Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Stick your headphones on, everybody. We're going to say hello now to Helena Golden. Hello, Helena. How are you?
Hi, Derek. Lovely to talk to you.
Lovely to talk to you.
Chapter 2: Who is Helena Golden and what is her passion?
Helena is known as the Willow Woman. So tell everybody, first of all, why you're known as the Willow Woman.
Well, I suppose I'm the willow woman because I teach basket making. So I started basket making, willow basket making as a hobby about 10 years ago. And it's just a really nice, tactile, rewarding craft. And over the subsequent years, I ended up turning it into a business.
Chapter 3: What inspired Helena to start basket making?
So I am. I work with people of all ages and abilities, from primary schools up to active retirement groups, just teaching our heritage craft of basket making. That's fantastic. Where are you based? I'm based in Leitrim Village. So we're midway between Drumshambo and Carrick-in-Shannon in County Leitrim. But I travel pretty much all over the country teaching the craft.
Lovely Leitrim, a lovely part of the world. Now, tell us all about the blue tit that you sent in to me. Well, you didn't send the blue tit in, but you sent a video of a blue tit.
Yes.
So it's my first season to have a nest box with a camera in it. So I'm very excited that we have action in it on the first season. I've always had a few nest boxes around our garden and the blue tits have always been nesting in a nest box that I had on the front of our garden shed.
So I suppose coming up to Christmas, I maybe dropped some subtle hints that I had an interest in getting a nest box with a camera. So I got my nest box at Christmas time. It's a dual camera. So there's a camera on the outside, a camera on the inside. We installed it just after Christmas. And on New Year's Day, the Bluetooth started just looking into the box.
So pretty much every day from the 1st of January right through to mid-March, they were prospecting then. But nobody going into the box. And then there were a couple of weeks they just completely abandoned it and I thought, I didn't know what had happened. But on Easter Sunday they returned and started building. So for the past two weeks now they've been building.
And last night they, well I assume the female bird... she actually stayed in the nest box overnight, and that was the first night that she stayed in it. So they're still bringing bits and pieces in and out, but it's just so interesting. I'm intrigued by it. I have an app on my phone so I can watch it live, and then I'm getting notifications so the cameras are triggered.
They start recording when there's motion. So in the past two weeks, there have been over 500 recordings with the birds in and out, so it's amazing.
It is terrific. And we showed a clip of it on the Today Show the other day with Dahi and Sinead. And it was really wonderful. There you go, Ken, back to what I was saying. Easter Sunday. Anyway, so it is the nesting season. This is when there's a lot of birds nesting. And the one thing we made very clear on the programme the other day was do not interfere with nesting birds. Let them at it.
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Chapter 4: How does Helena's nest box camera work?
It's wonderful to observe them. And this camera and box has been in place well before the nesting season began.
Yeah, that's key because there's no disturbance. The birds, of course, aren't aware that there's any camera there and they're not bothered by it at all. It'd be quite a different matter if they'd start to build their nest and a camera is retrospectively then installed. That would run the risk of them deserting that nest. It would radically change things and it would be against the law.
Chapter 5: What has Helena observed in her Blue Tit nest box?
But in this case, everything's been done absolutely perfectly right. This is exactly the way to do it. And from the description there, it sounds like that's absolutely perfect, Helena. Everything's going exactly to plan. The timing is right. That's a very good sign there that those birds will nest. We have to keep our fingers crossed.
You know, not all nesting attempts succeed, but they seem to know what they're doing. And that sort of disappearance, they were checking out the box and then disappeared for a period of time and then started building nests. That is typical of what they would do. They're prospecting for the nests. They're going around as a pair looking for likely places to nest.
They're obviously sizing up your nest box and thought, this looks good. They probably would have tried a few other options locally as well, realised this was the best one.
And over that two-week period, the male will have been probably close by singing away, probably singing his heart out, defending that territory, putting the other blue tits in the area on notice that we are claiming Helena's nest box here. And we are going to make sure that that no other bird comes in and challenges for it. And now they're happy with this. They've made the choice.
Then when they start bringing in the nesting material, that's they've committed. That's it. They build quite an intricate nest in there. They bring a lot of material in with them. And then hopefully soon you'll start to see eggs being laid, usually one per day. And once all the eggs have been laid, you don't know how big the clutch size is going to be.
It could be could be eight, could be 10, it could be 12 eggs. But when the female is finished laying them, then she starts the incubation process and then all of the embryos inside the eggs develop at the same time. So there's no advantage to one egg having been laid a week before the other ones. They all develop at the same rate, therefore hatch at the same rate.
They're all the same stage of development when they're being fed by their parents. And it's a very fast process as well.
14 days and 21 days to fledging.
Yeah, exactly. So 14 to 16, depending on the food that they're getting. And then they leave the box. And blue tits only have one brood per year. So some birds like robins and blackbirds, I can hear a lovely blackbird singing away in the background behind you there earlier as well. So you have one of those nesting nearby too, I would imagine. But they will have two broods if they can.
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Chapter 6: What should you know about the nesting season of birds?
And disturbance of nests, of active nests with eggs and chicks in them is illegal. Actually, photography at nests is illegal as well without a licence from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. So the best thing to do is not to do it. Obviously, where it's a remote system, where it's installed before the birds have even started building their nest, there's no disturbance there.
So the key is disturbance. But I always say as well, apart from the law, it's also the moral thing to do as well, is make sure you don't disturb those birds.
Chapter 7: Why is it important not to disturb nesting birds?
I want to go back to Helena. Now, Helena, last year you contacted us because you heard the cuckoo and you sent in a recording.
Yeah, and I actually heard the cuckoo here in Leitrim Village last Monday morning, the 13th of April. I thought it was a bit early, but I'm not sure if it was just such dismal weather. It still feels like it's almost wintertime.
Yeah, you certainly wouldn't notice climate change at the moment, would you, in terms of the place heating up?
Yeah, yeah. I was going to record the cuckoo during the week, but I wasn't able to. But I heard her last Monday morning and a few evenings since. Actually, I had my phone with me this morning. I knew I was going to be talking to you and I was hoping to get her a card. But I actually managed to record a woodpecker this morning. Did you?
Yeah, I was in my polytunnel early on, maybe half eight, nine a.m. And there was a great chorus of birds. And then I heard, I thought, my goodness, this is a woodpecker. I wasn't sure. So I used the app and recorded it. And yeah, sure enough, I got. And it was drumming away. Yeah, it's quite faint. I knew we had woodpeckers here, but this is the first time I was able to record.
Well, now it's confirmed.
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