Niall Hatch

speaker

1,580 appearances 31 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 21 Sep

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

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 31 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 10.

Appearances

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Mooney Goes Wild · Wildlife & The Wallace Line · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

probably a few dozen of them.

They've really come back.

There's about 600 of them back in the wild now, which is amazing.

And the reason why they almost went extinct, it's because they're beautiful.

People were trapping them in enormous numbers for the cage bird trade.

The thing is, in Indonesia, it's a way of life, particularly here in Java.

Everywhere you go, you see captive birds in cages.

And it's a big problem.

There's lots of species actually on the brink of extinction because of it.

And, you know, with the ballymino or the ballystarling, it's a beautiful bird, about twice the size of our starling.

It's pure snow white, apart from little black feathers in the tips of the wing and the tip of the tail is black as well.

And then around its eyes, it's bright blue and a big sort of crest behind the head, sort of sweeping back like a quiff.

So very striking and very attractive bird.

And that was nearly its downfall because it was rare and because it was so beautiful, it was trapped in big numbers for the cage bird trait.

To the extent I think the wild population went as low as maybe seven birds.

But thanks to careful management of the habitat, making sure that it's protected areas for the species and captive breeding of it, they've managed to bring it back.

And so now it's confined completely just to almost the tip of one peninsula in the very west of Bali.

And it's the only place in the world that you can see it.

And it's actually the only bird that is completely unique to Bali.

So we're talking about island endemics.

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