The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to an expert about Biodiversity

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Collie Ennis is a research associate at the Department of Zoology at Trinity college. We speak about biodiversity, insects, building ponds and becoming active in helping local biodiversity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scour the brown tower, you drowning hourigans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first podcast, please consider listening to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. It was a gorgeous day today. I cycled into work at 6am. It was everything I wanted from a summer morning. The horizon was a chalky purple. With all the moisture in the air, there was a real honesty to the sun. It wasn't hiding behind a cloud or penetrating any excessive humidity, it was just, what's the crack I'm the sun, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. The song Have a Nice Day by the Stereophonics came onto my Spotify and I listened to it all ironically. I'd normally skip past that song.

Just, I'm of a certain age, I'm of a certain age where through no fault of their own it's very difficult to listen to the Stereophonics. It's Celtic Tiger Banker music. Big baggy bootcut jeans. Pink fuchsia shirts. pint bottles of bulmers, the smell of farts, being lied to about the economy, being given a mortgage that you can

never afford. The music of the stereophonics is second only to Life is a Rollercoaster by Ronan Keating for eliciting those exact, specifically vicious memories in Irish geriatric millennials. It's very unfair. The Stereophonics of course are incredible songwriters, the songs are amazing. They just got played too much, played in too many adverts. But when I was cycling to work this morning at 6am, thrilled with myself that I'm experiencing the vitality of a summer morning, when Have a Nice Day by the Stereophonics came on, I let it play and I listened to it unironically and I agreed with the lyrics and I went, yeah, I am going to have a nice day, I will have a nice day.

So loadsie, we're looking for updates on the bard shit situation in Limerick City. If you've been listening to the last two podcasts you'll know that I dedicated an entire podcast to the history of bard shit because there's a street in Limerick City that's covered in the bard shit of starlings. Starling shit.

And the whole place stinks as a result. So Limerick City Council listened to this podcast and they responded. And I'm now stinks as a result. So Limerick City Council listened to this podcast. And they responded. And I'm now involved in a public feud about bard shit with Limerick City Council. So that's what I'm doing with my life currently. That's what I can put onto my CV. I'm having a public feud with Limerick City Council.

About bard shit. So I read about it in the paper. It said Limerick City and County Council are refuting claims of a popular limerick podcaster about a bad smell on the streets of limerick city they refute the claims but then they go on to admit that like it's a serious problem they publicly clarified that a hot water sweeper which uses water heated to 70 degrees is used to clean the street and to remove the bird droppings. What I will say because I don't want to be too harsh on Limerick City Council. There's been a lot of rain but since I put out the podcast two weeks ago there has been a noticeable decrease in the stench of bird shit in limerick city so they appear to be really taking it

seriously and trying so fair play to them my favorite part about the whole thing is they had this limerick city council had a conversation about my suggestion that they dress the statue of Terry Wogan up as a bird of prey to frighten the starlings away. So as part of this public feud, I need to make it clear to Limerick City Council. I'm not serious about that. That's a joke. That's part of my fictional universe.

I suggested that we dress up Terry Wogan's statue as a hawk. Because it's a visually arresting image. Actually no I said we should dress him up as an osprey. It's a visually arresting image. And it fits nicely within my fictional universe. The fictional universe of this podcast. But if you want to do it. I mean work away.

Please do. I mean as a piece of performance art. Yes, please dress up the Terry Wogan statue as a gigantic hawk. I'd love to see that. I don't think it's going to frighten away any starlings. But for the sheer insanity of it and the performance art aspect, please dress up Terry Wogan as a gigantic osprey. So for this week's podcast,

I have a wonderful chat for you. A chat that I've been sitting on and waiting for the right time to release it. A few months ago on Vicar Street, I had a wonderful conversation with a biodiversity expert, someone who, he's been a guest on this podcast before his name is collie ennis and collie is fascinated with frogs and insects and biodiversity and he's just an

unbelievably passionate person about what he does and anytime I want to speak about the climate or biodiversity I want to speak about it in a way that's empowering and hopeful and proactive rather than frightening I like to speak about it in a way that's inspiring and to speak to people who speak about it in a way that inspires action because the news cycle at the moment is quite bleak. So this was an incredibly enjoyable chat that I had with Collie Ennis. Biodiversity expert. He works up in Trinity College. We speak about frogs, newts, wildflowers, building ponds.

Holding your local council to account around issues such as biodiversity and nature we speak about venomous insects we speak about snakes this is a long conversation it's geez i think it's over 90 minutes long but i couldn't edit it down we had too much fun we had too much crack it was a really beautiful night it was a lovely night inside in vicar street it was a tuesday night. It was a lovely night inside in Vicar Street. It was a Tuesday night or a Monday night podcast. So wonderful energy in the room and everyone left feeling inspired because Collie is an inspiring person. Follow him on social media, Collie Ennis. And also he has his own podcast about biodiversity called The Critter's Shed. At the start of this interview, I just read the audience a new short story, which is about a person who rescues a donkey.

But I left in my response to it because it was relevant to the theme of the chat that I had with Collie. That's a new story from, I'm writing a collection of short stories and the name of the book of the collection is Topographia Hibernica because there was a book written, there's a manuscript from the 11th century called Topographia Hibernica, I've done a podcast on it, it was

a manuscript written by the Brits, by the Normans when they just invaded Ireland, right? Now, it's a hilarious book. It's amazing. What it reminds me of is, do you remember when the US and Britain

was invading Iraq? So they come up with all that WMD nonsense and come up with a lot of lies to justify the invasion, yeah? Well, Britain did that in the 11th century in Ireland, or the 12th century, sorry. They sent a fella to Ireland called Gerald of Wales, and they said to Gerald, he was a monk,

go around Ireland, right, and just write this huge book about what Ireland is like, but make it nuts. Make them look insane so we can go to the Pope and say, they need some civilizing. So Gerald did this, and the book is called Topographia Hibernica. And I love it. It's amazing. It's hilarious.

But what Gerald did is that he reduced Irish culture. He took the humanity out of it and made us appear like animals. So, for instance he wrote in the book when the King of Limerick was being crowned coronated as the king he said that the kingship ritual in Ireland is that

the prospective king fucks his horse then he gets a big bath of hot water and the horse that he just fucked, him and the horse climb into the hot water, and they put a fire under it, so it becomes like a half-human, half-horse soup,

and then while him and the horse are having soup made out of themselves, he fucks and kills the horse at the same time, and then eats this dead horse sex soup and then they make him king which is brilliant like in fairness it's not true and then he said that like the women of Ireland he said the women of Ireland at any point can turn into rabbits right they can transform into rabbits and when the women of Ireland transform into rabbits, right? They can transform into rabbits. And when the women of Ireland transform into rabbits, they chase after pregnant women

and jump up and suck all the milk out of their tits. And he said that up in Donegal, people eat a type of bird that grows on trees. And then he had a bishop in Wicklow who's married to a goat who stands on two feet, and the bishop walks around shifting the goat with tongues and it's this it's an amazing fucking

piece of work that was written in the 11th century and I love it because it's mad but the Pope at the time was an English Pope, Pope Adrian, so and as well as that what Gerald did is he took a lot of stuff from Irish mythology basically what he

did was he the the normans who were the brits went to the english pope and said have you seen what the irish have done with the bible have you seen what they're doing and then the pope said civilize them invade them and it all started that way with this book of lies like WMDs. So my collection of short stories which has the same name Topographia Hibernica I want it to be in an intertextual dialogue with that book from the 11th century for it to be decolonial and what I'm doing is each one of my stories contains an animal or nature of some description so I'm trying to rehumanize Irish people by bringing animals back as a helping character or something that challenges us but also not just for it to be decolonial but for

it to have relevance in terms of the biodiversity collapse that's happening right now do you get me so that's what I want to do. And it's the first time I've written a short story collection that has kind of a unified theme. So I'm looking forward to that and the 40,000 words that I have to write in the next three months. But the guest that I have tonight is quite apt in terms of the theme of that story. His name is Collie Ennis and he's an expert on frogs. Collie? I didn't know how else to introduce you.

It's a fair enough way of introducing me. Can you bring the mic a little bit closer there? There you go. How's that? You comfortable with that? Yeah, very comfortable. Okay. I just have to realise,

because you've been on this podcast before, like I've interviewed you twice. Twice. And I've had you back because we just have so much crack. We do. We have a good laugh. But I'm only after realising as I read that story out, there's parts of you inspired that.

Thank you very much. Do you know, little bits... I haven't had a donkey in the back of my car, but... Of course you haven't had that. Not yet. There's a line in that story where he's talking about his da, and he's saying, my da was the type of man who would bring all sorts of animals home

or put himself out of pocket to help animals and wouldn't be able to and that's you yeah like you're you're not you it could be anything man i'd say you'd hop over the fence of a zoo if a zebra was in trouble yeah look you get a soft spot for creatures that you find you know interesting or fascinating and my kind of interest is in the less loved creatures of the world they don't get any credit because they're not furry they're not you know they're not cute to a lot of people but I find them amazing I think that they're so underappreciated I think that a lot of people don't know that how important they are to us on a purely

self-sufficient level. We're talking frogs, slugs, the things we don't we lot of people don't know that how important they are to us on a purely we're talking frogs Slugs. Yeah, the things we don't we want to pretend don't exist. Yeah, or we don't know exists most people You know, I think for a lot of people maybe out here You would have if you're a little bit older kept frogs bond and watched tadpoles grow as a kid And you probably both stuff that and that kind of goes away with people but I kind of stuck with it over over years you know I'll give you a more more of a proper introduction so Collie is an expert in insects frogs things like that but he started off just as a kid who was fucking around with mud out the back garden just this curiosity um something that you develop naturally as a passion and what i love about you collie is oh man just you make it seem so accessible and relatable to me and and just following you on

social media over the past five years and chatting to you like you've had a measurable impact on my life and how I I didn't give a fuck about insects before I met you like I really didn't I knew they were there but I didn't think about them and I'll give you one example so you were the first person to turn me onto wildflowers right you were the first person to let me know that we have a biodiversity collapse which means that tiny little insects fucking grasshoppers the red fellas with black dots on their teddy bugs yeah they're all disappearing the flies are disappearing and you said to me that the tiniest thing you can do is these insects live in meadows and there's no meadows left. So grow a tiny amount of wildflowers. Now, I was thinking, come on, Collie, really, that's hardly going to make a fucking difference.

So what I did for the laugh about three years ago is the first thing I did was so I have a tiny patch of grass out the back garden. So I'm talking six foot by four foot. Not a lot. Okay. But that's the amount of grass that I have. And the first thing I did is I said, I'm getting some wildflower seeds. Now I made sure, because you'd warn me, when you're buying wildflower seeds, make sure they're legitimate native Irish wildflower. flower seeds make sure they're legitimate native irish wildflower because sometimes when you walk into like b and q or the range it says wildflower or wildflower but they're from poland or something

yeah yeah so i went online i think it was irish wildflower.ie it's it's one dude has been doing it for years he sent me a bag of these and i had my little plot and I just fucked him there. Yeah. Because that's what happened. Yeah. And nothing happened the first year. Nothing happened. Then the next year, 2020 lockdown, I start seeing flowers I hadn't seen before. So I'm going, oh, that's nice.

Then it progresses and it gets to August and I'm seeing insects I've never seen before in my life I've got grasshoppers that big that I didn't know existed in Limerick seriously I'm seeing spiders that are triangular but everything you told me that it would do, and it made me feel incredible. Because I hate feeling as powerless as I do when it comes to the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse. But just to see six foot Irish wildflower, and now for the first time in my life I'm seeing insects I've never seen before. Like they told each other. Here's the first question I'm going to ask you,

Collie, right? So I'm living in a housing estate. I don't live in the country. I live in Limerick City. Yeah. How the fuck did grasshoppers know about a six-foot meadow in my back garden? They're there.

They're looking for places to go. Now, to your point, it's only a small area that you're at. They're working with. But imagine everybody on your street did the same thing or did different things. Somebody doesn't want a meadow, but they'd like a couple of trees.

Or just knock out their grass. Yeah, knock out your... Let the dandelions grow. Put a pond in, which, you know, I'm pond propaganda, pushing that all the time. But stuff like that, all these small places. Now, I lived in Talla for 16 years, and I had a very, very posted stamp garden.

But I turned it into a swamp, and things just arrived, like all these creatures. My kids grew up... Oh, do you mean swamp? No, like, were you literally going, this is going to be, like, a swamp? Yeah. I was dressing like Shrek.

But, no, I basically took out like a massive big pond that took up 50% of the garden. And then I put smaller ones around to give them a variety of real estate, anything that likes water. And water bodies, flat water bodies like that

are in short supply and good quality ponds. They're really in short supply. We used to have loads of them, but because of agricultural policies over the years, all those ponds that were there for cattle to drink out of are all gone now because it's all modern, efficient. And if you offer a place, if you build it, they will come. I keep saying it. I know it's cheesy, but it's the truth. And those grasshoppers who showed up to you will be flying about, starving, hungry.

Bees are the same. And even a small patch makes a difference. And it does help you in these times where you're hearing all these bad news about the environment, biodiversity collapse. What can I do? The government's doing fecal. They're doing a lot of greenwashing.

Get out and do it yourself. Get out with your mates. Make a plan. do it yourself. The most impressive thing I've seen over the last five years since we talked has been local communities getting together and doing stuff. Not the government. They talk a good game before they get in, even the Greens, you know?

They talk a good game. I think at this stage we don't have to say even the Greens anymore. I think we know what they're about. game. I think at this stage we don't have to say even the Greens anymore. I think we know what they're about. Yeah. But, we kind of know.

Like, and it's disappointing to me because I had hope. You know, you have a lot of hope. You're like, God, we might be able

to make a difference now. They're going to pump some money into good conservation work. The money's there, but it never reaches the ground level where it needs to go it's just lost in the ether

also as well another thing I see and I usually see it from following yourself Collie is every so often you'll show some story where a local city council or county council is after doing something absolutely

ridiculous with a hedge or something was it was it Tala was there a little bit of a wetland in Tala or something was it it was something that

you had helped make and the council came across and flattened it or something yeah so 2018 yeah so I I was I work with the

herpetological society of Ireland and we focus that's frogs. Frogs, newts, lizards. Yeah. Herpes, things that crawl. Yeah, it's the Greek word.

But, yeah, it's weird. We're the herpes squad. But we were working with a lot of Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council, Dunlaughey, Rathdown, to try and get ponds into parks because parks aren't biodiverse. They're green deserts.

They're very fancy green deserts and there's not much there for wildlife. They're mowed within an inch of their life. The trees are cut down because the council are afraid of getting sued.

So it's just, there's nothing there. So our idea was to get some ponds in, and they were very receptive to that. So part of that was me going out and surveying, seeing what's alive and how can we help it. Make sense? So part of that was I was wandering around Tala,

and there's a place called Sean Walsh Park, which is a very kind of, you know, it's a dog walker's park with a pond, and you have a few ducks and swans and it's okay. But behind it was a place where they used to dump silt and refuge years ago. So over 20 years. Silt, like that's like a soil type thing. Out of rivers, when they were dredging rivers or canals, they'd ship it off to Talla, because they won't ship it off to the posh areas.

So they dumped it in Talla and left it there. And over 20 years, nature took its course. And this was already a wetland. Did nature like the silt? Oh, sure, that's draining. It sucked it down. It formed onto all these little... I walked into it and I'm like, oh my God, you had all these little... I walked into it and I'm like, oh my God, you had all these little areas.

Like, I went over months going up there and during the frog breeding season. So you didn't... This had happened naturally? This had happened. This was naturally there. It was just that it was left alone. No one went near it.

What animals were you now seeing because of this? So loads of frogs, newts, all sorts of invertebrates, dragonflies, three species of bat, newts, all sorts of invertebrates, dragonflies, three species of bat, the critically endangered European eel,

mad stuff. In the middle of Tala, like, and when you're beating off each other and working together, the bat is coming down because he wants

this dragonfly and wow, okay. And if you stood there, you could see the pyramid of the square. So as Tala built up around it,

this thing was just left there like Jurassic Park and it was going mental and it was brilliant. So I went back to the council. I said, you don't need to spend money on a wetland. You have a wetland. The biodiversity officer who was there, beautiful woman, brilliant, mad into nature. Oh, let's roll with this.

Put it up the chain. There was talk of a boardwalk getting put in so local schools could use the amenity to go down with their teachers. Now they're learning about biodiversity. They're learning about biodiversity on the steps of the school nearly. So part of survey work is you go back

throughout the year. You go back to catch it up on seasons. So I was going back to see the young tadpoles emerge and see how many uh there were and kind of just get a vibe of how well they were doing in that area and i went back and i walked around the corner and there was like that height of sludge dumped on it it. Like just, again, they just took, they were cleaning out some ponds in some other areas and they brought it back to Talla. They drove in some trucks and they dunked it all over the place.

And they flattened it. It was open. Flattened it. How does that happen? How does it happen that the workers were like, hadn't been informed, this area is going to be protected and they fucked it up? Because of this screen washing lark

that goes on with councils, they'd rather get a photograph on Twitter with a meadow than actually listen to what the biodiversity officers are asking them for or telling them about. So that was lost between,

there was a miscommunication, that's what they say. And I do believe that. I don't think it was malice. I don't think they're like, fuck these frogs. No. But frogs in Tala. But it's like, why is that going on?

And that day that it happened was the same day that kids, I don't know if you remember the time, where the kids were marching for climate change and all that sort of biodiversity loss. I remember when it happened, there was a sting in the tail of it because it was like, this is so dumb. Yeah.

This is, what a terrible time for this to happen. Yeah, and it really kind of, it broke my heart because I'd been quite attached to it. And I actually walked away because I only lived around the corner. I was walking away, I was like around the corner. I was walking away. I was like, oh, I'm done. I'm done with this.

You know what I mean? What's the point? And then I got angry. So I rang around a couple of people I've worked with in the media. That went viral as fuck. Yeah, it was on Modern Ireland the next day. So it was mad. And, yeah, it all kicked off.

So we eventually got some mitigation in frogs are back the place is starting to turn back into a wilderness again years later it's great to go back and see it i think the councils all over the country have re-evaluated dumping stuff in the middle of nowhere well what was great about that was they all got really scared like a lot of people looked like absolute dickheads because of that and it showed that people don't fucking like this and you will go viral

and you'll look like a fucking prick if you kill a wetlands people actually do give a shit yeah and it's more and more happening now you see especially with social media as bad as it can be, it's good for calling their councils, calling their local authorities on...

Cutting down hedges. The mad stuff they do. Cutting down hedges. It's crazy. And it's like, you know, they're saying one thing, but they're acting the completely different way if they think they can get away with it.

You know, and it needs to change. We're too wise now. People out here know, whether you're into it or not, you know about it, you know how important it is. This is what I'd like you to speak about, right? Because we can't assume that.

Because there could be someone in the audience going, who gives a fuck about frogs? Seriously, like, I would have been that, like, five years ago, I would have been, I don't give a shit about a dragonfly. I would have assumed that you're doing this because you think they're beautiful insects. And then I spoke to you and it's like, actually, no, this is really important. And it's not just about the beauty of nature.

Why are frogs important? Why are dragonflies important? And bats? In Irelandland in tallaght we in tallaght look we need we're part whether we like it or not we're sitting here in our lovely cities and it all is very distant from from us but we're all part of the food web whether we like it or not that's it and once we start to lose especially like the likes of inverted percent like if we were to disappear tomorrow the world will go on yeah no bother it's what i love about the last of us yeah did you watch that yeah it

was amazing it was great but what my favorite thing about the last of us and they do it even better in the video game is society has collapsed and then nature is like brilliant. It's such a beautiful world. The buildings have fallen down, but there's moss everywhere and there's fucking, wildlife loves it. Yeah, and that's the way it would be

if we were to disappear. But if invertebrates, for example, like all your bugs, all your insects, your flies, everything, if they disappear, everything collapses. Now we're quite clever as a species we probably build some kind of algal gel factories and we'd be surviving off that but what a shit world to be in you know what i mean what a what a crappy

existence that's going to be you know and apart from like just surviving in general but like everybody loves getting out to the countryside and seeing stuff and you know what I mean? And just getting that connection to nature, whether you live in a city or not. Going down to your local park is amazing. Your local park would be so much better if it was managed for wildlife.

The first time I really noticed it, Cally, so the thing with Ireland is, like, we do have our cities, but we're quite, we're green. There's a lot of vegetation in the country. I went to San Francisco, right? Roast and hot. And now San Francisco's fucking

massive. So you're talking concrete for ages. And trees, there was a tree there, there was a tree there, there was a tree there, that was it. Yeah. Surrounded by concrete. And I didn't notice it

while I was in the city of San Francisco. Only when I took a day trip up to where the redwoods are in the forest. Yeah. So I'm in San Francisco, it's horrible, it's rotten, I'm not really noticing this. I get in the bus, the bus is air conditioned, that's all right, and then I get in San Francisco. It's horrible. It's rotten. I'm not really noticing this. I get in the bus. The bus is air conditioned.

That's all right. And then I get to the forest. And I feel like I can drink the air. Yeah. I'm like, oh, that's what this is. I didn't notice the utter absence of nature in the city. My brain told me, it's too hot. It's not nice.

You're grumpy. It's like, no, no, no, no. I'm in a forest now and it's like, I can breathe and I felt it. I take it for granted a bit in Ireland because in fairness, the air quality is probably better than San Francisco. But when I was there with those two opposites,

it scared the living fuck out of me. Yeah, and if we keep going the way we're going, we'll end up like that. That's the simple fact of it and big cities can exist that are in in touch with nature Singapore is a great example of that

yeah they're doing brilliantly blow your mind they have fucking ivy climbing up buildings and it's a beautiful it's mad it's mad I walked I was like my god

they have a wetland in the middle of the city in the middle of the city they have streams going along with little frogs breeding I was in heaven I was like this is amazing but you saw it in real life happy days yeah it was

great photographs i thought i thought really good i saw some photographs of singapore and what they were doing i thought someone had made it in photoshop yeah it's crazy like they live on walls on like all the big overpasses and everything they've trees that link up so wildlife can use them as corridors they plan this out why is is Singapore doing that and we aren't? Because they, back in the day, they decided that, well, we're going to be building up with a lot of people living in small little gaffes, apartments or flats or whatever.

So we're going to have to give them a bit of nature around. So they planned in advance for this. So every apartment block has a lovely green space with a bit of nature around. So they planned in advance for this. So every apartment block has a lovely green space with a bit of water. Then they have all the links with the trees. You still have that freshness in the air. They appreciate nature. It's a cultural thing as well.

So that's what I'm trying to get at, because I'm working towards something at the moment, just a kind of... So you notice I'm speaking more and more about Irish mythology on the podcast the past year in particular. So from what I'm looking at, and I'm after getting obsessed with Irish mythology, right?

Right. It's great. I think that all human cultures have mythology. I think that mythology is like the fruiting body of the human unconscious. But I also think that mythology is what keeps us part of biodiversity. Humans are animals. We're fucking animals, right?

But we're the only animals that have language and the ability to hold ideas outside of ourselves and to swim in a sea of language and communicate via culture. We're the animal that has that. And I think mythology exists to keep us in harmony. Now, here's the reason that I'm thinking this. If you take Ireland, for instance,

we were an oral culture for years, right? Before Patrick came here and gave us Latin, we were mostly, our stories were passed around via word of mouth there were album stones and stuff like that but the average people our stories were preserved using only words that you couldn't write down so what that meant was if you want to map your world every single thing has to have a story so there's no such thing as a tree that tree is magical and underneath that tree the roots go into the other world and then

because it's in the other world there's hazelnuts on this tree and they contain the knowledge of the other world and when those hazelnuts drop into a pond and a salmon eats this hazelnut then this becomes the salmon of knowledge and then a mountain isn't just a mountain the mountain becomes the salmon of knowledge and then a mountain isn't

just a mountain the mountain is the daughter of a god or a goddess and when you speak this way about the landscape you're mapping it through stories but it's also something that you become fearful of you can't exploit and extract like the story about the salmon of knowledge be careful about what salmons you fuck with. You know what I mean? But even this with insects, and I went looking this up, bees are hugely important, right? Big time.

In Irish mythology, going back to Bridget, now I'm not talking Saint Bridget, I'm talking the goddess Bridget, so this could be 2,000 years old. In Irish mythology, there's not a heaven or hell. There's our world and the other world. And it's like a parallel universe, you know? So with this parallel, it's where fairies come from. It's where the Tuatha Dé Danann come from. They believe that the mouth of a river, a spring, where all the minerals come up, that that's coming from the other world, this other

dimension. So Bridget, apparently, because she was a goddess, could switch between dimensions. And she used to keep bees in the other world. So these bees that Bridget had were magical from the other world. And then they would pass into this world whenever there was morning mist, that this mist would shimmer between our world and the other world. So the bees would come in through there. And that's how ancient Irish people explained the miracle of fertilization. How

do we get these beautiful apples? Well, fucking bees come from the other world and Bridget tends them. Then you don't kill bees because you're not fucking with these things that come from the other world. In ancient Irish mythology, they believe that butterflies, that when a person dies, because of the way a butterfly flutters, right? That when a person dies, their soul leaves their body as a butterfly, or a butterfly will come near you if a person has recently died, that's your relative returning, right? Now that might sound like silly stuff, but up until the 1600s in Ireland there was a law yeah you couldn't kill couldn't kill a white butterfly because it was the soul of a child do you get what

I'm saying now mythology is like I said is the fruiting body of the unconscious mind that's what keeps us in harmony with nature because if you look at what colonization does, colonization is you destroy the indigenous culture and mythology of a land. Take away that, and then you open it up for exploitation. So when the British came here, particularly after

the, I think it's the fucking Elizabethan period, Cromwell and all that crack, 1600s onwards, they cleared the forests. They killed all the wolves. Like the eradication of culture and language went alongside the eradication of rainforests. Why? So that these things could be extracted for profit only. When you remove meaning and respect and fear and stories, then the land is nothing but something to

make money from. And that's what colonization does. Do you get what I'm saying? I do, yeah. And it's replicated across the world. Yeah. That's why I'm asking about Singapore. I'm wondering, what is it about their culture that maybe has them a little bit more respectful

and fearful of nature? You have to be in balance here. Yeah, I think it's a cultural thing. You know, Southeast Asian people are very in touch with nature, but also I think as well with Singapore, they're on the very bottom of that Malaysian kind of peninsular, that big landmass,

and they have a very limited amount of space to use. So they just used it carefully. They thought about what they're going to do. They thought about the future. It's quite new as well though, isn't it? Yeah, it's quite new. But I mean... Places like Hong Kong, Hong Kong isn't... The British built Hong Kong and it's really not nice in terms of what they did to the place.

No, but again, if you're in Hong Kong, they've left the forest areas around. So it's not far away to get up there. It's not like Dublin when you go up to the pine forest and it's just quail chin muck. You know what I mean? So there's a difference.

They still have a good kind of patch of their old nature there, even though it's a mega city. You know, I kind of admire them for that as opposed to what we've bare hills and just because rose and rose a monoculture what we don't think of as well in this country is um like i used to be you'd be up in an airplane you'd look down and you'd go wow aren't we great with all that green and i used to think it was class until i realized those fields aren't worth shit they used to be rainforests nothing happens on those fields other than one type of grass and that may as well be concrete they used to be but even after the rainforest we are still

a really biodiverse and rich in nature country because we had meadows and we had we had soft farming that's you know what I mean? But it's all gone and we're getting to the stage now where it's not only the insects are gone, but they're looking at the microfauna in the soil. And that's starting to fail. What's that now? What's the... The fungus, the small little bugs that live in the soil,

they're starting to disappear because you're constantly throwing down pesticides, you're constantly... I heard that because someone wrote in a question that they're dipping sheep in some chemical and this chemical is what's killing the soil. Yeah. Your dog as well. You're putting flea killer on your dog and it jumps into a local pond. It's not doing great because that's a serious pesticide.

So if he jumps into a frog pond or, you know a run through a stream where there's loads of damselfly lava stuff that stuff will go down it all adds up it all adds up you know so it it's it's so complicated to try and set this boat right it's like we're heading towards that iceberg and it's just so hard to steer it away. People come up with these fast track answers and it's not easy. It really isn't. And it will take like a cultural change, a massive cultural change

to try and set us right. But there are little things that we can do ourselves that really, really make an impact. One thing that I would recommend to people is, because it's just empowering, and I call this chucking our lawn. Yeah.

Because I did a podcast on it. Because as I was saying there, there is a relationship between climate collapse and fucking uh colonialism so you can be anti-colonial about this make seed bombs right this is great crack this is and it's it feels wonderful to do it right you first off get your irish wild seed get the real stuff uh if you walk into b and q home base and it says wildflower look at the back of that packet and make sure that it says irish fucking native irish it probably isn't um irish

wildflower.ie i think is the one you need to go for to get legitimate irish wildflower seeds they're not expensive then go on to youtube and look up how to make a seed bomb it's two ingredients do you remember the modeling clay that you'd use in in in school just kind of you get it in an art shop clay no no no not more like a clay that dries it's cheap enough you get some of that clay and then you get a bit of peat moss or compost or whatever and you just get clay and compost and you make a little ball, like a golf ball and then you roll that around in your wildflower seed leave them dry

and then you have these little golf balls that are loaded with Irish wildflower then walk around Dublin, right? Seriously, this is amazing and when you get angry at a vacant lot if you see a big fucking dirty Fine Gael vacant lot if you see a big fucking dirty

Fine Gael vacant lot, if you see a derelict building that you know they're not going to go near for 10 years and this is pissing you off, this is what you do. You reach into your pocket, you pull out your seed bomb and fuck it onto the roof.

Fuck it into a ghost estate. Fuck it into... But you know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. Into a shopping centre that they stopped building in 2007 and now it's just rotting. Throw wildflower seeds in there

and what happens is that the bomb lands and then it has enough soil for that wildflower to grow and once it grows it's a fucking flower. It'll start pollinating itself. If enough people do that

without breaking any fucking laws you can rewild all of Dublin in this real guerrilla way where you're not harming anybody you know so do that I did it all over Limerick and it really fucking works

or as well I was trying to do this in Limerick before the pandemic but my local pub trying to do this in Limerick before the pandemic, but my local pub that I go to in Limerick, Pharmacia, I was trying to get people there to make their own seed bombs and just leave them in a basket at the bar. And if people want to take

them away, fucking take them and throw a few hash seeds in if you want. Although don't do that actually, because then the guards will fuck with it. Wildflower, throw it everywhere. As someone who knows what they're talking about, what would that... Let's just say every single person in this audience decided

I'm going to make seed bombs and I'm going to fuck them at the next vacant lot that I see in Dublin. What would that do to the city centre? And there's like a thousand, there's 1,200 people here. It would certainly make it a lot easier for some touristy bees to get some food or to get a bit of nourishment. Little steps like that, if it's done on a big scale by individuals, will help.

It's exactly what I was talking about with getting together with your community groups to try and say, well, what can we do as a team? I'll do this this you do that um everything from the wildflowers to plant trees to put in wetlands and wetlands are super important super important so if you can do all that sort of stuff it will make a massive difference it makes a huge difference what i love about it as well, Collie, is with this, like sometimes just using the recycling bin at home, it doesn't feel like I'm making a difference. Yeah. And I know we're up here with our fucking plastic,

like a pair of pricks. Well, you see the news reports about where all that recycling was going. That's what I mean. It's just being shipped. So you feel great, but you're not actually doing anything. But if you have a tiny pond out of your back garden and you're looking at insects.

That's hands-on, effective conservation. That's what you want to be doing. It's no greenwashing. It's no bullshit. You're going to put something in and wildlife is going to use it. And you'll see it. And that's even more incredible because you're just like, oh my God, this is actually working. As opposed to like, as you said, putting the plastic thing in, you know.

So we're going to have a little interval and then when we come back, we'll speak about some of those methods that people can do. Yeah. Time now for a little Ocarina Pause. So you don't get any surprise adverts that frighten you. Recently, I've been hitting myself into the head with a new book each week. I like this this trend instead of the ocarina pause. This week I'm going to hit myself into the head with a book called Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez. It's a short story collection by one of my favorite contemporary short story writers Marianaiana Enriquez, who's from Argentina.

And I suppose you'd call it a little bit magical realism, a little bit horror. She writes these very visceral and frightening stories. So let's hit ourselves in the head with Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez. And you're going to hear an advert for something while I do this. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what?

Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real. What's not real? Who said that?

The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, Only in theaters April 5th. alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. The noise on my computer is very loud this week. I think my hard drive needs to be cleared. For the angry sounding computer here, the fan is pure load. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast If this podcast brings you joy, distraction, solace, entertainment,

whatever it is that has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do to make this podcast. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I rent out this office. It's how I buy my equipment. It's how I pay my bills. This podcast is only possible because it's my full-time job. So if you like it and you're listening to it regularly, please consider giving me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. But you know what? If you can't afford that, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it. You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for

you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Follow me on Instagram, Blind Boy Boat Club. My new book, Topography Hibernica, is coming out in November. You can pre-order it. And the link is my saved stories on my Instagram page. Let's plug some upcoming gigs.

I've got some live podcasts coming up. On the 26th of August, I'm in the Cork Opera House. That's going to be a wonderful crack it's part of Cork Podcast Week and also during Cork Podcast Week Collie, Collie Ennis actually has a live podcast too

Collie is doing the Crittershed Live Podcast right on August 27th in the Cork Arts Theatre and it's a child friendly show so you can bring your kids along it's 1 p.m in the day and as i understand it collie will have a lot of insects with him he'll be bringing his tarantulas and his notes and spiders and all sorts of things so the critter shed live podcast august 27th at the Cork Arts Theatre, 1pm.

That'd be fun, especially if you have kids. I don't think you should bring children to my live podcast, on account of rude words. I'm in Vicar Street on the 28th of August, which I believe is a Monday night. I'm telling you lads, my mid. My midweek Vicar Street gigs. Live podcasts. Are wonderful. This one that you're listening to right now. This was like a Monday night Vicar Street gig.

It's a different energy. It has the peacefulness of being at the cinema. You can go to it. You don't have to worry about work the next day. Because you're not going to be drinking. You'll at home in bed it's a great relaxing engaging way to spend a monday night so come along to that vicar street gig on monday the 28th of august it's almost sold out actually but that's going to be good fun i'll have a class guest then what else have we got Dunleary is sold out Patrick Cavanagh weekend up in Monaghan on the 30th of September I have a great guest for that

really good and there's not there's not a lot of seats for that that's only 190 so that that one will set out but I've got an amazing guest. For the Patrick Kavanagh weekend. Up in. The Patrick Kavanagh Centre. In Ishkeen. County Monaghan. English tour. UK.

England. Scotland. I don't know if I'm doing Wales. There's a tour happening over there. There's a tour happening over in that island there. To the right. I can't give you any. Any details yet.

It's happening in November. Hopefully next week. I can't give you any. Any details yet. It's happening in November. Hopefully next week. I'll have the actual dates. But there's. There's something happening. In Tanland. Then. Belfast.

The waterfront. Right. On the 18th of November. That's going to be good crack. Alright. Waterfront is a beautiful venue. Do you know what. because that one's probably going to sell out i'd love it if you'd recommend a few guests for belfast for me would you just

give me a little dm on instagram and i'll tell you why i have to really check myself when it comes to the north of ireland that i don't treat the north of Ireland as a curious tourist. Being from the Free State, the north of Ireland is a place of curiosity to us because of the period known as the Troubles. And listeners up north always say to me, don't have a guess that's political. Don't interview someone up in Belfast to speak about the troubles. Because A, a lot of people are just sick of hearing it all the time up there. B, there's community trauma.

Community trauma exists. C, I don't want to be up there as a tourist. I don't want to be up on stage as a tourist. I want to be in service of the audience. So if you have guest suggestions, interesting people, whatever the fuck, someone who's an expert in Alsatians, whatever you want. If you know of interesting, engaging, passionate people up in Belfast who you'd like to be my guest give me a shout on Instagram and

make some suggestions. Back to this chat with the wonderful Collie Ennis and in the second part we speak about venomous insects and we speak about invasive species in Ireland and building ponds So yeah we spent the first half talking about like

Irish biodiversity which I love that we focused on that because you've got loads of mad more interesting shit going on. This fella has a shed out his back garden with insects that will kill you stone dead. Legitimately. So recently you moved out to Wicklow, so you have more space.

Yeah. You have, like, so you recently, you moved out to Wicklow, so you have more space. Yeah. Like, just tell us, what's the most dangerous insect you have at home now? An arachnid, the six-eyed sand spider. So, yeah. They live in deserts, and desert creatures are really vulnerable for two reasons. Because the deserts are kind of poor environments for finding food.

And also, if anything comes across you, it wants to eat you immediately. So you tend to get these animals, snakes, spiders, scorpions, that live in deserts will have a lot more potent venom. And the six-eyed sand spider lives in some of the harshest deserts in the world. So they bury themselves. You would have seen them online. People were calling them the cocaine spider because they're in a white dish of powder and they bury themselves.

But that's how they literally sit there waiting for prey, sometimes for months, just sitting there really, really still. And then the cricket comes across and the six-eyed sand spider comes out and very gingerly, it's not vicious, it's really like, bites it, and the cricket-eyed sand spider comes out and very gingerly, it's not vicious, it's really like, bites it and the cricket goes dead.

Now most spiders, when they envenomate another animal, they have to struggle a bit, hold it, wait for the venom to take effect. Not these boys. It's game over straight away. And the reason is so they're so isolated and they come across prey so

infrequently that they can't miss. Yeah, that's exactly it. So the other thing about this one is you don't know what would happen to you if you got bitten because we don't know if a human has ever even been bitten by these. No one's volunteering for trials. So we don't know. Yeah, we don't know. I mean, like a lot of stuff you test on are similar animals, mainly rodents.

So, yeah, they get brain bleeds, heart attacks, something similar to Ebola. They basically liquefy themselves. So pretty funky venom. How do you then, because you're going to go home tonight, and then tomorrow, well, I'm assuming you don't feed these fellas every day. No, especially like desert species, you don't want to feed them every day,

because they're not used to it. So when's the next time you have to feed the six-eyed sand spider? I have a chart at home. I would say it's once every three months, so I'd say it's coming up to one anyway. So what is your regime around this spider that could kill you stone dead? And if it does bite you, it's like, we don't know. He's the first person.

Let's see what happens. How do you manage that? I met you in Cork and he had it in a fucking Chinese takeaway container. Like for real, we're backstage. Because I asked him tonight, I said, look, don't bring any insects with you tonight. It's not that type of show, and I'm kind of freaked out by it. But when I interviewed you in Cork, you had been

at a demonstration where you bought some insects. And then he goes, oh, I've got the six-eyed sand spider with me. I'm like, great, expecting to have to put on a costume, and it's in a fucking Chinese takeaway container. It looks like a Chinese takeaway container, but there are clips on it.

Okay. So even if I was to drop it, it's not going to break. It has to be a specific type of plastic. You can't get into it. And when you're keeping them as well, the thing about it is, despite the venom,

you have to realise that they're not an aggressive spider and they can't climb plastic so you're laughing there as well but again you have to be really careful and it has to be in a lock box has to be like lab conditions you know what i mean and at home then i'm you just throw the food in i'm guessing oh yeah yeah i'm not having it down the dinner table with the kids you know but i'm assuming there are spiders that you do, then. You've got, like, one of the big tarantulas, don't you?

Yeah, Goliath, Bordy are the biggest arachnid on the planet. And he just walks around your gaff? No, none. The tortoises walk around the gaff. They're like the pet rocks that people trip over all the time. No, the spiders, tarantulas are actually great pets, believe it or not, if you understand them and if you know that they're not a hamster

and you can't take them out and rub them. Because if you do, you're going to get itchy hairs all over you and you'll be in bits. Tell us the story, Cally. Tell us the story. So the Goliath board here, the big one that I have, I opened the cage one day. It was actually my mate's, I was babysitting for him. And I went down, I was in a rush.

So my mate was away on holidays and I opened up the Goliath board ear box, a head height, and you're always supposed to put goggles on. And they're arse, they have these... Hairs that they flick. And I've been keeping transances for years so I got very you know blasé about it and I opened the thing and went and got me in the eye and it was like somebody got a hot needle and stuck in my eye and as you blink the hairs that go in there are barbed like a fishing hook so they go in further and further and it's just like oh god so I went to Eye and Ear Hospital and there was a queue of people as there is in that hospital. And I went up to the counter to fill out the form. Couldn't see properly.

Bubbles were coming out of my nose. Just in excruciating pain. And the woman took the form off me and went in. I'm like, I'm'm gonna have to sit here for hours now with this pain in my eye as soon as the doctor saw what happened he ran out straight away Mr Ennis because he was buzzing he'd never seen anybody with a tarantula hairs in his eye so they bring me into this room and it's like do you remember Clockwork Orange like they did that with my eye and I'm sitting there under the oak going, oh, my God.

And they gave me the opioid drops, and it was orgasmic. It was unbelievable. It was like, oh, the relief. So that was grand. And I'm like, they're going to get this out. It's fine. Next thing I know, all these students start arriving in. They must have got busloads of student doctors in.

And they're all filming me down the lens of this kind of thing that I'm sitting there. And they're asking me all these questions and I was just like, that went on for, it seemed like hours, but it was probably only 40 minutes. Then they got these, they have micro, microscopic kind of tweezers to get in there. So the doctor's there and he's pulling them out. As he's pulling them out, my vision of the room was going plunk, because he was pulling the thing out, and it was mental, it was. But I didn't feel anything at that stage. I was probably a little bit out with all the

opioids, but yeah, it was a mad experience, and a tough one to explain to the missus. And also what you do, Collie, is, like, so you will go on field trips to the most dangerous parts of the, you'll go into the middle of the Congo

like places where humans don't usually go because it's real fucking dangerous with the animals that are there I go into like places, like the last place I was out was Morocco and you go out into the field there. I'm working with the guys up in Galway in the Venom Lab up there

and they're setting up a lab in Morocco because a lot of kids get stung and there's some pretty funky desert scorpions out there and they do affect a lot of the kids. Now, if you're going to Morocco on holidays, they're not near the holiday places. It's way out in the sticks. But we went out there to dig out

these scorpions and catch them with some of the local PhD students. And these are the lads in Galway in the venom lab. So they're interested in catching these things so that they can develop anti-venoms. Anti-venoms, cures for all sorts of diseases they're finding. Of course, yeah.

So you're going to have treatment for cancers and everything. You know what I mean? So, yeah, so we go out in Morocco. Now, my family were in a nice hotel and I'm going off in the day to catch these scorpions. And I was having a buzz. But we set up a lab there, which is very much like my shed. And I kind of was showing them, you know, proper husbandry, how to look after them, how not to get stung, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I like doing that kind of magic.

So the local people in Morocco are aware of these scorpions, but they're so scary, they're just like, stay the fuck away. So then you come from Dublin going, there's actually a way to be in harmony with them and to husbandry, as you said. Yeah, and also if you're farming them in captivity, you don't have to go out and collect them from the wild. It makes it easier to work with them

extracting venom all that sort of stuff instead of going out every day having to find them you just breed them so a little economy as well so these people now

are like I have a job now in the sticks of Morocco and this is to get some venom from this scorpion and they're shipping venom now to other places around the world

like vials of it because they know how to extract it so it's really interesting and it's it's great vials of it because they know how to extract it so it's really interesting and it's it's great for places like that because you know people are sleeping in areas where these scorpions are just going to wander in like we're very fortunate here despite all the papers say about you know giant spiders invading our gaffes that's not happening we're not going to get anyone not going to get seriously hurt by anything over here but in these countries

it's important to kind of get a handle on it like i mean snake bite is recognized by the un now is one of the biggest killers of people in the tour world because people are out picking our tea bags leaves now they're doing it manually and there's a lovely viper sitting there and goes get away from me and bites that person and because anti antivenom is so expensive to make and pharmaceutical companies are pricks, you're left there with some poor person. If they don't die, they're going to lose a limb, they're going to lose their job. So, you know, this work is important because you can...

Local communities there don't have to go to Pfizer or whoever. It's like you've been bitten by this viper and now we have a local venom lab and we can do our own antivenom. Well, the idea is to get, especially with the snake bite thing, is to get a universal antivenom and get it done cheap. All bites.

Imagine that. It'd be amazing. So lots of interesting work done. And being into these kind of less loved creatures and freaky stuff, I find it fascinating. And it's really cool to be involved in it. It's kind of a Forrest Gump moment where you're sitting in the desert going,

I'm from Crumlin, what am I doing out here? Chasing scorpions or going to Kenya with students on ecological trips seeing the effects of human encroachment on the Masai Mara National Park and stuff like that it's just kind of living the dream because I would have grown up watching Attenborough, reading books

I was passionate about all this stuff as a kid and now I'm doing it, it's mental What I'd love to ask you about as well is, so I fucking love heavy metal music, right? And you know, and so do you. And if I've had a few cans at two in the morning, Collie's the person I'm sending a Cannibal Corpse song to.

You know what I mean? We've had many a conversation where you look at it the next day and we're not spelling things right. But we both love metal. Yeah. And what I'd love to know is your love of because what I adore about heavy metal is it's hilarious I love how it is really funny like metal is

it does not take itself seriously and how like snakes are part of metal scary spiders are part of metal surely that's part of the attraction for you yeah I mean if you go to like any reptile or herpetological conference there's two types of people there

there's people with the the tweed shorts and the the leather patches on their on their jackets and there's people there with 62 persons in their nose you know what i mean and tats all down the thing and it's brilliant it's like yeah and i'm kind of halfway house between both of them and so yeah it's it does lend to the culture um you know one thing i do say is because i i you know animals like exotic animals to get as pets are still the same as a dog or a cat yeah it's all about response used to have a snake around his neck when he was playing guitar and yeah i'm not mad about that. Imagine he was doing it with an Alsatian. People would be going mental.

I see people going into nightclubs with snakes and stuff. What are you doing? Do that with a cat and see what people will say. They're living animals and I think they should be respected. Are we getting back? Because the mad thing too, it used to happen in England

more than Ireland in the 70s and 80s there was always like a small little local local nightclub and the nightclub was called like Crocs

it's like why they call it Crocs and it's like because it's a fucking real crocodile in the nightclub that was a thing there was one of them

in there was a fucking a huge 12 foot snake got loose in a strip club in Limerick in the nightclub. That was a thing. There was one of them in, there was a fucking, a huge 12-foot snake got loose in a strip club in Limerick during Brian McFadden's stag park. During the Celtic Tiger

in Limerick, there used to be multiple strip clubs in Limerick, right? Now there's not. There's just one swinger sauna full of taxi drivers.

But there used to be all these strip clubs. And there was one place anyway. And Brian McFadden was having a stag party when he was getting married to Kerry Katona. And all of Westlife was down. And whatever they'd done anyway, they'd hired a stripper with a snake. Like a huge snake. And the pub next door to the strip club used to be called the High Stool.

And it was a heavy metal bar and all my buddies worked there so whatever happened at this fucking stag party they lost the snake and my buddy who's now a garden bray he was the barman at this fucking metal bar

he was sent upstairs for fucking whiskey and there's a 12 foot cobra there it was like weeks later no one had reported the missing snake and now there's a giant cobra upstairs happens all the time yeah I'll give you

I'll give you a good one and again it's down to like people are you should have a license for it I really you know I'd be pushing for that it's just responsible pet ownership and then like i mean i get saddled with all these so a lot of people get snakes and spiders you get them and then they grow or they get bored with them some people get them as a personality transplant i think you know i mean it's like oh i'm really interested to have a snake it's like you know and then they end up giving it away and i have to you know try and rehome and so you're the person who gets called I get called out here's a good one for you right they did the DSPCA gave me a shout I was in work

and I was finishing up a shift at three and they gave me a shout they said we're out of getting a report of a snake loose in Crumlin and I was like all right that's on my way home so I hopped in the the frogmobile and I headed off to Crumlin and I'm in contact with the daughter of the man who found it and she's screaming down the phone at me and I'm like oh my god this is mad so I pulled into the turns out and I pulled in and I was like I know this place, this is a nursing home

it's a kind of a retirement village in Crumlin next to regular families gaffes but with a connecting attic. Poor old 78-year-old man with a big gut on him and, you know, probably liked a few cans in the afternoon, was sitting in his bed

and a python fell through the roof because it had gone along from whoever's house it got out of and gone between the boards. And pythons are heavy, heavy animals, you know. Five, six kilos. Boom, onto him. And he's there with the pacemaker, short now. And his daughter's screaming.

And I'm coming up. And the poor snake was harmless enough, you know. But yeah, that was a mental one. I was putting into a pillowcase, throw it a mental one. Putting it into a pillowcase and throw it on my shoulder. Was it a big python? She was about 7'4", yeah. What was the...

And again, no one said anything about it going missing. Okay. You know, it's mad. So the person who had it mightn't have given a shit. Or went, oh my god, what am I going to do? What are you going to do? Knock into your neighbours, by the way.

It's a tough one, isn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, that's why it's so important to be a responsible owner, to have locks on your... How did that happen? You don't know the person who did it, but how do you reckon a fucking seven-foot python ends up even leaving the person's house? So snakes are incredible escapers.

Absolutely. If you leave a little gap in the tank... They don't want to be there inside in that tank. No, it's not about that. I mean, most of them, if you have a big enough tank, they're happy out, but at the same time, they'll have a wander, they'll have a look around, you know?

They'll get the smell of a rat in the attic, which is more than likely what happened. And then they'll go off and they tend to go up as well. Up and warm. And how does that, like, so they have enough muscles on their body, I'm guessing, to fucking reach up high and get into that ceiling. Oh, man, don't get me talking about snakes.

Snakes are incredible. You're on a podcast, man, and you're here to do that job. But... Come on. So, you know, if you were a god and you were designing one of the most effective vertebrate predators on the planet, you wouldn't get your maw there and just go,

roll out a rope. But they are, because they can climb vertical poles. They've wrapped themselves around, they've pulled them up. They can swim. They've taken over. There's sea snakes there that live 90% of their life in the sea. They only come out to breed.

You've got snakes that can jump. You've got, you know, amazingly, you've got snakes from Southeast Asia that will crawl up to the top of a tree. They'll go out onto the very edge of a branch. They'll flatten themselves out like an airplane wing. They'll jump off and they'll glide for like 30 meters and steer themselves in the air. And that's all done with

the shape of a tube. So yeah, they can do loads of stuff. I love snakes. They're incredible animals. There's a brilliant snake as well, combining two of my favorite animals that they discovered in 2006 in Iran. Now, Iran wouldn't be a great place to go into the wilderness if you're a scientist because it's just not friendly

to that kind of thing. But some people have been very adventurous and gone out there. And they discovered this snake. Well, they thought they discovered a spider. So they saw this spider on a rock moving around. And they saw a bird coming down to eat a spider. And the next minute, a snake comes out and grabs it the snake's tail has evolved to look like a spider and he uses it as a lure check it out on on youtube tonight it's called the um oddly enough it's the spider tail thorn viper but yeah it's a it's an amazing animal and it's like it's like something you dream of when you're in school. I put a spider's tail on the edge of a snake. But it's amazing.

Really cool. And over the pandemic, you did a lot of field work in Ireland. Yeah. And we were promising ourselves we weren't going to talk about it backstage, and we'd save it for the stage. But what new stuff have you been finding in Ireland? Yeah, so we're quite poor in in naturally we'd be quite poor in biodiversity because we were basically covered by ice yeah

throughout the whole of the ice age and as that ice retreated and the warmer loving creatures like amphibians and reptiles were moving across they got to england but then the irish sea formed before a lot of them could get over here. That's why they have snakes in England. Yeah, they have a load of snakes over there. Well, compared to us. Boris Johnson being the biggest. But...

So we've one lizard. So we've got the common lizard. We've one newt, the smooth newt. We've got one frog, the common frog, and we've one toad. We've fucking one frog! Only one frog. Well, one species. Well, I know, yeah, but Jesus Christ! Yeah, and people think we've loads because they're multicoloured, which is really unusual for amphibians, but we've only the one of each.

We've only done one of each. Now, over the last number of years, we've found common toads. So English toads were in the Dublin Mountains. And we thought that, like, yeah, we were like, somebody's out there releasing them. I spent a lot of time with my colleagues, Rob Gondola and a few others in the Herpological Society,

traipsing around the Dublin Mountains trying to find where they were breeding, all this stuff. We did a citizen science project, so we basically called it Toad in the Hole to try and have you seen this toad, comparing it to Irish amphibians. And we've discovered that they're not only up in the Dublin Mountains, they're all over the place. And they've probably been there, and I'm working on that at the moment, because they move very slowly. And once we get the DNA results in,

if it's the one population, if it hasn't been multiple introductions, they could have been here hundreds of years ago. They could have been introduced by like the masses, the gentry from England and no one noticed them here because we're so anglicized in our media, like everything from Wind in the Willows

when you're reading that yeah to Springwatch and the BBC you're thinking if you see one I'm sure it's part of

our natural fauna do we have toads do we have Irish toads we have Natterjack toads but they only live in the Dingle Peninsula so you wouldn't see them around but people seeing the toads

up in the Dublin Hills and just assumed they were always supposed to be there. So it's really interesting. Are they larger than frogs? No, they're around the same size. And they don't seem to be doing any harm, quite endearingly.

Wow, really? Yeah, because they live natively in Europe alongside our own. Okay, so what they're eating, they're not impacting any insects? Yeah, now that doesn't always be the case because we've got the pygmy shrew is our common shrew, that's a small little mammal about that size, and then you've got the white-toothed shrew, which is a European species. Now in Europe they live together quite happily, but the white-toothed shrew was introduced to Ireland and it's basically wiped out the pygmy shrew. For some reason, because we're on an island,

you don't know what effect these creatures arriving in is going to have. Some are going to be winners, some are going to be losers. It's really, really interesting. And I find that sort of fascinating. Like, we have another newt that's after arriving that was found in a bog in the middle of nowhere by my colleague, Enya. And he sent me a text and he goes, I think this newt is a bit sick. And I went, okay, send me a picture.

He sent me a picture and I was like, that's an Alpine newt. What is that yodeler doing there? You know, in the middle of nowhere. So, yeah. Where is this newt from? From Europe, from many places in Europe. Up around the Alps and into France and into Poland.

But they've been introduced now. How does a newt get here? Well, that's the thing. There could be, you know, I have a few theories myself and I don't want to spoil them. I mean, I would think wood, wood, surely. Even in Limerick, right? There's a place in Limerick called the Scrat Heap.

And we'd see ships coming in, and there's loads of pine trees. And they're from Russia and from around there. Yeah, or, you know, with shipments of plants that come in, botanical collections, I think that's valid. You could have multiple introductions on different things and once a species like that that are very successful

gets in, I don't think they're going to be as innocuous as the toads are. I think they're going to be trouble. We want to watch and we're looking for funding now to really get a grip on it. There needs to be a lot more work from the governments so

if the Greens are listening to this, they need to start forking up some cash. Fair enough. So what's your... Okay, let's pretend I'm Eamon Ryan. And you get five minutes with Eamon Ryan and you're trying to say to Eamon Ryan,

I've found this alpine newt. Here are my fears. What's your fear? That we'll have a lot of alpine newts in the country and no smooth newts. We'll have a lot of one species. It could be the Irish cane toad. Oh, yeah.

You know what I mean? Do you know about the cane toad in Australia? They're a big deal. They're massive, massive toads, but they ate everything yeah they brought them over in the 1920s to Australia

to eat the sugar cane beetles that were eating the crops because they do that in South America where they're from but when they got to Australia the toads were like fuck off

and they went and they started to eat everything else and nothing could eat them because it didn't involve with them so people don't have like there's a brilliant documentary it's one of the best started to eat everything else and nothing could eat them because it didn't involve with them. People don't have, there's a brilliant documentary. It's one of the best documentaries. Yeah, it's amazing.

It's an Australian documentary from the 1970s about the cane toad. And it's just hilarious because Australian people are just hilarious. It's on YouTube. It's amazing.

But there's people who, they walk out their back porch and there's no ground because the ground is full of toad. And they're huge. The biggest one was recorded there a couple of weeks ago. It was like touching on four kilos. Mental.

It's so bad that when if you go to the airport in Australia, they sell like wallets made out of their bodies. Yeah. And it's like a frog wallet. It's a toad wallet. They encourage people to hit them with golf clubs.

Yeah. Oh, I'm serious. Go out the back garden and kill them with golf clubs because there's too many of them. And the gas thing is, when they went out into the world, like monitor lizards, crocodiles, all the native Australian marsupials who would normally eat frogs were eating them and dying.

So the populations were crashing as the toads were marching across. Who eats newts? Anything they can. So birds. Herons and stuff. But this new newt could kill a heron that's another thing

because it has a certain amount of toxicity to it so if a badger gets into it and our newt doesn't yeah well it does as well but again

it's about evolving next to an animal you know what I mean a great thing that they've done in Australia though in regards to the cane toads and the tide is turning

nature's correcting itself. The corvids, the crows and the magpies are very, very clever animals. So they've learned that the toxins are on the back of the toad. So if they flip them over, they can eat them from the underside. So they're having a field day. They're getting toad liver for breakfast, dinner, and

tea. And scientists have learned that if you capture quolls, for example, a beautiful, charming little Native American marsupial and you grind up toads and put it in the qualls dinner, in a bit of cat food that it will be eaten

just enough that it won't get killed but just to give it the worst quall toad hangover it's ever had in its life. You know, you've been to that pub where they have dodgy pints. Yeah. And you say, I'm never going to go back there again. That's the natural way of kind of getting them to go,

oh my God, I remember the smell of toad. I'm not going to eat that again. When they do it with female quolls and release them back into the world, they'll teach their kids that. So it's a really cool way of doing it. Another thing about cane toads is their tadpoles are quite predatory of their own kind they're cannibalistic so they've synthesized a young toad smell and put it in these kind of lobster pots in lakes where there's

massive amounts of tadpoles so all the tadpoles go dinner and they all come in they pull all the pots out disposes the tadpoles and that crashes the numberspoles go, dinner. And they all come in, they pull all the pots out, dispose of the tadpoles and that crashes the numbers as well. So it's kind of turning, but it's costing Australia billions. Now that's what I'd say to Eamon Ryan. Do you want that here? With newts? So let's see what we can do

right now. Let's see, let's knock it on the head. Let's see how... What would that look like? I'm assuming you and your group then would want funding to go... Yeah, you want to get a PA. We're going to kill newts. That's what we're talking about, isn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, you have to see impact.

What they're eating, what's eating them. Is it having an effect? All that stuff has to be done first. Because we don't want to be killing animals that didn't do anything out of their own fault. You know what I mean? But you need to research and you need to get a grip of it now

as opposed to going, oh God, yeah, down the line. Here's a little question for you actually, just as someone who loves animals. So I remember out in my back garden about two years ago, just above the porch, I had what I believed to be

an infestation of false widows you did you sent me the photograph yeah yeah so there was loads of them so i'm going okay they're false widows they need to die but i went hold on a second here because i i don't know like i know what a false widow looks like but i'm not an expert so I sent you a photograph of them and you said no they're not they were an orb weaver oh okay yeah so you managed to save an eight of species

there was about 60 of them like oh yeah yeah yeah I thought that they were false widows I would have just sprayed them because I know that they shouldn't be here yeah and even spraying

like I mean there was a school in London. My God, I couldn't believe it. False Whitters have been in England for, like, 150 years. And just because the press and the Daily Mail have been making such a fuss about them, everybody's terrified. So False Whitters are a new spider that are in Ireland and they can bite you. Yeah, but it's not...

The press love that. Yeah, and you think they sell papers. So they were kind of not the press love that. Yeah, anything to sell paper. So they were kind of putting the willies up everybody. They went to... The school found some false widows in the windowsills and stuff like that. So they took everybody out of the school for two weeks, gassed the whole place to get rid of the infestation, and then opened the school up again.

First of all, it's daft. It's mental the most false widows are going to sit in their web they're not an aggressive species the only time they kind of nip you is if you're putting pressure on them if it's cutting your jacket or something like that also if you gas an area because they are an invasive species they're the force wants to come back like literally the next week they'll be there going prime real estate so it's like it's completely unnecessary and uh counterproductive in many ways because you're also killing all the native spiders as you as you were saying there so what do you do when you're just so you go about your day with a different set of eyes than i have like you're you're the type of person that comes across white dog shit. I'm guessing.

But what I mean is that, like, you're, like, you walk down an alleyway and you're interested in the corner of a brick. You're looking for insects all the time. All the time, yeah. What do you do when you come across something that it's like, you shouldn't be here? Yeah, and there's a couple of species

that I'm pretty sure have arrived here, but I haven't found them yet because they're in... But do you kill them on sight? No, no, no, no. First of all, you kind of, you're trying to... You want to... I'm not the Terminator, like, you know what I mean? You don't belong here.

No, the first thing you want to do is find out how many are there. Again, impact, all that kind of stuff. There's a process to it. To try and get a grip on what they're doing, what their effect is. And then you take it from there. And if they're having an effect and they're in low numbers, then you can kind of deal with it. And that's the whole point with the Alpines.

The Alpine news is, stuff like that should be taken seriously. Terrapins in our waterways should be taken seriously. We're going to get warmer. People are, millions of terrapins, thousands at least. They're the little small turtles. The turtles that get to that size in a couple of years, and then people go, well, you'll be granted. Have you found any terrapins

in the wild in Ireland? They're everywhere. Go down to the Grand Canal dock on a sunny day. Really? When you're having your coffee. Are you serious? At the ramps. They're everywhere. Are you to Grand Canal Dock on a sunny day. Really? When you're having your coffee. Are you serious? At the ramps. They're everywhere. Are you serious?

Loads of them. Loads of them. Have you seen them? You see, he's lucky he has a different set of eyes to us. Like, you're looking and I'm not. Yeah.

Like, I was on the way up to the Viking Museum yesterday. And, uh... Which was great. I loved it. But I... I found a crab on the ground what was he doing there probably probably one the herring goals down at the leafy having a snack and got a little pinch yeah okay yeah um another

vilified species the poor old herringring gulls. Why vilified? People are just going mental about them and the press doesn't help. They deserve it? Well, the cleaning ladies in Chinty have to wear crash helmets in the morning when the gulls are nesting because they've swooped down and banged them on the head. But that's because there's no fish in the sea where they'd normally be out catching them.

So they're nesting inland, they're moving inland. All these things have direct effect from our own behaviour. And they are like a protected species. And then people or counsellors are up in arms saying they need to be killed. It's ridiculous, you know. I remember once... So one of the shittiest things about... It happens in Limerick as well as Dublin.

I'm not going to blame it on Dublin. But do you know when you get into a fucking taxi, right? And the taxi driver is Irish. And you're kind of going, all right, how long before he says something racist? And I'd managed to get into a taxi up in Dublin. And it was like a ten-minute journey. And your man hadn't said one racist thing. And I was managed to get into a taxi up in Dublin. And it was like a ten minute journey. And your man hadn't said one racist thing.

And I was like, great. And then... It was early in the morning. And all the seagulls were all over the street. Right? And he goes, those fucking seagulls. And I'm like, yeah, I know, man. It's all the foreigners.

I'm like, I'm sorry, what? All the foreigners with their takeaways you see all the foreigners have takeaways and the seagulls are there because of them consistency couldn't believe it consistent yeah you mentioned there about um there's some species that you reckon are in the country, but you don't know yet. What do you think there? Yeah, because in the UK and a lot of port towns, there's European scorpion species out there. And we're a port town.

We still are, you know. So there's lots of, especially around Guinness and the walls along the Liffey there and down at the docks where the Point Theatre is. There's a lot of traffic that goes through there and i you know that's the sort of stuff if i was going for a wander i'd be there with a uv light just to discuss scorpions glow in the dark under a uv so you kind of take a wander down there once a year or something like that have a look around just to see if anything's

there if you don't find the scorpions themselves they molt their skin and the skin still glows in the dark. So, you know, and it's kind of like... What do these scorpions look like? Do they look like mini scorpions? They're just like... If you were going to... You've probably seen them in pools and stuff when you're in Spain or Portugal.

They're about that size. That's as big as they get, but they're just... The tail, the pincers, same thing. And, like, this is what I'd like to know as well. So that's bad news. That's bad news if you find them. You don't know. Are you excited? I'm excited. Yeah.

That's what I'm wondering. You're going down there like taking time out of your afternoon with your fucking UV light. Effectively looking for bad news, but at the same time you're thrilled. You're thrilled about this. Yeah, yeah. It's a sad existence isn't it? But I mean like when you're saying about it yeah yeah it's a sad existence isn't it but um

but i mean like when you're saying is it bad news is it not bad news well look half our native fauna that we're so familiar with okay isn't irish the hedgehogs were brought over for a snack and they just got out and they they started what the normans brought them over for food are you serious 100 serious yeah that was a delicacy to them so they were breeding them and then hedgehogs being hedgehogs they got out and they started and now we love hedgehogs

now we love hedgehogs and rightly so so hedgehogs came here a bit like the Normans actually because in fairness the Normans were grand they became more Irish than the Irish

anyone who's called Fitz Simon Fitz William, you're half Norman. So the hedgehogs came here and they were fine. They didn't fuck any shit up. They were... I mean, they're an introduced species

as opposed to an invasive one. Now, rabbits could be considered an invasive species. So rabbits aren't... Irish. And they do have a detrimental effect on our hares, who are Irish. What do they do? They compete for food? They compete for food and they spread my a detrimental effect on our hares, who are Irish. What do they do? They compete for food?

They compete for food and they spread mixed mitosis, stuff like that. Oh, okay. So, you know, that's kind of two examples of, you know, introduced as opposed to invasive.

Invasive is the false widow, where they're kind of spreading out everywhere and they're munching, like the lads up in Galway discovered they're munching on our Irish spiders. And the lizards, yeah. And the lizards, yeah. Because discovered our munching on our Irish spiders and the lizards yeah and the lizards yeah we found them

because there's not a lot of Irish lizards yeah and now the widows are eating them we discovered them eating small bay not now bearded dragons

or anything like that but like small little lizards and they found them in England eating shrews and bats didn't they get a shrew and didn't they lift

his back lifted it up yeah they used the kind of kind of bungee cord silk that they pull these little animals. They'll eat snakes. They're mad yokes there. Brilliant, brilliant. Really impressive creatures.

I sound like a man from Alien. But they are impressive creatures if you look. You have to admire them because they got this little niche in this cold country far away from where they came from, Madeira. And now they're here and they're having a great time. And they're kind of slowly evolving to get used to the cold and creeping away from human habitation. Wow, really?

Yeah. I was doing a biodiversity survey of Mickey Deesgaff in the Phoenix Park and we found steatodid deer in the woodland. And that was a big deal because they were away from the house. Because I first started hearing about false widows we'll say 10 years ago and my understanding is that they would come into your house because they're from Madeira so

they want something warmer. Now they're in the wild. Yeah and the thing about it is because they reproduce so rapidly they have hundreds of babies you're going to have that kind of evolutionary arms race within themselves where the ones that are more you know adaptable and hardy towards the cold cold they'll survive so you'll get them getting hardier and hardier over generations i'd nearly prefer them in my house biting my toe yeah with all due respect than having them in the forest going at

the natural that's and that's why it's great that people are actually looking at them and studying them and not just taking it for granted that are grand they seem okay you know it's not always the case but at the end Collie right is like at some point someone might have to go we need to do something about these there's nothing

you can do about these you know what I mean do you not like bring in a gorilla do you know what I mean like there's one bring in a gorilla do you know what I mean like there's one species that isn't doing well so you go well let's bring in

its predator and see how that goes yeah but then you're getting into the old woman who swallowed the fly territory and you know you keep putting in stuff

and where do you stop so I mean like with the steed toad with the false widows the best thing to do is all we can do is hope that

our native wildlife will adapt to them and start to be able to deal with them. Yeah. I need to know about these turtles, man. Are they out, is it only Dublin? No, I mean like, people

have done... They're like that size. Big one. Yellow sliders will get that size. The females get huge. And didn't Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles start this? Yeah. No, that's for real. No one gave a fuck about them in the 70s. And then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

came out in the 90s and everyone wanted these as pets and it started in America first. Yeah. And now we're dealing with it. We're dealing with it everywhere in the worlds and everyone wanted these as pets and it started in America first. Yeah. And now we have, we're dealing with it. We're dealing with it everywhere in the world is dealing with it. You go to any,

Spain, Portugal, Italy, go over to Southeast Asia and you're going to see American terrapins and like red-eared sliders. I've seen turtles in Spain. And they're everywhere. They're everywhere.

And like in Spain, they're breeding. So it's an even bigger impact on native wildlife. They're not breeding here not at the moment that we know of so every

terrapin that you might see down by the docks is something that was a pet yeah so it is going to die it's like a neutered cat

well you see some of them do well some of them don't some of them it's a very long years of starving to death slowly

which is awful for any animal. Of course, yeah. So, like, we have a pond in my garden that I built for rescued terrapins. Now, I'm at maximum capacity at the moment, you know what I mean? Teenage mutant ninja monsters, they are eating me out of the house at home.

But, like, we have loads of them, and people are still ringing me up and going, can you take a terrapin? It's too big for the tank.'s it's crazy it really is and it's again though that goes back to what we were talking about earlier on it's like if you're going to get a pet at that size a cute little a little turtle and and put it in a bowl that thing's going to be half the size of the table in a few years and you you want to be prepared for that you want to have a heated pond you want to have a great filtration system but people don't think about that they just think of like right now and i think that kind of response and the great thing is

there's some brilliant pet shops around now like reptile haven i'd like to know your your your opinion on pet shops well actually i walked past that on the way to the viking museum yeah yeah reptile that's around the corner and then the shauna's pet I walked past that on the way to the Viking Museum. Yeah Reptile Havens. That's around the corner. And then Dushana's Pet Shop which is across on the other side of the quays. And they're just two examples of ethical pet shops. But there's other crowds who, like there was a place in Limerick, it was one of the franchise places.

And they sell fucking nothing now. Because I've gone in there, they sell nothing because a lady inside there got a rare disease off a parrot. And she nearly died like she got a they paid out a couple of million to her like it really fucked her life up yeah and they just they're just a shop now with nothing in there only photographs of dogs and food but they're not selling any they're just like we're out of this game empty cages empty everything after the parrot incident and as sad as I am for that woman, I'm happier for the animals.

Because, you know what I mean? It's the big shops that you're not... It's the big businesses that you don't give a damn. It's just about getting product in and getting it out at that markup. Okay. And you don't want that. Whereas it's the small local pet shop with the person who's, I actually, I'm in this business, I fucking love it.

I won't sell you this unless you send me a photograph of your setup. a video of it not just a photograph like a video showing this is my house this is where like the lads in reptile haven are like i've got a python here i need to know who the fuck you are wow and and and sean is very very like that as well and i really really that off his own back yes she is yeah yeah it's it's it she is. It's really good and it's great to see. But legislation should be kind of brought in. And not like legislation, because some people freak out. It's like, oh, government, tell me what to do. It's not. The government has your dog license.

They should have a cat license as well, as far as I'm concerned. He's got a big problem with cats. I have. as well as far as I'm concerned. He's got a big problem with cats. I have. But again, down to just responsible ownership and caring for the animals and giving them a life that's good, stress-free,

they're happy out, there's no predators and they're not sitting in their own crap all day. And I don't think that's too much to ask. And anybody who genuinely cares about animals, I don't think they'd really mind. Because I did ask you before what the most dangerous invasive species was in the country, and you said straight out it's fucking cats.

Cats. Cats for wildlife, yeah. So, I mean, cats are devastating to wildlife all over the country, and, you know, even your cat, if it's never brought anything back to the house, that doesn't mean it's not out at night. That's the real... You said that the last last time as well you think your cat is sound it's like you don't know what it gets up to yeah yep it's um it really is it you know when there's scrub animals and if an animal gets away like kildare wildlife rescue are a great group uh check them out online a great group of of people and they deal with a lot of

cat injuries so it would be like a board with a scrub but the thing about it is there's bacteria in those claws that's specifically designed to injure the animals and to spread and to cause infection and these animals will die regardless of oh I caught my cat with a blackboard but I let it go the blackboard's fucked do you know what I mean

so in New Zealand now and in Australia I think they're bringing in some legislation a lot of people have catteries where it's like basically a big board cage attached to your cat I've seen those yeah and the cats have a great time and it extends the life of your cat because it's not getting run over by the milkman so you know what I mean it's it's good for the cat they're not as stressed you don't get strays all over the place. It's just a simple thing you can do. And I always encourage people,

I don't judge anybody who has a cat because it's only recently we've discovered how much effect they're having on wildlife. But anyone who's getting a new kitten should definitely be keeping it indoors, keeping it as an indoor cat with entertainment or build a cat griefer. I don't think that's too much to ask, you know what I mean?

To let, you know, other wild creatures around get on with their life and not be dealing with a giant monster that they've never seen before, you know? Because our robins and our sparrows, they're like, I don't know what the fuck this thing is. That's it, you know? Young birds, fledgling birds are just kind of, they're getting nailed by these creatures that shouldn't be here, basically.

I'm just going to check the questions. I know it's a good podcast when I never have to consult the sheet. Because I got so many amazing questions from the internet. I've only got a couple to alright here's actually this one is from me that I

put in here it's just it's really silly it's really silly right but I just need to know it like if you just like build a pond out your back garden, right, and then, like, fish appear, where the fuck do they come from? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it'll happen, won't it? Yeah, a lot of times, especially with, like, a stickleback perch. Where the fuck are they coming from? How does a fish get into a bit of water that you just leave there for long enough? Mr. Robin, Mr. Blackboard

goes down to another pond where a fish has been spawning in the shallows. Goes down and has a bat. And the spawn, or the eggs of the fish are sticky. And he flies off. Oh my God. And it's nice and moist. And he goes down to another waterway to have a drink.

And one or two of the eggs fall off. Natural colonisation. And that's what's supposed to work. That's what... Wow. It's mad. Nature's crazy. You know, if you get your eye into it and you read up about it like these are really cool ways of, you know, animals

arriving at your door. And have you had a... Because the new gaff that you have in Wicklow now, you've got a lot more space than you had when you were living in... Was it Crumlin you were living in? I grew up in Crumlin. I live in Talla, yeah. And I've seen you with your little ponds

out the back garden. Yeah. Have you had fish just appearing? Yes, because... Yeah, I haven't. And if I did see sticklebacks or something like that in, I would try and get them out as quickly as possible. Okay.

Because I'm trying to bump up amphibian numbers in my area, and amphibians and fish don't mix, because fish will make lunch out of all the tadpoles, which brings the numbers down. So your ponds, how big are they, actually? So I've got a big, big massive one which is 9 foot by 9 and 4 foot deep then I've got 12 other ones varying

from like a scrape, we call it a scrape which would be about the size of this but I basically put a liner in and then I put the sods of the turf back on top of it and it fills up with water that's the most productive pond for frog spawn, it's just like a big jelly plate at the moment, it's crazy because they love that so the Irish frog pond for frog spawn it's just like a big jelly plate at the moment

it's crazy because they love that so the Irish frog is ranatemporana which means it's the Latin word for a temporary frog because they show up in spring and then disappear that's why they call them the temporary frog and they love these kind of ephemeral ponds that form in wetlands and dry out over the summer for two reasons. The tadpoles develop quicker when it's warmer. So they're already out swimming now, even though it's been chilly enough, in the smaller ponds. That gives them a head start.

So less water means it heats up. It heats up quicker. They get a head start on the other guys in the bigger ponds and lakes. And then ponds, when they dry out, which they tend to do, that kills off all the predators like dragonfly lava, great diving beetles, all the stuff that would munch on the tadpoles.

So they're really smart. They're still spawning the big pond as well and other areas, but they tend to gravitate towards this. So you're just giving them different real estate. And it's fascinating to see them use it, you know? It's really cool. What would you recommend to everybody out here with whatever they have?

If you're fortunate enough to have a little bit of land in your garden, my passion is obviously trying to give the fauna that live in ponds a place to go because we're desperately short, especially in urban areas, especially in new housing estates and stuff like that. And people think of a pond,

they think it has to be some mad thing you're digging all day and you're stressing yourself, you're ruining your good patio. It doesn't have to be that way. You know the trays you slide under your bed for your shoes? The big plastic ones. You can get a meter by meter one of them. A big square one. Pop it down

the ground. Make sure it's level. Build up all around it with bricks and moss or logs so that there's a way of an animal to get into it and some rocks on the other side of it so they can get back out, fill it with water.

If you can, get some native plants from your local pond or your local canal, some oxygenating plants, throw them in and just sit back and I swear to God you won't be disappointed, particularly if you've got young relatives, young kids. It's magic and it's magic for kids of all ages but it really is.

It's such a simple thing you can do really effective if you don't get frogs or newts you're definitely going to get bees coming down to drink it because there's no there's not many concrete jungles you know with not many water sources for them and you'll get dragonflies and and all sorts of creatures showing up you'll get midges that will land in the pond, have their babies. They'll go off into the air. Then you'll get bats around your house

flying over the pond, which is amazing. Like when we were living in Tallaght, my neighbours, when I first pointed out that the bats were coming on their nightly route to hunt, would be flying along. They'd stop off at the Ennis's for a bit of a snack and they'd go off and all the neighbours would be out looking at it going, you know, it's amazing

we'd be out with bat detectors you know, it's just, it's amazing what a small step like that can do to increase biodiversity give nature a little bit of a break on top of that if you have the space what you want to do is create a

you know several different habitats together, a mosaic of habitats. So if you have the small water body in and you put a tree, a native tree in there, a hazel or whatever, and you leave a bit of a mess for nature. Now, I'm not talking about wrecking your whole garden. You can have a lovely garden that's wildlife friendly.

You can have a pile of logs there that's, you know, stacked up neatly and just let it rot down. You get your solitary wasps. You get the solitary bees, the solitary wasps coming in. Amazing. Stuff like that.

It's just so simple, so effective and making a difference. It's giving animals a place to go. I mean, like, we've all picked up a bin bag or your wheelie bin that you've left outside in the garden for a couple of days and found a slug a worm a couple of wood lice under

it they're looking for a home that's all they're doing they're looking for somewhere damp and moist easy for you to create it was so easy for you to create and doesn't have to cost a fortune it's effective active conservation on a small level i'm not going to lie, big corporations all have to pull their own weight. But for what you can do physically, that's more than just doing recycling and the usual malarkey. You can do this.

And I think it's well worth trying. And I think you'll all get a great buzz out of it. I really do. Then just then just again one more basic question so if someone is in they're in a housing estate they do this tiny little plastic pond right and they're the only person doing it

how does the frog end up in there and how does the frog know what's that how they have a great sense of smell for new water bodies frog end up in there and how does the frog know what like what what's what's that how they've they've a great sense of smell for for for new water bodies especially if it's a dry patch like if it's really warm they'll be kind of smelling algae and and standing water and they'll know to go so whatever so you leave this pan there for a month or whatever the whatever hormones or smells come off the natural shit in this pond.

Mr. Frog is miles away and he's like... Yeah, yeah. Wow. The right ability to find it. And like, you could have... There's historical introductions of ponds into all these neighbourhoods around... I found my mate bought a gaff

down at the Walkistown Roundabout. Yeah. I love that about Ireland Walkers Town roundabout. Yeah. I love that about Ireland. The fucking roundabout gets it. That doesn't happen in England. That's just us. Right beside one of my favourite pubs, the Cherry Tree. Shout out to them. So

he sent me a video and he's like, what do you think of the house? And I was like, yeah, it looks really cool. And he goes, wait, you see this? He walked out in the garden. There's two ponds there full of frog spawn. I was like, buy it. Buy it now.

I don't care how much it costs. Buy that. So he's like, yeah. So like there's a population that's been there forever. Now, if somebody had bought a house further down, sucked a pond in, you're guaranteed to get recruitment from one area to another. Then if somebody else does it,

you're going to get them moving along and you're giving them more of a home. They're there, they're just looking for somewhere to go. All these creatures are there and we've moved in, but there's no reason we can't get along together and co-exist.

This plastic lawn bullshit that people are getting into, no offense to anyone who's done it, but you're cheating yourself and your family. I know it's easy to maintain and all that, but there's ways of doing gardening that is great for your mental health, it's great for nature, it's great for, you know, all these things that, that, you know, when you go out and you sit in your plastic lawn once every

month in our weather you don't get that satisfaction as you do when you go out and you see some flowers blooming. You're all gardening and telling and you used to have videos of us. It was just a small garden. Hopping. Hopping with Wiley. Three or four different ponds.

But it was aesthetically beautiful. Yeah. You had it planned so that this was... I was like, I want to sit in this garden and it's fully wild. But you'd planned it out to be gorgeous. So it was as gorgeous as any rockery or anything you could get down in the garden centre.

But it was native and helping biodiversity. Yeah, just take a little bit of plant. There's loads of inspiration out there. You know, people love Lord of the Rings. Think of your garden as like one of those fancy programmes where it's like you can make that little place for you to go, for your family to go and enjoy as well. And it's so much more.

It's that air you were talking about when you're sitting there, like I sit in my mates' gardens who are just dead. And the noise, man. I'm talking about four or five feet of meadow that I have out my back garden in the summertime. I'm listening to crickets. Yeah, and you're getting that fresh air. I've never heard them before.

The fresh air off it, it just... And the smells, the smells of native Irish wildflower. And watching the seasons turn. That's a thing that people don't do anymore. You don't get to see the seasons turn. You see certain flowers are coming up at certain times. Certain animals are arriving at certain times. When the frogs start riding, I know the miserable winter is over.

That's a great sign for me. It gets me out of those January blues. It's like, yes, you go. So, yeah, I mean, you watch the whole season progress. And then you kind of get into winter and you're like, okay, this is grand now. Nature's going to shut down for a while and you can potter around the garden and do stuff like that.

You know, I think it's a great disservice to yourself and also to the natural world to kind of miss out on that I'm going to take one or two questions from the audience now right? I have a couple of questions a not so serious one and a serious one I don't know which one you want me to ask first but

the not so serious one is do you reckon the English Toads are trying an invasion on the Irish frogs? Well, yeah. I mean, they are, like... It's not what intent, like, but... They could be Welsh or Scottish, so if they are, that's a lot better. You know what I mean? Should we arm the frogs, then, to fight back?

Imagine that. Call them Little Bella Clavas and all the frogs. Go ask the other question? A serious question is, so I work for a big corporation like probably a lot of people here, and you've given some good examples of what we could do as people, like give these wildlife a chance in our back garden, but what fight should we be fighting with the corporations?

What should I be saying to my boss? What should we do in the city centre to have this? Beehives on the roof. Get them to sponsor people who are doing active conservation for starters. That'd be great. Get involved in real stuff, not just the greenwashing

that a lot of big corporations get involved in real stuff, not just the greenwashing that a lot of big corporations get involved in. To try and get them as well to show that they are being ethical in their own practices on a larger scale. As an employee call them out. And as people who work everywhere, call out.

We should be calling out the government for all the promises that they make about biodiversity. I don't have any biodiversity conference i've gone to with my colleagues and we're promised the world and the stars and it never comes true because they don't feel the pressure on them you know what i mean um so so that's that's what i'd advise you i think as well um calling out your local county council this summer when they're cutting down hedgerows if they're mowing over a roundabout instead of leaving it for the bees these small little things

putting it on social media and shaming them that does work one little idea that came into my head there so when you were speaking there about what can you say to your boss what would you think of this for an idea right so do you know the way like at a corporation you'll have your team building exercises they might take it to a fucking bouncy castle or playing quasar

i don't know i don't have a real job but you know what i mean they'll do this shit team building day what if like we're gonna start a a pond building society what if like we're going to start a a pond building society what if it's the little instead of going for beers

it's like why doesn't the company go there's an area of land and that was a team building exercise they're going to

bring you in yeah and then it's like it's happened a couple of times is that happening already it's happened already and it's can you put that

into better words than I put it yes what is that what's it called? They basically call me out and I do a PowerPoint presentation. I show them how you go about it outside and then everybody goes home and hopefully does it.

It's been really good and that's when I kind of say, well, this is cool. They're not doing it for kudos. It's a very private thing. It's just for the employees. It seems like it's come from a genuine place. And what about the use of the roofs? What if the building is an office block?

What can you do with the... Because in Limerick, there's one organisation in Limerick, right? And there's loads of beehives on the roofs of buildings that no one knows nothing about, but they're there. In Cork, there's the rooftop farm. It's this one building and it's there's a restaurant below but all the food is grown on the roof like it's good it's good it's

good to have you have to realize though with bees and beehives that they're they're the bee equivalent of cows so we might have too many bees we might have too many bees. We might have too many, you know, bees that are... Hoodie bees. We need to look after our own native species. Little solitary bees, the lads that want to go into wood. We have loads of species of those. A bee hotel. Man, I bought a bee hotel for a fiver.

You know the ones, yeah? They make wood out of bamboo. I left it out my back garden, and within two weeks I'm seeing insects I've never seen little bees living on their own making cocoons inside there I couldn't believe it and we did a thing in UCD where we were trying out

different bee hotels to see which ones were effective and surprising how I'm not going to spoil their research but yeah it was pretty effective, really really good I need to know what the fuck that is now it's obviously something big aliens have been coming to earth

all along in the form of solitary bees the rooftops as well I mean imagine they put like meadows on rooftops that's what I'm thinking

meadows on a rooftop meadows on rooftops because who says you can't have ponds and meadows on a rooftop there's loads of weeds growing on rooftops anyway yeah

if you go up on the rooftops you know Trinity was laughed at because they kind of put the meadows in the front. And it was a very symbolic thing as well.

But I'm telling you now, I obviously work there and I'm, as you said, looking at bugs and stuff all the time. And the amount of beetles

and stuff I'd never seen in Trinity in 20 years working there that showed up in the heart of the city, brought bats right back into the college that were coming in to feed.

It really was effective. You know, it was so good, easy to do. It replenishes itself. You could stick them all over the roofs in certain areas and just, you know, again, give nature a little helping hand in a concrete jungle. And the thing is, you don't know what that does. Like the example I always think of is when they brought wolves back into Yellowstone.

Yeah, yeah. They brought wolves back into Yellowstone in America and it ended up improving the salmon, was it? Yeah, they changed like the amount of deer that would be feeding on. So I think what happened was so they brought wolves in and everyone was like that's a bad idea why do you want wolves

but the wolves came back in the deer because there was no wolves had turned into lazy bastards for like a hundred years so deer weren't moving around anymore they were just

sitting around standing there eating grass but because the deer weren't moving, they were fucking up the riverbed. Their hooves were fucking up the riverbed. And they were eating all the saplings. They weren't moving all the areas.

And numbers started going up. And there was loads of deer. And then they got scared by the wolves. And wolves would shift them and move them off and give... You know what I mean? We have the same issue in Ireland. I mean, We have the same issue in Ireland. I mean, we have so many deer in this country, and sheep as well, that are just any sapling, any oak tree or native tree that's trying to get a foothold here is just munched.

I was talking to Eoghan Dalton recently. Yeah, he's an amazing man. So there's a fella called Eoghan Dalton, and he has a rainforest, an Irish rainforest down in Cork. He wants to bring back the native lynx, which is an ancient Irish wild cat, so that it'll kill the deer. Now, he's a bit of a mad fucker, but like...

Yeah. And it's difficult to look at something like that, a project like that, because I know a lot of conservation people are talking about it, but like, we can't look after the animals we have now. How are we supposed to bring in the lynx? That's a good point.

Every fecking eagle we release, beautiful creatures, is getting poisoned. It's mental. It's very frustrating. So we need to change our attitudes towards nature before we start bringing in species, which we should do. We should reintroduce animals that were here long ago.

Wolves were once a big deal here. Where are you going to put a wolf? You can put it down in Kerry National Park and all it will eat with tourists. You know what I mean? They just haven't got the land to roam around. You could do it in Scotland and places like that. Scotland has fenced off.

Scotland's amazing at this shit apparently. They're fenced off areas and you just see it in 15 years just coming back to life. Like, we all think, you know when you drive up over the mountains and you're saying how beautiful our countryside is? But it's kind of heartbreaking if you're into ecology

or if you're into what it should look like. We should have spruce trees and massive rainforests all across our land, and all we have is header. And then more than that, they set it on fire every year yeah they born the land so anything that was eking out a living in there is is burnt up and nobody does a damn thing about it now it's starting the snowball is starting to roll where people are saying why are you setting because i'm telling you down the line and mark my words someone's house is going to go up and then maybe people will start to go what are you doing setting fire

to the land every year what do you think of the idea of going to farmers and then giving the farmers money to go stay the fuck away from that part of your land just leave it be and leave it be wild and we'll pay you yeah i mean I mean, listen, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, you know, and demonising... We've got big honeys in the building. The honey lobbyists are here. Check later on. Yeah, that's it, no.

But, look, people tend to demonise farmers. That's terrible as well because they are the custodians of the countryside. Yeah. Look, people tend to demonise farmers. That's terrible as well. Because they are the custodians of the countryside. Calling them all the names and isolating them away from... Calling them colchies, Dublin. But I'm talking about environmental groups that really go hard at the farmers. You're just creating a void,

and you're never going to work together. Incentivise them. Teach them how to do it. They need training. Yeah, and put out so many farmers that are going to work together. Incentivise them. Teach them how to do it. They need training. Yeah, and put out so many farmers that are mad to do it. But they get punished by the existing laws because they put in a wetland in their area. Like, it's ridiculous.

What do you mean by that now? So some farmer might decide, I'm doing a big wetland here? And then they'll mark out the amount of land he should be using for whatever crop or whatever animal and they'll say well that's that's useless land even though it's biodiversity biodiversity rich and great for nature it's just written off so his subsidies or whatever go down i didn't know that yeah it's it's stupid and that is what do we need to do to change this just pay farmers and say listen

will you let half that field go and he'll go less work for me because they're already doing it with beef and shit anyway they're already getting money anyway 100%

I mean but it is you know they're not the enemy they're they're just people who want to make a living and if you make it worthwhile for them

to put nature back in, as opposed to punishing them for doing it, that just makes absolute sense to me. I'm going to take a question from up here. Unless you don't have one, and then I won't ask. There's plenty. Hi.

How are you? What's the crack? So basically, we live in an apartment above a gala. Like, it's absolutely tiny. And we have houseplants. And like, I imagine they're doing absolutely nothing for anybody. But what can we do?

We don't have a rooftop. We don't have anything. What little, like, we literally have a three bed, one kitchen, nothing. And that's a lot of people. Yeah. That's a lot of people. I'm guessing that a huge amount of people here don't have the luxury of a of people. Yeah. That's a lot of people. I'm guessing a huge amount of people here don't have the luxury of a back garden.

Yeah. So I just imagine our houseplants are doing nothing for nobody because they're just inside all the time. They're doing something good for you. It's nice. It's a great thing to have a bit of greenery around. Have you got local parks? Yeah, there's a pretty big one.

Yeah. So make sure that your park is, and whoever's your local councillors, are actively making that park the most biodiversity-rich park for you and your family and for everybody who lives around you. And keep the pressure on them and call them out on the bullshit

that Blind Boy was talking about earlier on. That's a really good thing you can do. Notice stuff that's going on. Learn the rules about hedge cutting. Learn when they should be doing what they should be doing in regards to putting down wildflowers, mowing. If they're saying they're not going to mow for nature, make sure they do it. And if they don't, call them out and put pressure on. It's difficult when you're in apartment blocks like that, but that's the sort of stuff you need to be doing as a community

and looking out for the green spaces we have left. And if you can, try and encourage your local councillors. I mean, we need allotments over here. That's another great thing that people need. The UK are great for that. There's loads of wasteland out there that families could set up to grow a bit of vegetables, to learn how to get their hands dirty. And allotments, you can combine them with biodiversity.

You can put in board boxes around that will pick off the bugs that are going to eat your cabbages. You can put in ponds. You can do all the stuff we were talking about earlier on as a community. And there's so many of these spaces around. stuff we were talking about earlier on, as a community. And there's so many of these spaces around. There's a couple of organisations in Ireland that are pushing for it that you'll find on Twitter

just banging Irish allotments. And follow them and support them. Even if you have to hop in a car and drive a little bit to get down to work on one of them, it's fantastic and it is a movement that we should be all getting behind. And I know I'm going to say this because it'll probably get you in trouble,

but like I said, make those seed bombs. If you live in an apartment, seriously, make them and fucking throw them everywhere. If I could make pond bombs, I'd do it, so don't be worried. Yeah, just fucking throw them everywhere. That's amazing. Over there, I don't know where it's going to land, but wherever it lands, nature will do its thing, and there's native Irish wildflowers.

Just do it. The guards aren't going to say, shit, they can't. You're throwing dirt. Throwing dirt dissolves. It's like the bullet made out of meat. All right. That's time. I want to thank you so much Collie for coming here tonight

always a pleasure man thank you for having me thank you very much that was that was a wonderful engaging enjoyable chat we had so much crack quite long

but you know it's a podcast you can listen to it whatever way you want I think you'll agree it needed to be that length I couldn't edit things out of that I couldn't cut things out we had. I couldn't cut things out.

We'd do much crack. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, I don't even think I need to tell you to rub a dog or to wave at a swan. Just take on board some of the wonderful things that Collie said in that podcast and think about how we as individuals

in our own lives can help to improve local biodiversity not just for the benefit of insects and the benefit of wildlife but to do so for our own well-being our own mental health and a feeling of hope and to do that on an individual level but also be conscious of the collective level and the the political level. And putting pressure on fucking corporations. Or putting pressure on politicians. And letting them know. This shit matters. This shit is important.

Because it is. Okay. I'll catch you next week. Dog bless. rock city you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play.

Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rockcity at torontorock.com. Thank you. you