Rat the dog:

Woof Woof, Woof, Woof

Chris Skinner (00:35):

Rat my demented terrier has not encountered where the countryside and the seaside actually meet. So he's partly perplexed chasing every wave that comes on the shore. It's, believe it or not, it's a fairly calm morning this morning. The sea is almost like a mill pond, but there was a little bit of wind overnight, and that's just made a little bit of waves coming in on this shingle shore. I'll explain where I am in a minute and what I'm doing here, and I've stolen away from the farm for just an hour or two to visit one of our seaside ducks. What a seaside duck. So I'll explain more in a moment. 

Announcer: 

Chris Skinner's Countryside podcast. 

Matthew Gudgin:

It is another bright October morning here on High Ash Farm just outside Norwich, a square mile of beautiful English countryside that is managed for wildlife. And this is the latest episode of the Countryside Podcast with Chris Skinner. Chris is the farmer here and has been for many decades, but he's also a broadcaster and now podcaster as well. And Chris, in fact, you're not on this episode only going to be confined to these acres, are you? 

Chris Skinner (02:43):

No, I have actually stolen away for part of this week's podcast. They say in life exchange is no robbery and last week a gentleman came here because he wanted to include Little Owls in his annual birdwatching list, and he found no better place than High Ash Farm. And I was very kind, I took him to a site, he sat there for the rest of the morning and photographed the farm's little owls, and he said, would you like to come to my patch as a reward? His name's John Moore, a really keen ornothologist and I visited Aldeburgh and just south of Aldeburgh on the shingle banks there, borrowed his spotter scope and managed to find a flock of over 200 Scoter ducks right out to sea. They were about a mile out to start with and gradually came in and started feeding. I'll explain all about those later on in the podcast. 

Matthew (03:45):

So Chris has had his passport stamped. He's been to Suffolk, and we'll hear more on that at the seaside later. But no, it is a lovely morning here, isn't it? And what have we come to see? 

Chris Skinner (03:55):

Right, well, we're going to continue our walk through history Matthew, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of history at a time. And this week's podcast, we are going to be looking in the early 1700s, which is really the extreme beginning of the massive agricultural revolution that happened about that time and takes us right through almost to today. So, in front of us we've got some over winter wild bird seed mix cereals, and I said we'd be looking at history and I'm going to do something really strange that affected history of the world of people all over the world, really, because we're in autumn, Matthew, we're in October, and this is the month where it's good to see different species of fungi. So what on earth has fungi got to do with history? 

Matthew (04:52):

Yes, I was looking around for some archaeological remains or old buildings, but nothing of that sold in this field. 

Chris Skinner (04:58):

No, something influenced it even more than you can possibly imagine. So this crop has got some wheat, some barley, here’s barley here with a head curling downwards some more there little grains all ready to be eaten by the wild birds that visit here. And this slightly taller crop is called Triticale , and it's a close family member of the rye family. And what happens at this time of the year is, a fungus attacks particular grains in the ear. And I've found one here right beside us, and I'm just going to pull the plant up. There we go. There is, and the plant, the triticale is about what, two and a half feet tall. And immediately you will see something strange on the ears. Can you see there's two sort of blackish protrusions that… 

Matthew (05:59):

They’re not just the seeds then? 

Chris Skinner (06:00):

No, they're not the seeds. It's a fungus that's infected the actual seed site. And lots of people will know the name of this fungus as soon as I mentioned. It's called Ergot, and it's a constituent of LSD. It's a mind changing in a very big way, fungus that if you eat lots of it, you'll become partly demented can go right back to biblical times because if you eat this, you feel as though you're on fire and you have visions of fire as well. And Moses in the Bible saw the burning bush, of course, if you remember, and we think it might have been caused by, because in the Middle East they eat lots of rye. It's a fairly drought resistant plant. Certainly over in Germany and France, it formed a main part of the diet in this period, which we're talking about today, which is about the 17 hundreds.

Matthew (06:56):

So in primitive agriculture, these things weren't filtered out necessarily. They couldn't be. 

Chris Skinner (07:01):

No, they weren't. And so ergot will infect all sorts of species of grasses. And of course that includes cereals, particularly wheat and farms are still very wary of it today because of the effect of it if you have lots, it's a fungus. So these little sclerotica (sclerosis) they're called will drop onto the ground and over winter on the ground and when you have the right conditions, some really cold weather followed by some rain, this little fungal, it looks like a tiny black banana. 

Matthew (07:39):

It's about half an inch long.

Chris Skinner (07:40):

It is, yes. But compared to the grains which are less than a quarter of an inch long, it really sticks out. So I'll try and get to photograph of these two. It's unusual to see two ergot on one plant. And it's also called St. Anthony's Fire because of the effects it has on you. It is really serious. If you eat several grains of ergot in mixed in with your food, your fingers start burning, your hands start burning and your limbs and eventually gangrene sets in and your fingers drop off, your legs drop off. And it is called Ergotism. And it also causes abortion in animals like pigs if they eat lots of it in their diet. So it's incredibly toxic. 

Matthew (08:29):

And this is just something we've walked into a field and you've looked for it and found it straight away almost. 

Chris Skinner (08:33):

Yes, it is. Yes. So we'll go right back into the sort of early 1700s. And Russians Czar, PeterThe Great no less, decided to try and invade parts of the world that weren't his, much further south. So they had what's called warm sea ports. Most of the Russian ports head out northwards, and of course that freezes up during the winter months. So Peter, the Great, decided to invade parts of the Caspian Sea to take that over so that they could shift the grain out. And so the horses, the whole army, the troops, the horses all moved southwards and started to obviously need hay for the horses. The hay was infected with ergot and the troops ate the rye bread and got infected with the ergot. And they became so ill, you won't believe this, they had to retreat. Lots of the soldiers actually died.  And so ergot actually defeated the Russian army way back in the early 1700s. And that's the period we're starting today's history tour, if you like, of what's happened to agriculture in this country. So a massive lesson ergot, and still today, farmers their grain, every sample of grain that's sent into a grain merchant is tested. The first test is for ergot, and it has to be less than 0.001% of contamination. So it's still very low. If it's above that, you can actually separate ergot out of the grain, but it's expensive. So the farmer takes a big hit. And with modern tillage methods, which are called min till or minimum tillage, we've seen far more ergot than we've seen in several years. 

Matthew (10:29):

It's nasty stuff and it changes the world's history. 

Chris Skinner (10:31):

Yes. So these little scleroritca, these little banana shapes drop on the ground. They then germinate in early spring and you'll have tiny little pink mushrooms come up, spores come off those and infect the cereal or grass plants just as they're in flower at a particular stage. And from that point onwards, the ergot takes over and you then have these sort of banana shaped structures coming out of the grain. So that takes us into the early 1700s. Now, interesting time, and this is much more up my street, it's due to a farmer in Berkshire and it's called Jethro Tull. And he started to change the two course rotation into a three course rotation. We've got a tractor going past, I think. Oh right…

Matthew (11:26):

That's Daniel, isn’t?

Chris Skinner (11:27):

That will be Daniel on the mower. He's waving, yes. So he's mowing the tracks this morning. He'll be gone in a second. And so Jethro Tull started to change agriculture from the two rotation system, which was a crop and then a fallow. And then he started doing something interesting. He had broadcast by hand turnip seed on the ground to feed the livestock over the winter months because prior to that, a lot of farmers had to actually slaughter their livestock because they didn't find a way of storing enough food over the winter months. So Jethro Tull started to grow turnips in rows, and he invented a drill to drop the seed in rows, and then he'd used horses to hoe in between the rows, and it was called the Jethro Tull horse hoeing revolution. Now, this is where it comes even more to home because a gentleman living in Norfolk called, Viscount Townsend, saw what Jethro to was doing, liked the idea, and decided that instead of the three-course rotation, he would invent a four-course rotation, the first crop being Bali, the second one, grass, the third one, wheat. 

(12:52) And then he would leave the wheat stubble. He sewed, this is really unusual, turnips in rows into the wheat stubble and then used Jethro Tull’s idea of hoeing between, so he didn't have to till the ground. And so at that point, the Norfolk fourcourse rotation was born. He unfortunately owned the nickname of Turnip Townsend, but he changed farming and pretty much that rotation system that stayed right from the mid 1700s right through almost to the first part of the last century, the early 1900s. And only then did it start to change when we had the outbreak of the second World War, and we were really desperate for home produced food. And so lots of the old grassland as part of those four course rotation was ploughed up and farmers grew cereals, which are far more profitable. So that's how it all changed. And then on top of that, we have the agricultural revolution. The machines changed hugely and we'll describe that. I'm going to take you back to the farm and show you some, not my new tractor that just went past us, but some of the old implements that were made, and they are absolutely beautiful to look at. So come on back in the truck and we will go and have a look at some of the ancient machinery at the farm. 

Matthew:

I had a thought that Jethro Tull was that chap who stood on one leg on Top of the Pops and played the flute. 

Chris:

That was a different Jethro Tull. Come on. We're going back into the early 1700s this morning, and that doesn't mean five o'clock in the morning. 

Matthew:

There’s a hive of activity back at the farmyard. Horses are being clipped. They're better groomed than us, Chris. 

Chris Skinner (14:51):

Yes, you're telling me, all sorts of different clipping going on. I think that's a trace clip where you leave the shape of the saddle that isn't clipped. And I don't understand the ladies doing this really as we go into autumn and into winter, they then clip all the fur off the horses so they don't get too hot when they're riding them. And then you have to put rugs on. So it doesn't make logic to me. We're just walking up the farmyard, Matthew, and I said, I'll show you some of the beautiful sort of artefacts from the past, although as a young boy, I use this one in front of us. 

Matthew  (15:33):

So it's your living history. This is, yes. Oh, it's a green machine with a wheel on the front and some lettering as well. 

Chris Skinner (15:40):

Yes. It's called a Bentall Unchokable and it's all 

Matthew (15:45):

Unchokable?

Chris Skinner (15:47):

Yes, it's the unchokable model

Matthew  (15:48):

It says that. Look at that, unchokable! What does that mean?

Chris Skinner (15:50):

It means it's a Mangel Grinder and it's so for grinding up roots. And this is the bit I remember this handle here, it's made of cast iron. There's 71 different castings here, all made of cast iron. So it dates from the late 1800s. This model, the unchokable, and you can look it up on the internet, it was made in about 1880. So it's well over a hundred years old and it will still work today, although I've got flowers in it. 

Matthew (16:23):

It's actually a planter these days, but it's obviously got a receptacle at the top to receive 

Chris Skinner (16:28):

The mangel, and then this handle here, I've turned it round the wrong way so nobody can sort of trip over it. This works this flywheel, but you could also have it on a little petrol engine later on, sort of petrol and steam engines were all over the farm here. The fields were ploughed with massive steam engines parked each end of the field and the ploughs were pulled across the field by the steam engines. And then it was the invention of the new mouldboard system where you had two sets of mouldboards, one over the top of the other, so you could reverse the plough and pull it back over the field. So it did away with furrows, but the steam engines had to be fired up early in the morning to produce the steam. And they were six or seven tonnes each. And a cable went across the field to pull the plough from one side to the other, and then the steam engines would move up another yard also. So incredibly slow work, incredibly difficult to do, and you needed fairly flat level fields, which Norfolk was brilliant for. And the mouldboards kept changing shape from…

Matthew (17:37):

What does that mean? Mouldboard? 

Chris Skinner (17:38):

A plough has a sort of point on it. And the points were cast iron and they were later manufactured here in Norfolk and North Suffolk as well, at the Ransom’s plant. And you'd have various ploughs, all different makes and models from the early 1800s right through to the 1900s. And a mouldboard is the actual bit that twists the soil over onto the previous furrow. So it would cut down into the ground on the metal point, it would slice underneath the furrow and the long curved metal, which took 200 or 300 years to develop. First it was used behind oxen, then behind horses. And eventually with this era, we're now talking about the steam era. These long mouldboards would turn the soil. And in Suffolk, our neighbouring county, they had mouldboard four or five feet long. So it gently twisted the soil and kept the furrow slice intact. 

(18:46)
And on sunny days in the autumn, they would pride themselves that the clay was actually shining in the low winter sunshine or late autumn sunshine. So furrows changed hugely. Once you had horsepower in the form of tractors and steam engines to pull it, the mouldboards could be much shorter and more aggressive. So it turned the soil quite quickly. And today, if we do use ploughing, we can even use slatted mouldboards, which plates the soil up a little bit more, but it'll all have something in front of the mouldboard called a skimmer. And last year's trash, the stubble, any weeds remaining, any residues and even muck you wanted to plough it in. The skimmer would flip the top two inches of soil into the bottom of the furrow, and then the mouldboard would cover all that up. So that's how it worked. And this is an era that this old Unchokable Bental Mangel Grinder

Matthew (19:46):

But it was designed to last forever. This wasn’t it?

Chris Skinner (19:47):

It was. It's all in separate casting. So each one of these little components is bolted together. 

Matthew (19:56):

I should think it's about three and a half feet tall. It’s on the legs here.

Chris Skinner (20:00):

Everything's patented 

Matthew (20:05):

Bental's patent. 

Chris Skinner (20:06):

Yes it is. And so you grind it. But later on, this flywheel was added for little stationary engines. Later on they became after steam, they became petrol paraffin engines. And that takes us into the era of the early 1900s when Henry Ford decided to help farmers out from all the gruelling work they did. And the first tractors appeared out in the Norfolk countryside, the Fords and tractors, the early ones, E 27 N I remember it. And much later on in my era in the 1950s, the end of the horse era and the beginning of the tractor era proper, the Fords and Super Major, many farmers will know those models. You can close your eyes, you can see the blue of the tractors and the orange lettering round them. And that's the beginning of the huge change which happened in the early 1900s. And that's the period we'll be dealing with in the next podcast. 

(21:39)

Chris Skinner:

Good morning everybody. I've just arrived at coastal Suffolk. I sort of feel a bit like a naughty schoolboy this morning, but I've had an invitation and I can resist anything but temptation from John Moore who's recently visited High Ash Farm and to have a look at Little Owls and to complete help complete his annual bird watching list. And he also saw the White Buzzard at the farm, and he invited me to his birdwatching patch, which is just south of Aldebourgh, just off the Suffolk coast. High Ash Farm situated just south of Norwich. And whichever part of the coast you want to visit, they're all about the same distance because East Anglia protrudes out in the North Sea in a huge semicircle and everywhere is pretty much equidistant from the farm in a huge arc around coastal Norfolk and parts of coastal Suffolk. So I just arrived just south of Aldeburgh short distance south because he invited me to come and look at some of his ducks, as he called them marine ducks. 

(23:04)
And as I don't have the opportunity very often, and it's a quiet morning on the farm, so I've escaped. So he said, I feel a little bit guilty this morning and to come and look. And John's very kindly left me one of his high powered telescopes to look at, which we're going to leave in the truck for the moment and I'm just going to walk down the shingle beach. On one side of me is sort of coastal marshes and the estuary of the River Alde coming out into the sea just behind me, lots of marshland. I can see a Mute Swan on my left and I'm up on top, a very large defensive sea wall with a concrete edge. Rat my terrible terrier is with me, and I don't think he's hardly been to the seaside before. So here we go out of the truck and wow, it's a bit bracing wind. 

(24:04)
Come on Rat, come on out the track. Good boy. Right! It's a very shingling, we will call it a beach. And there's a slight wind blowing off the land this morning. You can hear the shingle and it's about a hundred metres down this bank to the edge of the sea where countryside meets seaside and it's low tide, so the waves are retreating back over lots of shingle and we have that lovely sound of the stones washing back against each other. I'll get as close as I dare with the microphone so you can actually hear that wonderful sound. It's almost therapeutic. 

(25:21)
So the challenges for me to find these special ducks, they're called Scoters and they spend most of their life out at sea, obviously not when they're nesting. And I’ll explain a bit about that when I get back to the truck. So we'll clamber our way back up this shingle bank, it's not the sort of thing you'd want to sunbathe on. It's very stoney sort of shingle of all different sorts of sizes and forming a very important defensive wall topped with concrete at the far top where I've parked the truck. Good boy Rat. So what I now need to do, and I've been given strict instructions as to how to find these ducks. It seems strange looking out to sea. We're just getting in the shelter of the truck a bit because slightly breezy, good boy in you get. Rat’s got back in the truck and there, right now. 

(26:28)
Next stage is I've been told about a mile out to sea is a sandbar, and along that sandbar there are lots of crustaceans, things like mussels, small crabs feeding, and low water is only a few metres down. So these ducks, are Common Scoters, although there's nothing common about them because they're become a red list species. I love the scientific name Melanitta nigra, literally meaning a shining black duck. So the challenge is holding the microphone in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other and scanning out to sea, and it's going to take a little while to find them. You don't sort of see them very easily. It's quite a swell out to sea. 

(27:29)
And oh, I've seen a seal. My heart jumped for a moment, I thought I'd found them straight away and not so lucky. So we're scanning out, get the right distance, get the binoculars in focus. They're 10x, so they're quite powerful. You need quite steady hands to hold them still. And looking right out now almost to the horizon now, which is perhaps a little bit too far and going along and I can see the waves breaking out yet, that is about a mile out I would think. So that indicates there's some shallow water there. There's long sandbar and I'm now going to got about the right distance now. So I'm scanning along and wow, this is quite looking for a needle in the haystack springs to mind and yes, wow. Yes, sure. Wow. Probably 20. I can see jet black dots and some sort of brown in amongst them, which must be the females. Right. So next step is to use a spotter scope or somebody standing beside me, not far away. It's not John, I'll just go and have a quick word. Can you see that large ship over there sort of more or less in line betwixt us and them. Woof! Rat, my terrible terrier! and they're about halfway between us and them, and there's a flock of about 20 that I just saw. There's probably more than that. Can you see? You got them? 

(29:21)
No, I had a heck of a job to see them, but roughly in line with that boat. Wow. I'm teaching a coastal bird. Watch. You got them this. How many can you see? 

Neil (29:37):

Gone down again now? 

Chris Skinner (29:38):

Exactly. They come up and disappear the waves. Sorry, what's your name? 

Neil (29:44):

Neil. 

Chris Skinner (29:45):

Well done Neil. 

Neil (29:47):

I see 20? I reckon. 

Chris Skinner (29:49):

Yeah, good. I reckon I got to 50. 

Neil (29:52):

Yeah, you might be right. But they go up and down. 

Chris Skinner (29:54):

Yes, they just disappear. What they're doing, they're feeding on that sandbar, probably mussels, small crabs, things like that. You can see they're jet black. 

Neil (30:04):

Yeah, black. 

Chris Skinner (30:05):

That's their part of their scientific name. 

Neil  (30:07):

Oh, I can see a lot more now. 

Chris Skinner (30:08):

Excellent coming up. Excellent. There you go. You haven't been on the gin and tonic then? 

Neil (30:12):

No, there is about 30 there I reckon. 

Chris Skinner (30:14):

Yep. And can you see that goes along that raft of ducks. It is over a hundred metres long,  so there's probably double that and some of them are diving down. Well done. Wow, that is a surprise! Right. I'm just going to have a look with the big scope now and see how many I can actually see. 20 x, 30 x, 40, 50, 50 times the magnification. We've got the right spot and I've got them absolutely fantastic. Jet black shiny ducks. I can see little specks of yellow. There's a slight breeze. So it looks as though I've got a very shaky hand using a tripod there we are. Common Scoters, red list species, absolutely beautiful. I'll explain a little bit more when I get back in the truck. 

(31:29)

Chris:

There we are. The back of the truck Rat's in there already. You all right, Rat?

Rat:

Woof

Chris Skinner:

He's ready to go back, do some proper work. Anyway, we saw about, well you can call them a raft I suppose, of around 200 common Scoters. It started off close to a mile offshore and as we got to low, low tide, they came inland a little bit, sorry, in towards the shore a little bit. And that was an amazing site. I could actually pick up the short stubby beak with a yellow mark on the top that's on the males. The females were kind of a sooty brownish, blackish colour, a little bit more camouflaged as we find with our home mallards. The males are quite spectacular, particularly in early spring when they got those emerald green heads and the females almost looked like a different species. So I could actually see them really clearly when they came in towards the shore a little bit. 

(32:40)

And they had some really endearing habits. They kind of make a raft, they're very gregarious, they love being together and they sort of fly over the top of each other. And then the front ones immerse themselves and they do a kind of little flip dive. They just jump out of the water, fold their wings tightly against their body and then descend vertically down. It's probably four, five metres of water depth where I'm watching them. And it's obviously crustacean down there, things like mussels and other mollusks down there for them to eat. And they're obviously doing really, really well. But they come here after they're finished moulting generally they'll moult over in the near continent, Denmark, down to coastal regions there. Then they fly across, come across the North Sea and feed on our coastal waters. Occasionally you see them in the estuaries as well if they're resting up, but most of the time they're out to sea here. 

(33:41)
And I've had a word had quite a few chats with the fishermen. If they go out early in the morning, three, four o'clock, they sometimes come across these sort of rafts of Common Scoters just because a long river of birds. What I've seen is 200, the local fishermen there has seen over flocks of over a thousand. And as they're quite a scarce bird now, that's quite something. So they actually nest much, much further north, northern Europe, sort of where the coniferous tree line finishes. And you've got the beginnings of what I call tundra. I suppose it's really quite hostile environment for them, but it suits them. You've got birch trees growing, lots of low scrub and the females make their nest on the ground often several in close proximity to each other, quite close to water as well. And the females quite well camouflaged, as I said, on the ground when they're incubating, which they have to be. 

(34:44)
And then they incubate about 21. It depends on the weather conditions for how long incubation actually takes. It can vary six to eight days depending on the conditions. And then the young hatch out and feed and they can fly and then they come down and the males come down first often leaving the females behind with the young. And that's what I'm seeing out here. So most of the flock that I was watching a short while ago were of males, which explains why they were black and it's lovely to actually watch them flying almost towards me. So there we are. That's a fair exchange. Little owls for Common Scoters, it does happen. Exchanges no robbery they say. So that's a real treat for me. But as I said, I feel rather like a naughty schoolboy this morning having bunked off school and I need to get back and get in the tractor and pretend I haven't been away. So there we are. A really lovely treat for me and I hope you've enjoyed visiting in your mind's eye. Anyway, the Common Scoter, that beautiful shiny, black diving duck, wonderful. 

(36:22)

Chris Skinner:

It's been a long busy day on the farm. The sun's just setting on the horizon. It's early evening. Farmyard is absolutely full of livery customers all arriving now to look after their horses for the evening. Some ladies are putting them in stables, some ladies still putting them out in the pastures to avoid the extra fly problem late on as the weather's been so mild horses get plagued by flies in daytime. So if you put them out to graze in the evening, they can avoid that. Anyway, you can hear the farm geese calling away because for them it's tea time, it nearly is for me as well. So I've just come into the farm workshop and we've got a bucket and a bag of best bird food here and I'm just going to pour that into the bucket and that's enough to feed the 5,000, which is about what I'm going to do here we go. 

(37:38)
Around the corner is a very large duck pond and it sunk into the ground and it was a clay pit used to dig clay out for the manufacturer of the old farm buildings, clay block buildings that were here probably in the 16, 1700s. They've all been demolished because they weren't really fit for modern agriculture, although they were quite attractive to look at covered in black tar to stop the clay washing away. But it's not just tea time for me coming up or those two geese, it's tea time for the mallard that visit the farm every evening. And I'm just walking across the area of grass. Some have just taken off and landed in the pond, but they know full well it's tea time and it's a lovely sound and it's a nice way for me to finish this part of the day off. So there goes some corn out onto the ground and I'm just going to walk back a bit already. 

(38:46)
There's probably between a 100 and 150 there and I'm just sitting down on my bucket and we've got a mixture of mallard and there's two Teal just in the background a bit shyer. The Drakes that's the male mallard are already sporting their kind of emerald green heads. And you can tell them also, because they've got a little kiss curl at the top of their tail, two or three little black feathers that just curl up over the tail and the head is separated from the sort of crimson body, brownish crimson by a white band right around the neck. And that separates the grey on the back as well. And both the males, some of the younger ones and the adult males have got that fantastic green sheen on their wings, speculum and absolutely incredible sight. Some are sort of greenish and some are almost pure blue. 

(39:59)
It depends which way the light's striking them. I've just crushed the bucket I'm sitting on, so I'm sitting on the ground now. Anyway, there's around 200 come in every evening. Some are still flighting in on the pond and it's absolutely wonderful to see them. So quite a common bird. It's really widespread right across northern Europe and down into Asia as well. Some have been introduced into New Zealand and Australia and they're doing equally well down there. Very, very powerful flyers. But the ones that breed in this country probably are sedentary. They don't generally go very far. So the population from now on, once we're in October, starts to increase and they're all feeding, believe it or not, probably within six to eight feet of me just listen….

(41:15)
And that's why I love this time of the day. It's a kind of treat after a gruelling day's work to give them their tea first and some stay all night long and some then fly off to perhaps the broads somewhere safe to spend the night on water. So in early spring, even from this time of the year, they'll have paired up male and female, the male's called the Drake, and then the female's, the duck. And they'll keep that pair going right through the winter until you get to spring. And then you have mating. And the female will then choose somewhere usually in long grass, vegetation, sort of bracken if it's near that sort of territory, brambles anywhere out of sight. And she is almost like a different species. She’s completely camouflaged. Her bright orange legs are about the only colour. She has got that little blue speculum on the wing so you can distinguish them. 

(42:20)

But other than that, no colour whatsoever. And it really looks like sort of brackle down grass on her back, perfect camouflage. And that's exactly what she needs because she's going to lay 8, 10, 12 eggs in this little nest. And almost from the day she lays the first egg, she starts taking some of the feathers from her breast to line the nest. And that comes in really handy. Once the clutch clutches finished, all the young really hatch out in 24 hours, although it might've been laid over a 10 day period. So if she leaves the nest when she's incubating, then she'll cover the feathers that she's pulled over and maybe some grass as well to help camouflage the eggs. And also of course to help keep them warm as well because her feathers are really good insulation. But as we come into winter now, we have a lot of mallard come across the North Sea, some from northern Scandinavia, they'll come down through Scandinavia, Denmark, and then hop. 

(43:29)
They'll often do short hops of two or 300 miles and hop across the North Sea. And whilst we might only have, I was going to say a hundred thousand breeding pairs in the UK in the winter months, we can have numbers of six, 700,000, particularly in the Humber Estuary, the Ouse washes here in Norfolk are a really good place as well. And some of the big reservoirs in Essex as well. Anywhere where there's ample water for them and you'll have huge numbers and they'll graze on the vegetation beside the rivers as well. So they’ll eat grass, this is their real favourite, it's grain, but they're really spoiled here because that's my entertainment, so I don't mind feeding them. So wonderful birds, very powerful flyers. And then once we get into spring, those large numbers that are migrated across will fly back across, say Denmark, somewhere like that. 

(44:35)
Then go northwards and eastwards. So northeastwards direction for the major part of the migration takes you right across into Russia and north of that, even almost up to the Arctic Circle. Some of them breed quite high up in the tundra where you have those long hours of daylight, much more than we have here further south. So some will also migrate southwards. But generally it's a cold weather movement and they’ll come across because we have much more maritime influence here because we've got sea all around our country and it's ideal for them. They do amuse me though. They fight and squabble over the food and because it's so precious for them, they're only a few feet away. And the two geese are just right beside me,  the eldest is now 25 years old, she's a little bit past it. She still lays eggs and her male partner has chased some of the mallard off. 

(45:40)
He's 23 I think, and he's also past his best. So none of the eggs hatch at the moment, but they kind of go through the motions and it does amuse me. The mallard generally will choose those sort of habitats out in the countryside that I mentioned. Tussocky grass, a good place anywhere near water, sometimes a little distance away. And then the female will take them to water. Sometimes if you're in a small town or somewhere, the local policemen will hold the traffic up while the duck takes charges across the road. And I do remember back, I think it was in 1980, it was the Iranian Embassy siege right through the siege when there wasn't much happening. The cameras which were on the other side of the road, it was Regents Park on the other side of the road to Regents Park. Somebody spotted a female mallard in a flower box up on the side of a building and she sat tight right through the whole drama that was going on. Actually the camera spent more time on the duck incubating her eggs than they did on the actual sort of seige that was happening, all the drama of that. So it did have to laugh about that and that became quite a famous duck and she did hatch off successfully at the end of that trauma. So there we are. It's a real treat for me and I hope you've enjoyed just a brief history of the mallard duck. What a lovely sound. I'll finish with just the mallard feeding on their dinner. 

Announcer (47:45):

This is a SOUNDYARD production music by Tom Harris.