Madeleine Finlay
speaker
2,579 appearances
38 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard today
Madeleine Finlay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 8.
Appearances
I mean, do you have experience in your life of feeling this loss of birds?
Today, a flock a mile long seems preposterous.
But that's nothing.
Take the now extinct passenger pigeon.
In the 1800s, there were so many of them in North America, they would darken the skies overhead for days as they migrated.
The fact that this sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, that's shifting baseline syndrome.
And as well as losing the birds themselves, what also ends up happening is our chance to connect with nature on a regular daily basis.
Rob.
And as bird numbers have continued to fall, each generation has fewer opportunities to have this kind of experience.
And this is exactly what Gen Z are doing.
They're bucking the trend and taking up birding in droves.
What was once niche and old-fashioned has become, dare I say it, cool.
One factor in bringing a love of birding back is the Merlin Bird ID app.
Developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, it listens to recordings in real time, creating spectrograms with distinct patterns for each bird song that the app is trained to recognise.
Put it on, hold it up in the air, and it'll tell you what it thinks you're hearing.
It's Shazam for birds.
I asked Rob what he made of it.
And I'm sure it's a way in for a lot of young people as well.
And I wondered, why do you think there's a bit of a renaissance going on in birding and young people?
I decided to touch some grass myself and see if I could spot any Gen Z spotting birds.
Showing 1321–1340 of 2,579 · page 67 of 129
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