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Chapter 1: What role do Marine Protection Areas play for seabirds?
This is Countrywide on RTE Radio 1.
Hello, good morning. How are you doing on the programme today? Sounds of the air and ocean in Cork, beachcombing in Wicklow and putting plenty more fish in the sea. Great to be with you this morning. I hope you can stay with us until nine o'clock, even if it is November this morning. There's a chance that it might be February by afternoon.
But, you know, first week of the leaving of the junior cert is over. So, you know, the rules. Summer is unfortunately over, too. Let us begin then by going indoors, even if only temporarily. This was the unlikely sound inside City Hall in Cork on Wednesday.
It's World Oceans Week and the Environmental Coalition Fair Seas ran a conference to highlight Ireland's need for effective marine protected areas, MPAs, refuges at sea for nature and fish stocks to recover from overfishing, pollution and climate change. Lots of interesting things being said about that in City Hall that day, which we will get to.
The recordings that you're hearing here were, as you will probably have already guessed, made by ornithologist Sean Ronayne. Now, we have featured Sean's bird songs on Countrywide so often in the past that I felt it was time to meet and spend a bit of time with Sean himself. I asked him to take me to his favourite place. The cliffs beneath Roaches Point Lighthouse, as it turns out.
Now, one minute we are walking along a cliff path, chatting, and then the next, Sean disappears completely from view. I thought for a moment that he'd gone over the edge, but he was actually in the long grass. And then he pops up to say, come, come, come, look at this. It's a rock that a song thrush has been using as an anvil to open snail shells.
Songtrot handle. See?
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Chapter 2: How does Sean Ronayne capture the sounds of birds?
Bits of cracked snail around it. It's not a whole lot. Sometimes you see them and there's little fragments of... brown-lipped snail everywhere. I actually sound recorded a soundtrack cracking a snail off a rock finally after five years of trying to capture it. I didn't find it, it found me, you know.
So it found one of my microphones that was lying in ambush under the grass and just so happened to start cracking its snails next to the rock which was touching my microphone. These little nuanced details are the things that bring these birds to life, you know, because this is a part of who they are.
So not just their call, not just their alarm, that's only a very small part of their character.
This is how they feed themselves. This is their little niche, if you will, you know.
Why is it important we get to know these birds that intimately?
Well, the way I look at it, when you get to know a neighbour of yours, you're much more likely to help them in times of need as opposed to the stranger at the end of the street. And, you know, if we look at birds as our neighbours or people on the street, they're definitely in need of help now.
So the purpose of recording all of Ireland's birds was never just to hoard all of the sounds, it was to explain them and introduce them to the rest of us?
Yeah, so I collected all of these sounds to showcase the beauty and the wonder and the intricate details that lie behind them all. We have over 200 regularly occurring species in Ireland. And each one of them has a story to tell. And I really believe that when you dig into these stories and listen to those unusual details, that's when you fall in love with them, you know?
As we're standing here now, I can see passing gannets, which is our largest seabird. We have great blackback gull, the largest gull in the world. Look, there's a gannet. No, folding its wings and diving. Oh no, it's a fulmer. Fulmer. There are guillemots. There are razorbills. You can see anything. There's an abundance. Shrew. You hear the shrew? It sounded like a pygmy shrew.
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