Jim Wilson
speaker
359 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2013
last heard 25 Jun
Jim Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Which is partly why they were kind of called geese as well.
Because geese are well known for flying in V formation.
Gannets do it all the time.
It's amazing to watch them.
I've watched them off the south coast of Ireland.
I've watched them in Canada.
I've watched them in quite a number of places because they're found across the North Atlantic.
And they really like flying in these Vs. And what's also very interesting, the way they do it,
they seem to come across what look like imaginary humps in the sea because all of a sudden the V, all of them will climb up a little bit.
And what they're doing is just getting a little bit of height and then they'll glide down towards the sea surface and on they will go again.
And of course, what they're doing there, we know it now, it's a bit like cyclists in a peloton where you tuck in behind the leader because that leading bird is going to
cut through the wind a bit more, the air, and you can kind of slipstream behind it.
They're finding out more and more now that it's even more complex than that.
It's got to do with the wing beats and whether they're in sync with them or out of sync with them.
But basically the whole idea is it makes the flying more efficient and the lead bird can drop out and another one can take over.
But you're dead right, they do fly in Vs and we used to always have a competition
to see how many could we see in a V when we were watching the birds off Cape Clear down in the south west of Ireland and we used to get sometimes in the autumn up to 100 or 150 in a big V out over the water and it was spectacular to watch.
On this trip, it's literally hop on, hop off.
I get off in Dingle tomorrow because I'm not on the full trip this time, but they've asked me to come on and I'm doing Dingle tomorrow where I will be talking more about Tom Crean, my favourite polar explorer, but also talking about Irish countryside birds as we walk through the Kerry countryside.
Yeah, and of course the beauty about these long-term recordings is that if we come back again in 10 years time, you can literally do a survey of the overall population of birds in the same place by comparing recordings from 10 years ago to today.
Showing 241–260 of 359 · page 13 of 18
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