Conservation Sound podcast: Recent Episodes
Conservation Sound
Conservation Sound is a podcast for scientists and conservationists. It introduces other people who tramp across fields in wellies but whom you might never meet. We all use natural (and otherwise) sounds in different ways – perhaps here we can inspire each other. Produced by Connor Walsh in 2015.
Counting Manx Shearwaters on Skomer Island, Wales, in June 2018. An episode of Conservation Sound by Connor Walsh. ConservationSound.wordpress.com.
This episode is mostly me with field recordings.
Although I was at the time volunteering to help in a Manx Shearwater census, this podcast does not represent the organisers of the census is any way: the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales; the mega wardens Bee and Edd; the university and academics using the data; or the other volunteers. It is purely my own project.
I started getting emails at the day job about World Curlew Day. It had a lovely logo. Curlews have such a distinctive call, the potential for a podcast rose gradually across the office Outlook screen. The emails came from Mary Colwell, and her website revealed her to be a very experienced broadcaster. Podcast tip: interview a radio producer, they know what makes a good interviewee!
I made a point of getting this episode out fairly snappish to be part of the hashtag #WorldCurlewDay, up to 21 April. This is running across different social media platforms, with a bias of course for photos, so here’s an audible contribution.
This episode includes audio from Xeno-Canto, (which probably should be an episode in its own right); in this case, it’s XC344313 by Patrik Åberg, released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0, and that means that this episode is covered by the same licence too.
Indonesian conservationist Sasha tells me about gibbons (Sasha has a longer name but this audio is repurposed from something else and we didn’t involve her employer’s Communications team, so we’re staying on first name terms to keep it simple).
The impetus to turn my chat with Sasha into an episode of Conservation Sound was the cheering take-up of two previous episodes at an event and on the radio. I had a grand plan of creating a delicious work from my Hainan gibbon recordings, with Sasha as a narrator, but I have accepted that if I try that sort of project again by myself it will never happen! So here, with reasonable speed, you can learn about the sound of gibbons. There is much more to a say about that subject, books, papers, even whole websites, so this is just a taster.
You're the world's leading conservation group. A big oil company, with a big spill not far behind, is offering you £10,000,000 for conservation. Do you take the money?
Three half-episodes crammed into one! Short excerpts from works relating to conservation, without interviewing the producers or playing the pieces in full. Plus a couple of other audio-less recommendations.
Running after Antelope Scott Carrier https://homebrave.squarespace.com/home-of-the-brave/running-after-antelope
Running the goat Chris Brookes/Battery Radio http://www.batteryradio.com/Pages/Golden.html
Out of Doors BBC Radio Scotland http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074hjr/episodes/player
Off Track http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/
Radiolab http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/
Other people and programmes who were on the cards include:
Tree-climber James Aldred who has been in a couple of BBC Natural History Unit radio programmes such as James and the Giant Eagle and James and the Giant Tree. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010fc06 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l14wp
Taiwan-based sound artist Jannick Dauby. http://www.kalerne.net/yannickdauby/
Marc Anderson of Wild Ambience. http://wildambience.com/
And Colette Kinsella whose Zoo Diaries (in particular 'Birth') pushed me to start the who project in the first place. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/radiotonic/zoo-diaries-stories-from-within/5959900
The excerpts are all short parts of longer programmes, and are used for the purposes of education and criticism. This is the final episode (for a while at least) of Conservation Sound – I'm off to do a Master's in Conservation Science and won't have time for this lark!
Leah Barclay celebrates cross-disciplinary work of art and science, to aid the conservation of natural places. She introduces her work with rivers and biosphere reserves in this episode of Conservation Sound. Find out more on http://www.biospheresoundscapes.org
Cheryl Tipp is Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library. She talks about the conservation applications of sound, and the availability of sounds in the archive. This is Episode C of Conservation Sound. The natural history sounds are from the British Wildlife Recordings playlist, used under Creative Commons with attribution: soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/british-wildlife-recordings
A recent blogpost by Cheryl about the audio being made available as Creative Commons. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2015/04/british-wildlife-recordings-on-the-move.html
Sarah Blunt doesn’t make radio with the purpose of conservation. She is, however, a scientist who tramps about the countryside in wellies, and reaches millions of people with messages that treasure Britain’s natural history, entirely though sound.
Some of Sarah's output on BBC Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=%22Sarah+Blunt%22&filter=programmes
This is Episode B of Conservation Sound.
Antoine Bertin brought his creative sound mind and his fascination with nature to a fox rehabilitation centre in London. The result brings together multiple familiar worlds (including radio telemetry) into something that excites the imagination.
Find out more on the project on his website: antoinebertin.com.