got must have been a good seed year for willows in 25 years ago, and and you know, one parent willow tree has produced a hundred thousand offspring or whatever. So it's really varied and patchy, and the pigs rootle around and create lots of disturbance. So you can, if you look again from Google Earth, you can see where the pigs were just before the photos were taken because they literally, just like a plough has been through, but in the in patches. Um and it it's just really cool, you know. They nature has sprung back in way more than I think I might have guessed it would. I mentioned the nightingales, you know, they there were no nightingales in there 25 years ago. The latest count, there were 61 singing males. 61 this year. Wow.
SPEAKER_02Um so that's kind of April. Actually, they were here early in East Anglia this year.
SPEAKER_01I guess they probably were.
SPEAKER_02Because of the warm patch that we had then.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think they're finished now more of the 61.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And Purple Emperor butterflies with these beautiful, you know, metallic purple, didn't have any 25 years ago. Now it's it's it's it's either the best or the second best spot in Britain for them. I think it's the best spot for them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um you can, you know, if you go in the right time of year in July, just have to look stand next to an oak tree and look up, and you can see them dozens of them sometimes swirling around. And loads of other stuff too.
SPEAKER_02So is it is it you've the thing you've described there is you leave the land for a while and then lots of surprising things happen. There's a kind of emergent property.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's hard to to predict.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I certainly the This is kind of nice actually, isn't it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. You might have guessed it would all react in the same way, but there must be subtle differences in the seed bank or you know, the drainage or whatever, and which means that you get this amazing kind of diversity of habitat.
SPEAKER_02Microclimate as well. All just completely naturally regenerated, which uh or maybe our idea of uh if you're taking kind of 3,000 hectares, you think, oh, it's probably going to be the same thing across this area, but those kind of micro differences are enough for emergent nature to be just actually diverse and mosaic. It's habit.
SPEAKER_01It's sort of it's it's interesting to think about, you know, when I when I was at university, people talked about Western Europe having this prior to the arrival of man being a dense forest, basically, um, which raised kind of puzzling questions as to you know, where did all the creatures that don't live in forests, what where were they? How come the blue butterfly survived? Yeah, autonomous blues do not live in woodland, they wouldn't they wouldn't live anywhere near woodland, and yet apparently we you know we we have them living here, so it doesn't quite make sense. Um but the the sort of rewilding movement is based on the idea that that large herbivores that used to roam in numbers around Europe kept sort of maintained diversity of habitats. They would have been able to knock over small trees. Well, if you go back long enough, there were elephants wandering around that could knock over big trees. Um and and that the sort of interaction between predators and herds of large animals and the vegetation would have created this sort of patchwork of different habitats with some open areas where the blue butterflies lived and so on. And in a sense, NEP is trying to recreate that as best it can. Um the way things have turned out there, it certainly shows that you know nature doesn't need us to thrive.
SPEAKER_02Yes, needs us to set up the thing in the first place.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, to just leave some space basically.
SPEAKER_02But you were saying that this has kind of inspired students and others in a in an interesting way, that it becomes a becomes a story in itself. I mean it's a thing that carries on, but also people feel somehow invested in it and interested in it and it's inspired.
SPEAKER_01Somehow it was very striking t teaching third year conservation students. Um We took them to every every week during the spring we'd take them to a different sort of conservation project. And the net trip was always the one they loved most. We'd take them to really nice national nature reserves, you know, Chalk Island and so on. And they kind of, you know, didn't seem that interested really. But we take them to NEP, which just somehow got them excited. I guess it's partly the novelty. But also I I think they liked the notion that it's sort of it's not being managed. Most nature reserves we we have to manage the hell out of them because otherwise in the case of chalk down and it'll scrub over, so people scrub bash and sometimes use herbicides to keep scrub down. And somehow that that seems less interesting to the students than the idea of just chucking in some large animals and then stepping back. And I I kind of get it. I I find it more interesting too, somehow. But it's it it's I hope it's something that that spreads, you know. I mean obviously we can't rewild the whole countryside. We've still got to grow food, and there are other demands on the land. But we could definitely do more than we have.
SPEAKER_02You know, and the idea of patches and mosaics and in this kind of way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, does they're they're trying to link there's a there's a the Nepp folk have joined up with other sort of conservation groups, and they're there there's this wheel to waves project where they're trying to basically create a more or less continuous band of habitat from Ashdine Forest, which is quite close to where we are, through Nepp, and then south to the sea somewhere west of Worthing. Um I mean, and they've got this dream of their of the pigs at Nepp being able to wander to the sea, which would be a hell of a long walk for the pigs, but uh but I think that's kind of okay to have that bigger idea.
SPEAKER_02I mean it doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen or has to happen in exactly a way, but if that inspires people to think of going from small patches to bigger ones to larger ones and then connecting up whole layers.
SPEAKER_01The idea that even little gardens along the way could help as little stepping stones for some creatures. Why not? Yeah. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02If you're in a village or that's within that kind of broader big corridor, then you could contribute by to less.
SPEAKER_01I mean I guess it I I I hope it doesn't put people who put people off who don't fall in one of these corridors, but no, well that's true, yes.
SPEAKER_02Well you can have more.
SPEAKER_01Well you can never never have too many wild patches as far as I'm concerned, etc.
SPEAKER_02Um so let's come to a few closing thoughts. Uh uh something you're proud of achieving, um perhaps against the odds.
SPEAKER_01Ooh I I'm I'm still pretty shocked with the way the Bombay Conservation Trust has gone, and I'm I'm very happy with the books, but I think I think the role we played in um getting the ENIX banned in Europe is probably the thing I feel is is the most significant, even though they've, you know, there's all the kind of caveats about how they've been replaced with the pesticides and so on. Yeah. It felt like we did something, you know, it wasn't I I must say there were lots of scientists involved and lots all over Europe and North America, but it was something that we were heavily involved in in my group, and some of our papers were definitely contributed to that. Yes. Um rare example where science actually led somewhere useful. Directly to that.
SPEAKER_02I've talked to some recommendations uh from your garden, and maybe it would be just look at your garden or look at a local habitat and think what you could do differently.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, certainly every every garden has the potential to support a lot of wildlife. I mean hundreds of species and probably thousands of species in most gardens. So and you don't have to do that much to to make it that insect-friendly or wildlife friendly, just some simple things that we've already talked about. You can just do one of them, um, you know, grow grow one margarine plant, and I guarantee you'll see dozens, probably thousands of insects visiting it over the summer. Yeah, so it doesn't have to be complicated. Yeah, brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Well, thanks very much, Dave Bilson. Wonderful. Placid to have you on. Fantastic, thanks for hosting us here. Um, East Sussex, and a real pleasure to have you on.
SPEAKER_01Absolute pleasure to be well to be in my own garden.