Collie Ennis

For example, you know, you drive around the countryside, if you're sitting in a train in particular and you're looking out the window, have a look out the window as you're passing along and you'll see lots of troughs, metal troughs for cows and sheep and animals, horses to drink out of.

Before them, they had farm ponds.

We had farm ponds all over the country, little wet patches on the grass, and they were all filled in on the instruction of better farming practices by the government.

Were they dangerous to kids?

Well, I mean, it was more to give more land for grazing.

Absolutely.

Dragonflies, amphibians, which is my obsession, diving beetles.

all the kind of the small aquatic midges that come up that feed bats I mean these pond ecosystems are so rare nowadays that like there's no fresh water small fresh water bodies without fishing them the numbers just absolutely crashed and what we need to do is kind of rethink what you'd like to have in an attractive pond in your back garden and everybody should try to have one and it doesn't have to be a massive thing it can be exactly what your may have done

Well, you see, everything is connected in this food web.

And the likes of, especially water beetles and aquatic beetles, are quite chunky and large.

So they're feeding the bigger bats and the bigger birds.

They're feeding on the wing.

Because the water beetles, even though they're called water beetles, actually can fly.

Like all beetles, they can flip, come up to the side of the pond, flip open their outer casings of their back, and then these origami wings come out, and off they go.

And some of them are like little helicopters, and they'll take off.

And the gas thing is...

So your auntie gets her lovely glass table from Woody's and she's sitting there having this cider of an evening.

This has happened loads of times I've gotten contact over and people think next minute they hear a helicopter and a big beetle crashes off the table.

Now why is that happening?

The beetle thinks the reflection on that table is pond water.