Niall Hatch

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150 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 25 Aug

Niall Hatch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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In Your Nature · In Your Nature Ep 59 - Breeding Waders EIP · 25 Aug 2026 podcast

uh well one fox can wipe out one percent of your breeding population just like that.

Uh and you know we have far more than a hundred foxes in Ireland.

So the fact is that can have a massive impact.

And I think the the the key there you mentioned about how these ground nesting birds, most of them it's this big open expanse that they want.

They want this big bleak featureless landscape in a way of course it's it's full of full of food and full of other of plant communities and all of this.

But to the human eye and to the predator's eye it's one sort of big unbroken

Expands without anywhere where a predator can watch and scan and wait and try to pinpoint exactly where that nest is with those vulnerable eggs and vulnerable chicks.

When you have things like um telegraph poles or forestry plantations, all of a sudden you have an opportunity for the fox or the crow or the pine marten to actually stop and watch and look.

I can see now exactly I have an opportunity to see exactly where that nest is and I can pinpoint it.

And then when they find it, of course, the parents have no defense.

Also

Also, it's a thing about critical mass that you know when you see it with lapwing in particular.

Uh, when they breed in sort of their big sort of colonies, when you have enough of them, if you have dozens and dozens of pairs, actually they can drive a fox away that they can annoy it and harass it and dive it at so much that fox will just leave and go off for quieter life somewhere else.

If you just have one or two pairs of lapwing in a field, there's very little they can do when the fox arrives.

Uh, so that's another another side of it too.

So we humans have created

created this situation where unfortunately the world in which these whaders find themselves breeding is now completely unnatural, it's completely altered by humans and I think that we as a species have a duty therefore to try and correct that.

You know, th y as you can hear there, uh, Anon puts it very well, like waiters do have their work cut out for them.

The uh the conservationists uh like the the breeding wader IP, like Birdwatch Ireland, my colleagues, they have uh so much work cut out for them.

But the fact of it is too, there's optimism there.

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