Springwatch

Yeah, I mean, as a kid, I was one of those squirts obsessed with football and dinosaurs and all that sort of thing.

And watching TV, I was always watching Springwatch or Deadly 60.

And I think my mum got fed up with the kind of former hobby so gave me a pair of binoculars and got me to do the big garden bird watch and I think I ended up then going for a walk after seeing a green woodpecker and I think from there it was I was pretty hooked but I was also pretty lucky in London I think as I talked about as well my patch in London Beddington there were a lot of birders there who were very keen to help me out and you know take me to see some good birds and I think by just being surrounded with some pretty decent people That really helped me stick with it during the teenage years where a lot of people can drop off it.

It's a brilliant place to cut your teeth, Beddington.

Yeah.

Spring Watch and Autumn Watch are Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan watching animals live as they were doing stuff.

It's quite a sweet, good show that.

I love that.

Thank you so much for giving me your time.

I'm going to carry on running around the building like Springwatch to see if I can catch some more sounds of the bats.

But we've got emergencies.

They're starting to happen now.

My name's Stephen Moss.

I'm a lifelong birder, best-selling author, former wildlife television producer on series like Springwatch and Birding with Bill Oddie.

And for the last few years, I've done a series of bird biographies.

And I've recently done...

It's not really something that occurred to me, but then in the rest of the, in the rest of the natural world, you do hear about it more.

You hear about, um, One of the ones that popped up when Neri sort of briefly said about the question that you'd asked is, I was watching Springwatch the other day, because I'm that old now, and they were talking about the, was it the cuckoo? Because Neri, you were- Yes, yeah.

Yeah, like the one, I couldn't believe it, where they'd like blagged their way into some other little bird's nest and like, made them think it was their baby, and then it grew to like five times the size of it.

Making them feed it for months, it's outgrown the nest, and it's going, meh, meh.

between wildlife and birds particularly, and the rest of the world using actual live streams and camera technology.

Her garden, her work, her passion, and obviously all of her cameras, I think there's 16 on her property currently, have been featured on shows like BBC Country, Fylde, BBC Springwatch, and a host of other press and media as well.

But what I really love about Kate, and we get into this big time in this conversation, is what she's doing on her little plot of around three acres in Wales in terms of creating habitat and and collaborating with conservation organizations and charities to try and create a truly self-sustaining and rewarding environment for our feathered friends and obviously a few other little creepy crawlies and mammals and all that good stuff as well.

We're talking ponds, we're talking meadows, we're talking woodlands, we're talking all the biodiversity that you could shake a stick at.

And I could lift the lid, pop the little bits of food in.

This was really, I think, the pivotal start of Wildlife Cave in terms of a brand.

Because I put the food inside and then started to get bank bowls and wood mice and shrews and filming and Springwatch picked it up.

They then put that out on Springwatch.

And today we're going to be talking to Megan McCubbin.

You might know her from Springwatch.

Yeah, she's a really cool young person that's in the nature space.

Yeah.

And that comes under so many different things.

So I do a little bit of wildlife TV.

So I host Springwatch occasionally and Animal Park and various other shows.

But I write books, which is mad because I'm a dyslexic kid that was always scared of books as a child.

I said this in the vlog.

If you saw that episode of Springwatch, I think a year or two ago, they showed one where you think they just eat grubs and cat food and worms.

They had a, a thermal camera, uh, watching a nest of some bird on the ground, and the adult flew away.

Hedgehog came through the grass, and it just munched on all of these chicks.

I mean, the answer is with difficulty.

Do I explain it? Especially during the Springwatch years, we do quite a lot locally, for example.

We do quite a lot of presentations and talk to people about what we do and open days.

There are a lot of people who... can't understand the uh that's that's a very i don't i don't mean to say they're ignorant but they they they they currently don't understand the difference between how we could be a wildlife organization that's on spring watch and is doing great things for wildlife and for nature and at the same time actually uh killing an animal or like sponsoring the killing of an animal for that very same goal of managing wildlife um And I think there's been over the years a real conflation and blurring the lines of animal welfare and conservation.