It seems hard to believe, when so many of us are coping with lockdown and more, that the power of nature continues unfettered:  Spring, in all its fecundity, is altering our landscape as it always does.  To chart this time of great change we gave the naturalist, Brett Westwood, a microphone at the end of March and asked him to record a nature diary.  He lives in urban Stourbridge in the West Midlands, which doesn’t sound an obvious setting for a spring journal but actually it’s perfect:  What he sees at close quarters, with his expert eye, is available for us all if we know where and how to look.  His sightings include feather-footed flower bees who live in the brickwork of our houses, buzzards that might steal frogspawn from your pond,  bee-flies which coat their eggs with dust before shooting them at the nests of solitary bees, and mistletoe... which doesn't sound as intriguing, but it really is: Brett can explain why our behaviour is causing it to spread further than ever before.  Note: The podcast contains extra material that couldn't be squeezed into the original programme: see the 'related links' box below for how to access and download the BBC Sounds App.   Producer: Karen Gregor

Closed Country: A Spring Audio-Diary with Brett Westwood

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

Science

Wiltshire has more chalk hill figures than any other county in the UK, with no fewer than eight white horses carved into its rolling hills. They're all slightly different, and were carved into the hillsides at different times, often to mark an important occasion such as the coronation of Queen Victoria. In this programme, Helen Mark visits some of them - from the oldest and probably best-known one at Westbury, to the much smaller and less prominent horse at Broad Town near Swindon. She finds out about their history and significance, and asks why they became so popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. The tradition continues into the present-day, with the most recent horse, at Devizes, created in 1999 to mark the Millennium. The white horses are a key feature of the Wiltshire landscape, and have become an unofficial emblem of the county. The horses have to be regularly maintained. Left unattended, they would gradually revert to nature, become overgrown with weeds and lichen and simply disappear. In Broad Town, Helen meets up with a team of volunteers who are spending their Sunday morning perched on a steep hillside, weeding and putting fresh lime powder onto their horse, to keep it white and visible. As well as its horses, Wiltshire is also home to carvings with a military connection - in the shape of regimental badges and insignia. There's also a map of Australia, a YMCA logo, and even a giant kiwi. Helen visits some of the military carvings at Fovant near Salisbury, and finds out how they were created by soldiers stationed at training camps in the area during the First World War. She discovers that they're still important to the county today, more than a century on. Produced by Emma Campbell

Wiltshire's white horses

Martha Kearney visits Whitstable to discover the fascinating and mysterious story behind Guy Maunsell’s sea forts at Shivering Sands. Built in the second world war as air defences, these towers can still be seen from the shoreline, although they are now in a state of disrepair.  Martha discovers their incredible and strange history. Once home to up to 265 soldiers, these huge metal boxes on stilts later became the base for a broadcasting revolution. In the 1960s, pirate stations such as Radio City, Invicta and the short-lived Radio Sutch (run by the musician and parliamentary candidate Screaming Lord Sutch), broadcast from the sea forts to huge audiences who wanted to hear the latest pop and rock records. Tom Edwards and Bob Leroi are two of the DJs with fond memories of their time aboard the sea forts at Shivering Sands, but there is also a darker history. David Featherbe’s father was lost at sea after visiting the Red Sands fort and foul play was suspected. These mysteries and the forts imposing physical architecture fascinate historian Flo McEwan and many artists such as Stephen Turner and Sue Carfrae.  Today the forts lie empty and are slowly being lost to the sea, but they remain a source of inspiration to artists and photographers, as Martha discovers. Produced by Helen Lennard

Shivering Sands

Martha Kearney is in Cambridge to explore wildlife at night. She takes an evening trip on a punt to see and hear the creatures which come out after the tourists have gone to home bed. She learns about the bats which at this time of year are just emerging from hibernation - hungry and on the hunt for insects. They swoop low over the waters of the Cam, their echo-location picked up and relayed for human ears by the clicking of a bat detector. A bat enthusiast from the Wildlife Trust tells Martha about bats' habits and identifies the species flitting through the trees around them. Punts have not always been used in this benign way around wildlife. At the Museum of Cambridge, Martha is shown a punt gun - a huge weapon which was widely used in the 19th and early 20th century. It would have been mounted on a punt, with the huntsman paddling into a flock of wildfowl in order to shoot them in large numbers for food. Martha also visits Cambridge University Botanic Garden, where a long-running moth research project is in progress. She watches as a moth trap is set out in the evening, and then returns early the next morning as a team of volunteers checks which moths have turned up in the trap, before releasing them back into the wild. She learns about the importance of these nocturnal species, and asks why night-time creatures like bats and moths always seem to get such a bad press. Produced by Emma Campbell

Bats on Punts

Martha Kearney explores the shifting sands of Gibraltar Point on the Lincolnshire coast, to witness the effects of beach erosion on both birds and people. At Gibraltar Point National Nature Reserve, wardens go to extraordinary lengths to protect shore-nesting birds from habitat loss caused by beach erosion.  They build wooden platforms for the nests of little terns and cages to protect the nests of ringed plover, as well as mounting overnight patrols to keep predators away.  In 2023 they tried the platform technique with oystercatchers for the first time, meticulously moving the nests in stages so as not to spook the birds.  The shingle where these striking birds prefer to nest is threatened with inundation from high tides, as well as from foxes, sparrowhawks and curious humans with dogs.  The birds raised a successful brood and now the wardens are preparing for another season, hoping for more fledgling oystercatchers. Reserve wardens aren't the only people to take extraordinary measures to deal with beach erosion.  The sand on Lincolnshire's beaches has to be replenished every year to protect the coastal population from flooding.  Like sandcastles on an enormous scale, 400,000 cubic metres of sand are pumped onto the beaches from offshore dredgers and a sand profile created, in what's known as 'beach nourishment'.  It's become a tourist attraction in its own right.  The sand works its way a few miles down the coast to Gibraltar Point with the tides, literally shoring up the sea defences.  And then there are the inland pumping stations at every seaside town, which 'evacuate' water from low-lying areas, of which there are many in Lincolnshire: one third of the county is below sea level. Without them, this landscape would be marshland.  Martha compares the historic diesel pumps (made in Lincoln) with the automated electric pumps (from Holland). Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

Gibraltar Point

Helen Mark is in Dorset to investigate the county's ancient sunken roads, known as holloways.  They're deep, steep-sided tracks formed when soft rock erodes and are often overtopped by a canopy of trees.   The erosion over centuries creates remarkable, often otherworldly spaces, that come with their own unique flora and fauna.   On her trip to the Symondsbury estate near Bridport Helen hears about how the cave spider and goblin's gold moss can thrive in the cracks of these unlikely rockfaces.  She is joined by Andy Jefferies and Rosie Cummings from Natural England who are behind a project to map Britain's extensive network of holloways.  The holloways often come with their own folklore too.   Local storyteller Martin Maudsley recounts the legend of the Dorset colpexie - mischievous sprites that can taunt the unwary traveller! Producer: Robin Markwell
Presenter: Helen Mark

Closed Country: A Spring Audio-Diary with Brett Westwood

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