Clips
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Bird Seed Farmer
New figures from the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs show the numbers of farmland birds are at their lowest level for 40 years. Nicholas Watts MBE, a Lincolnshire farmer, is the biggest producer of bird seed in the UK and is also a keen ornithologist. He’s seen some dramatic changes since he started recording birdlife on his farm in 1982. He spends a lot of his time bird-watching and adapting his farm to help birds thrive. He tells Adam Henson how he regularly keeps an eye on any newborn chicks and rings them to help monitor their progress.
DEFRA: Wild bird populations: Farmland birds in England 2009 -
Photo: Adam Henson
Adam Henson goes bird watching on Frampton Marsh in Lincolnshire.
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Frampton Marsh
Lincolnshire is the land of big skies and sunsets and the ideal environment for overwintering migratory birds which return every year to salt-marshes around The Wash. Working with the Environment Agency, the RSPB is restoring 400 lost acres of this landscape on former farmland at Frampton Marsh. It's a vital breeding ground for redshank and the best place in the UK to see snow buntings in the winter months. Adam sees how the work is progressing.
RSPB: Frampton Marsh -
Photo: Adam Henson harvesting peas in the Lincolnshire Fens
Adam prepares to take part in a race against the clock to harvest peas.
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Pea Harvest
Adam travels to the Lincolnshire Fens for the pea harvest and joins in a race against the clock to get our favourite vegetable picked and frozen in less than three hours. It's a complex operation for growers with the harvesters working round-the-clock. Adam follows one of the last loads of the season through a freezing factory in Boston, and finds out why this part of the country produces such a high proportion of the incredible 140,000 tonnes of peas grown in the UK every year.
BBC Gardening: How to grow peas -
Photo: Adam Hension and Stephen Francis
Adam interviews Stephen Francis who organises the pea harvest north of Boston in Lincolnshire.
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Open Cast Mining
Open-cast mining is enjoying something of a renaissance. Now coal reserves at brown-field sites have been all but exhausted, the coal companies are increasingly turning their attentions to the countryside. Not everyone is happy about it – John Craven meets members of a protest group in the village of Measham, Leicestershire, where UK Coal is proposing to mine a vast area of countryside on a 300 acre site. Opponents say it would be an eye-sore and a threat to local wildlife. But UK Coal say wildlife will be protected and the company will re-landscape the site when it has finished extracting more than a million tonnes of coal in four and a half years time. UK Coal has won support from some locals by offering to pay more than £1m towards the restoration of the nearby Ashby Canal. John also asks why we’re still burning so much coal as we strive to cut our carbon emissions.
Department of Energy and Climate Change: Coal -
Bees
Ellie’s been meeting up with Professor Francis Ratnieks and his team at Sussex University to discover the language bees. They’re able to understand the bees’ unique form of communication in the hive which is known as the ‘Waggle Dance’. This is the way bees are able to tell the rest of the hive where to find food. The professor and his team decode the direction and length of the dance which corresponds to where they have found a reliable source of pollen and nectar. It’s hoped this information will then inform landowners what, where and when to plant and that this will help the bee population survive long into 21st Century.
University of Sussex: LASI -
Battle of Britain
Seventy years ago the skies above Britain were fiercely fought over by the pilots of the RAF and Germany’s Luftwaffe. The Battle of Britain is credited with preventing a Nazi invasion in 1940, following the fall of France. Jules heads to Cambridgeshire, and to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, where he takes to the skies in a Tiger Moth bi-plane which was used as a training aircraft for our Second World War pilots. He also learns how Churchill’s famous ‘few’ beat the might of Hitler’s air armada.
Imperial War Museum Duxford: History
Credits
- Presenter
- Adam Henson
- Presenter
- Ellie Harrison
- Presenter
- John Craven
- Presenter
- Jules Hudson
- Producer
- Andrew Tomlinson
- Executive Producer
- Andrew Thorman
