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Open Country
BBC Radio 4
443 episodes
1 month ago

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

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Nature
Society & Culture,
Science
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All content for Open Country is the property of BBC Radio 4 and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

Show more...
Nature
Society & Culture,
Science
https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts112/v4/21/9e/a7/219ea7a9-3e85-4501-f39a-4ba20cfcba60/mza_12934166212214773266.jpg/600x600bb.jpg
Bats on Punts
Open Country
24 minutes
11 months ago
Bats on Punts

Martha Kearney is in Cambridge to explore wildlife at night. She takes an evening trip on a punt to see and hear the creatures which come out after the tourists have gone to home bed. She learns about the bats which at this time of year are just emerging from hibernation - hungry and on the hunt for insects. They swoop low over the waters of the Cam, their echo-location picked up and relayed for human ears by the clicking of a bat detector. A bat enthusiast from the Wildlife Trust tells Martha about bats' habits and identifies the species flitting through the trees around them.

Punts have not always been used in this benign way around wildlife. At the Museum of Cambridge, Martha is shown a punt gun - a huge weapon which was widely used in the 19th and early 20th century. It would have been mounted on a punt, with the huntsman paddling into a flock of wildfowl in order to shoot them in large numbers for food.

Martha also visits Cambridge University Botanic Garden, where a long-running moth research project is in progress. She watches as a moth trap is set out in the evening, and then returns early the next morning as a team of volunteers checks which moths have turned up in the trap, before releasing them back into the wild. She learns about the importance of these nocturnal species, and asks why night-time creatures like bats and moths always seem to get such a bad press.

Produced by Emma Campbell

Open Country

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles