Richard Collins

speaker

767 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 14 Sep

Richard Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

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Mooney Goes Wild · Headstarting Chicks Helps Ireland's Curlew Numbers · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

So that's a factor of four.

So to get 20 chicks off in the wild, you're talking about something like 80 pairs.

of wild birds and in fact there's only 100 pairs in the entire country.

So we were effectively doubling the amount of the delivery of curlews to the environment here by this project which is excellent.

I'm interested in all kinds of things about this and that is the education of the curlews.

The curlews, well they will move to estuaries and places like that.

In the wild, I think the daddies don't do that much for them, but they do help.

But they don't take them to show them the nice juicy places where they can get ragworms and lugworms.

And in fact, talking about lugworms, it's quite a skill for a curlew to catch lugworms.

I used to catch lugworms when I was a youth for fishing.

And the lugworm is the one where you have the squiggle on the surface of the mud and a little hole about six inches away.

And you had to dig down very fast to get.

And as a young fellow, I could get to it and catch the tail and pull the beautiful big lugworm, a beautiful specimen.

You pull him up out of it now.

But the corlew has to learn to do that.

It shoves down its beautiful big bill and twists it around and the arc engages anything that's there, including the low worm.

But that is a huge operation.

It has to learn that.

In the wild, how would it learn that?

If it's released on the carob, it's going to have to go to Shannon Estuary or someplace or some nice mud flat area.

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