Callum and Richard N discuss recent developments with government plans for funding rare species and weigh up the benefits vs potential better choices. Meanwhile Richard P is focussing on fixing his leg!
CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside.
You can contact us by email on: contact@countryslide.co.uk
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The Hosts
Richard Negus website
Callum McInerney-Riley website
Richard Prideaux website
Edited and Produced by Amy Green for Rural and Outdoor.
Richard N: It's a bit like one of those Agatha Christie things, isn't it? There were three and now there are two.
Callum M-R: Just the two of us. There's a song about that.
Richard N: If there isn't, someone should write one.
Callum M-R: I think there are quite a few. Spice Girls classic, 2 Become One. That could be the soundtrack for when one of us breaks something else and it just becomes a solo podcast. A monologue. Actually, that's what you get when you come round your house, isn't it? Just, "Get off my lawn!"
Richard N: You know, I was just thinking they missed a trick when they made the film The Human Centipede. They should have used the Spice Girls' 2 Become One as the soundtrack to add a little bit of humour.
Callum M-R: That'd be a great trailer. Somebody has recut Mrs. Doubtfire as a horror film on YouTube. It's just some creepy man putting on a woman's mask and invading the houses of children. One of the best editing jobs I've ever seen.
Richard N: Brilliant. It's a bit like the gender studies student who did a thesis on Love Actually as an example of gross misogyny. It was genuinely quite a funny, tongue-in-cheek thing about how terrible all the male characters are. But of course, the Daily Mail picked it up and said, "Look at these woke snowflakes."
Anyway, I suppose we ought to explain to listeners who were out of the loop last time. Unfortunately, Mr. Prideaux is not with us and won't be for the next couple of weeks whilst his leg heals. He came off second-best after a fight with an alder—that is a tree, not an old man. Although, possibly he could have had a fight with an old man and is just trying to make it sound a bit butcher.
Callum M-R: I don't think shattering your leg is the sort of injury an old man could inflict on you. In my former life, I used to rob pensioners, and let me tell you, you only get surface wounds and a bit of bruising. You're fine.
Richard N: "Give me the purse!" I'd just like to remind listeners that everything you hear on Countryslide is not necessarily real. It's a work of fiction.
But yes, there are only two of us today. Because the rudder—the keel that keeps us balanced—is now not with us, we will probably veer off into rocky shores. What have you been up to of late, Callum? Hopefully you're back to normal after spending last week in A&E with your daughter. Anything exciting?
Callum M-R: Yeah, all back to normal. I've been doing lots of complaining because my kitchen is currently being built really slowly. I tried to put the dishwasher on last night and found out they hadn't connected the water. They didn't put a tap in because it looked "too fiddly," so that became my job. But on the exciting front, I made a video for Zeiss Optics that played on the big stand at the Stalking Show.
Richard N: Oh, did you go to the Stalking Show?
Callum M-R: I did not. I went to Norfolk instead and spent four days drinking, which was quite good.
Richard N: Well done. So this film for Zeiss, was it shot at Chippenham Park with Jim Riley?
Callum M-R: Yes, exactly. That is the Zeiss Centre of Excellence. I just got to boss Jim around. "Please walk around the woods with a gun. Do this, do that." We were talking about the Seeker Cam. They're trail cameras you can strap to trees with SIM cards and Wi-Fi that tell you what deer are knocking around. They're also pretty good for security. If you've got an estate and want to know what the local hoodlums are up to, they're quite good.
Richard N: How does it work legally? If you catch a miscreant up to no good on a trail camera legitimately placed for wildlife, could you give that evidence to the police?
Callum M-R: Absolutely. I'm not a lawyer, but people have used them to report incidents to the police and it is used as evidence. If you're in a public place, you can film and photograph. In my early career, I used to sit outside a courtroom and play a rubbish game of Guess Who? I'd get a description—"He looks like a posh bloke wearing tweed"—and photograph anyone matching that description coming into court.
I once got my picture on the front page of the Metro when Marlon King, a Premiership football player, was getting sentenced. One of the other photographers got his camera thrown over a wall, and I dodged a punch. There's a picture of me in the background with my mouth open, dodging this attack.
Richard N: My life is so mundane compared to yours. This week I wrote the first chapter of my new book and gave a couple of talks. One was for the Hadleigh Environmental Action Team. HEAT.
Callum M-R: In my head, I'm picturing an elite task force. "The HEAT Squad."
Richard N: As an elite hit squad, they're quite old, actually. But they are superheroes in their own way. They are the good eggs who make sure the litter gets picked up and the green spaces are looked after around the lovely little market town of Hadleigh in South Suffolk. I gave a talk to them about words, hedges, and my day job, explaining my belief that we can halt biodiversity decline, but we need to get behind farming.
All of a sudden, someone from the Green Party piped up: "Well, if we don't reach net zero, there won't be any birds anyway because they'll all die from the heat." I had to explain that while we can all play a part in increasing biodiversity, we can't all manage this net zero push. Thankfully, the rest of the HEAT squad agreed. They'd rather sort out biodiversity decline first and worry about the carbon later.
Callum M-R: I get it, there's an endgame where we have to reduce emissions, but when you look at our progress towards net zero versus the influx of carbon pollution from places like China... What we have essentially done is taken all our dirty manufacturing and shipped it to a different part of the world.
Richard N: It's incredibly imperialist to offset our pollution by telling China and India they can keep polluting while we sit here looking smug. Speaking of pollution, I went to Southwold for my birthday and watched an episode of The Crown about the Great Smog of 1952. Battersea Power Station and the other coal-fired plants were jettisoning sulphur-laden coal smoke over London, killing 12,000 people. It led to the Clean Air Act. We used to be a very dirty country, but people forget that we now have the means of capturing bad gases. When people say we shouldn't burn wood as a fuel, they act like we're still stuck in 1952.
Anyway, tomorrow I am going up on a thatched roof in Bedfordshire with Chris Dodson, the thatcher, Tom Barker the agronomist, and Anna Hill from BBC's Farming Today.
Callum M-R: Look at you!
Richard N: I'm working on a piece to address the thatching straw shortage and see if we can get more farmers growing it.
Callum M-R: I remember from an early podcast episode that about 90% of all thatch comes from China now, doesn't it?
Richard N: Yes, that's what Chris's twin brother, Andy, was telling us about the reed. So I have a complete "Dodson week." Roof with Chris on Wednesday, Wicken Fen with Andy on Friday to look at reed beds, and then a farm cluster meeting about thatching straw on Monday. Then I'm talking with a leading European expert on bitterns. So it's a complete thatching, reeds, and bittern week.
Callum M-R: I can't say I've ever seen a bittern. Don't they sound like a water drop booming?
Richard N: "Boom, boom, boom." Yes, their territorial booming. They have a very long set of requirements: deep water to fish, well-covered areas, certain types of reeds. This leads nicely into what we wanted to talk about today: the government's announcement of funding for charismatic species releases.
When you've got a bird like the bittern that nearly went extinct, we know how to bring them back. It requires thought, effort, and habitat management like clean water. I'd like your opinion, Callum: why is the government spending huge amounts of money reintroducing extinct, charismatic species like Golden Eagles, White-tailed Eagles, and Beavers, rather than focusing on the Bittern, Yellowhammer, Corn Bunting, or Turtle Dove?
Callum M-R: Well, some reintroductions work. The Griffon Vulture in France was brought back from Russia and now there are loads of them. But some of it is just a PR exercise. If you're trying to prize twenty quid out of a member of the public's wallet, it needs to be exciting. You won't get funding by saying, "We're going to bring back the pigeon." But if you say, "We're bringing the Great Bustard back to Salisbury Plain," people engage with it.
Richard N: Exactly. Bitterns are secretive. They need to be left alone in watery reed beds that humans don't want to walk through because they're dangerous. People can't see them, so they don't care. But a White-tailed Eagle? You can't miss it. We had one land near here a couple of seasons ago, a youngster released in Holland. A tractor driver posted it on the farm WhatsApp group going, "Has a falconer lost a bird? Because he's a big *******!"
Callum M-R: I will say, if the White-tailed Eagle gets the public to engage with wildlife more, that's a good thing. If it captures the imagination of kids and makes them want to be ecologists, it's not all bad. But if you look at the ROI—the return on investment—if the goal is just increasing animal populations, go for the easy wins.
Twenty years ago, I sat on an oak log outside Harlow Mill fishing with a float and some maggots. In a couple of hours, I caught ten separate species of fish: gudgeon, roach, dace, you name it. Today, I couldn't buy a bite there. If fish that naturally belong in that river can no longer survive, what chance does a reintroduced, critically endangered species have? Like this "glutinous snail" the government is talking about bringing back.
Richard N: Exactly! The glutinous snail. Before you start a species reintroduction for a water snail, do you not think it might be a better idea to clean up the water that water companies are currently churning sewage into? Water is the stuff of life—that should be priority number one. Instead, the government wants to mask itself behind a shield of wildlife PR. "Don't look at the polluted rivers, look at the White-tailed Eagles!"
Listen, we've got to wrap up soon. But before we go, I saw a local election poll about milk. Apparently, what milk you drink dictates how you'll vote on May 7th. If you drink whole milk, semi-skimmed, or fully skimmed, you're a Reform voter. If you drink powdered milk, almond milk, oat milk, or soy milk, you vote Labour. But get this: if you have your tea black, you vote Reform. That's the sort of polling I want to see!
Right, thank you very much for listening, everybody. Bye!
Callum M-R: Just the two of us. There's a song about that.
Richard N: If there isn't, someone should write one.
Callum M-R: I think there are quite a few. Spice Girls classic, 2 Become One. That could be the soundtrack for when one of us breaks something else and it just becomes a solo podcast. A monologue. Actually, that's what you get when you come round your house, isn't it? Just, "Get off my lawn!"
Richard N: You know, I was just thinking they missed a trick when they made the film The Human Centipede. They should have used the Spice Girls' 2 Become One as the soundtrack to add a little bit of humour.
Callum M-R: That'd be a great trailer. Somebody has recut Mrs. Doubtfire as a horror film on YouTube. It's just some creepy man putting on a woman's mask and invading the houses of children. One of the best editing jobs I've ever seen.
Richard N: Brilliant. It's a bit like the gender studies student who did a thesis on Love Actually as an example of gross misogyny. It was genuinely quite a funny, tongue-in-cheek thing about how terrible all the male characters are. But of course, the Daily Mail picked it up and said, "Look at these woke snowflakes."
Anyway, I suppose we ought to explain to listeners who were out of the loop last time. Unfortunately, Mr. Prideaux is not with us and won't be for the next couple of weeks whilst his leg heals. He came off second-best after a fight with an alder—that is a tree, not an old man. Although, possibly he could have had a fight with an old man and is just trying to make it sound a bit butcher.
Callum M-R: I don't think shattering your leg is the sort of injury an old man could inflict on you. In my former life, I used to rob pensioners, and let me tell you, you only get surface wounds and a bit of bruising. You're fine.
Richard N: "Give me the purse!" I'd just like to remind listeners that everything you hear on Countryslide is not necessarily real. It's a work of fiction.
But yes, there are only two of us today. Because the rudder—the keel that keeps us balanced—is now not with us, we will probably veer off into rocky shores. What have you been up to of late, Callum? Hopefully you're back to normal after spending last week in A&E with your daughter. Anything exciting?
Callum M-R: Yeah, all back to normal. I've been doing lots of complaining because my kitchen is currently being built really slowly. I tried to put the dishwasher on last night and found out they hadn't connected the water. They didn't put a tap in because it looked "too fiddly," so that became my job. But on the exciting front, I made a video for Zeiss Optics that played on the big stand at the Stalking Show.
Richard N: Oh, did you go to the Stalking Show?
Callum M-R: I did not. I went to Norfolk instead and spent four days drinking, which was quite good.
Richard N: Well done. So this film for Zeiss, was it shot at Chippenham Park with Jim Riley?
Callum M-R: Yes, exactly. That is the Zeiss Centre of Excellence. I just got to boss Jim around. "Please walk around the woods with a gun. Do this, do that." We were talking about the Seeker Cam. They're trail cameras you can strap to trees with SIM cards and Wi-Fi that tell you what deer are knocking around. They're also pretty good for security. If you've got an estate and want to know what the local hoodlums are up to, they're quite good.
Richard N: How does it work legally? If you catch a miscreant up to no good on a trail camera legitimately placed for wildlife, could you give that evidence to the police?
Callum M-R: Absolutely. I'm not a lawyer, but people have used them to report incidents to the police and it is used as evidence. If you're in a public place, you can film and photograph. In my early career, I used to sit outside a courtroom and play a rubbish game of Guess Who? I'd get a description—"He looks like a posh bloke wearing tweed"—and photograph anyone matching that description coming into court.
I once got my picture on the front page of the Metro when Marlon King, a Premiership football player, was getting sentenced. One of the other photographers got his camera thrown over a wall, and I dodged a punch. There's a picture of me in the background with my mouth open, dodging this attack.
Richard N: My life is so mundane compared to yours. This week I wrote the first chapter of my new book and gave a couple of talks. One was for the Hadleigh Environmental Action Team. HEAT.
Callum M-R: In my head, I'm picturing an elite task force. "The HEAT Squad."
Richard N: As an elite hit squad, they're quite old, actually. But they are superheroes in their own way. They are the good eggs who make sure the litter gets picked up and the green spaces are looked after around the lovely little market town of Hadleigh in South Suffolk. I gave a talk to them about words, hedges, and my day job, explaining my belief that we can halt biodiversity decline, but we need to get behind farming.
All of a sudden, someone from the Green Party piped up: "Well, if we don't reach net zero, there won't be any birds anyway because they'll all die from the heat." I had to explain that while we can all play a part in increasing biodiversity, we can't all manage this net zero push. Thankfully, the rest of the HEAT squad agreed. They'd rather sort out biodiversity decline first and worry about the carbon later.
Callum M-R: I get it, there's an endgame where we have to reduce emissions, but when you look at our progress towards net zero versus the influx of carbon pollution from places like China... What we have essentially done is taken all our dirty manufacturing and shipped it to a different part of the world.
Richard N: It's incredibly imperialist to offset our pollution by telling China and India they can keep polluting while we sit here looking smug. Speaking of pollution, I went to Southwold for my birthday and watched an episode of The Crown about the Great Smog of 1952. Battersea Power Station and the other coal-fired plants were jettisoning sulphur-laden coal smoke over London, killing 12,000 people. It led to the Clean Air Act. We used to be a very dirty country, but people forget that we now have the means of capturing bad gases. When people say we shouldn't burn wood as a fuel, they act like we're still stuck in 1952.
Anyway, tomorrow I am going up on a thatched roof in Bedfordshire with Chris Dodson, the thatcher, Tom Barker the agronomist, and Anna Hill from BBC's Farming Today.
Callum M-R: Look at you!
Richard N: I'm working on a piece to address the thatching straw shortage and see if we can get more farmers growing it.
Callum M-R: I remember from an early podcast episode that about 90% of all thatch comes from China now, doesn't it?
Richard N: Yes, that's what Chris's twin brother, Andy, was telling us about the reed. So I have a complete "Dodson week." Roof with Chris on Wednesday, Wicken Fen with Andy on Friday to look at reed beds, and then a farm cluster meeting about thatching straw on Monday. Then I'm talking with a leading European expert on bitterns. So it's a complete thatching, reeds, and bittern week.
Callum M-R: I can't say I've ever seen a bittern. Don't they sound like a water drop booming?
Richard N: "Boom, boom, boom." Yes, their territorial booming. They have a very long set of requirements: deep water to fish, well-covered areas, certain types of reeds. This leads nicely into what we wanted to talk about today: the government's announcement of funding for charismatic species releases.
When you've got a bird like the bittern that nearly went extinct, we know how to bring them back. It requires thought, effort, and habitat management like clean water. I'd like your opinion, Callum: why is the government spending huge amounts of money reintroducing extinct, charismatic species like Golden Eagles, White-tailed Eagles, and Beavers, rather than focusing on the Bittern, Yellowhammer, Corn Bunting, or Turtle Dove?
Callum M-R: Well, some reintroductions work. The Griffon Vulture in France was brought back from Russia and now there are loads of them. But some of it is just a PR exercise. If you're trying to prize twenty quid out of a member of the public's wallet, it needs to be exciting. You won't get funding by saying, "We're going to bring back the pigeon." But if you say, "We're bringing the Great Bustard back to Salisbury Plain," people engage with it.
Richard N: Exactly. Bitterns are secretive. They need to be left alone in watery reed beds that humans don't want to walk through because they're dangerous. People can't see them, so they don't care. But a White-tailed Eagle? You can't miss it. We had one land near here a couple of seasons ago, a youngster released in Holland. A tractor driver posted it on the farm WhatsApp group going, "Has a falconer lost a bird? Because he's a big *******!"
Callum M-R: I will say, if the White-tailed Eagle gets the public to engage with wildlife more, that's a good thing. If it captures the imagination of kids and makes them want to be ecologists, it's not all bad. But if you look at the ROI—the return on investment—if the goal is just increasing animal populations, go for the easy wins.
Twenty years ago, I sat on an oak log outside Harlow Mill fishing with a float and some maggots. In a couple of hours, I caught ten separate species of fish: gudgeon, roach, dace, you name it. Today, I couldn't buy a bite there. If fish that naturally belong in that river can no longer survive, what chance does a reintroduced, critically endangered species have? Like this "glutinous snail" the government is talking about bringing back.
Richard N: Exactly! The glutinous snail. Before you start a species reintroduction for a water snail, do you not think it might be a better idea to clean up the water that water companies are currently churning sewage into? Water is the stuff of life—that should be priority number one. Instead, the government wants to mask itself behind a shield of wildlife PR. "Don't look at the polluted rivers, look at the White-tailed Eagles!"
Listen, we've got to wrap up soon. But before we go, I saw a local election poll about milk. Apparently, what milk you drink dictates how you'll vote on May 7th. If you drink whole milk, semi-skimmed, or fully skimmed, you're a Reform voter. If you drink powdered milk, almond milk, oat milk, or soy milk, you vote Labour. But get this: if you have your tea black, you vote Reform. That's the sort of polling I want to see!
Right, thank you very much for listening, everybody. Bye!