Discovery

Can China’s new generation of birdwatchers and North Korea’s weak economy save migratory birds from extinction?

Habitat loss for shorebirds in the Yellow Sea is rapid as the mudflats on which they depend are converted to farmland, factories, ports, oil refineries and golf courses. But all is not lost on the East Asian Australasian Flyway.

Ann Jones travels around the northern end of the Yellow Sea, talking to the world’s leading shorebird researchers and Chinese nature lovers about their concerns for the Flyway’s future. They discuss their feelings for the long distance migration champions of the natural world, like the Eastern curlew and bar-tailed godwit. Ann also meets the New Zealand conservationists who have just emerged from North Korea with good news about the birds.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National. Additional recordings were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker and Ann Jones.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National.

Additional recordings were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Curlew sandpipers coming to one of the few feeding sites left for them along the coast of Bohai Bay in northern China.

Ann Jones flies north to Shanghai as shorebirds from as far away as Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh arrive on the coast of the Yellow Sea.

Here she meets a traditional whistling bird hunter who used to catch shorebirds for the pot but now does it for science. Bird mimic Mr Jin Weiguo demonstrates his centuries-old technique of bird trapping - luring them into nets by copying the different calls of the many different species. Scientists can then attach ID rings and GPS transmitters to follow their migration and estimate their declining numbers. In ten years as a conservation trapper, Mr Jin has caught more than 10,000 birds.

In Jiangsu province to the north of Shanghai, Ann also spots the world’s smallest and most endangered shorebird – the remarkable spoon-billed sandpiper. This species is regarded as the Panda of migratory shorebirds – a charismatic flagship species for the protection of the rapidly disappearing mudflats on which all the migratory shorebirds and local fisher folk depend.

Ann meets the Shanghai birders who set up an NGO to save the most important surviving locations for this bird’s crucial spring and autumn breaks in the Yellow Sea. One 7km stretch of coast, known as Tiaozini, hosts at least 50% of the world’s spoon-billed sandpiper population, which after a precipitous decline now numbers about 200 breeding pairs. Tiaozini is now recognised worldwide as a critical place for the species’ survival. The provincial government has advanced plans to convert Tiaozini into dry land within five years.

Additional recordings in this programme were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National.

Image: Waders readying to migrate north at Roebuck Bay, Western Australia, copyright: Ann Jones

One of the great wonders of the natural world is in deep trouble.

Millions of shorebirds fly from Australia and Southeast Asia to the Arctic every year. They follow the planet’s most gruelling migratory route – the East Asian Australasian Flyway.

Join Ann Jones as she watches wading birds such as curlews, godwits and sandpipers prepare for their epic journey. They fatten up on clams to the point of obesity, to fuel the flight. They grow bigger hearts and flight muscles. Just before departure, they shrink their digestive organs to become the most efficient flying machines for their first 7 day non-stop flight.

The birds’ lives are full of danger and the most serious threats are man-made. The flyway is in peril with many species plummeting towards extinction. As you’ll hear, it’s enough to make a grown man cry.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National.

Image: Waders readying to migrate north at Roebuck Bay, Western Australia, Copyright: Ann Jones

We may fear going blind, deaf or dumb, but few of us worry about losing our olfactory senses. And yet more than 200,000 people in the UK are anosmic - they cannot smell.

Kathy Clugston is anosmic and gives a first hand account of the condition.She sets out on a personal mission to discover why she cannot smell. She has never before researched the extent to which smell guides and shapes our lives, how we smell and what parts of the brain are affected. For example, is her 'terrible memory' connected to the condition?

Referred to by the experts as the forgotten or neglected sense, we reveal the seriousness of not being able to smell.

She adds, "As I got older I began to realise how much I miss out on. People say "Oh, you can't smell B.O.! Lucky you!" but then it dawns on them that I can't smell freshly brewed coffee, newly cut grass, a baby's head, my partner's hair, a rose. I can't catch a whiff of something and be instantly transported back to my grandma's kitchen or an exotic holiday. It's as if life has a missing layer."

(Photo: A nose)

Last November Sierra Leone was declared Ebola free. By then, the epidemic had killed over 11,000 people in West Africa. The speed at which it took off highlighted the poor state of healthcare in the affected countries. Now in Sierra Leone some of the facilities created to deal with Ebola are being repurposed, to take in wider health care needs.

The capital Freetown’s main hospital now has a new accident and emergency department, developed from the facilities created there to deal with Ebola. Around the country medical laboratories set up to detect and confirm Ebola cases are now being equipped with new diagnostic machines capable of detecting nearly 50 other viral diseases.

BBC Health correspondent Matthew Hill has been to take a look and asks how useful this high-tech approach will be in the fight against disease in Sierra Leone.

(Photo: A sign warning of the dangers of ebola outside a government hospital in Freetown on August 13, 2014, Credit: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images)

More than half the world speaks more than one language. New research is showing that being multilingual has some surprising advantages – it can help us keep healthier longer. Gaia Vince finds out how knowing many languages can protect our brains over our lifespan, and even stave off the appearance of some diseases, including dementia.

Gaia attempts the Flanker Task at Lancaster University and then talks to Professor Panos Athanopolous about why bilinguals do better at it than monolinguals.

She hears from Professor Ellen Bialystock from York University in Toronto and Dr Thomas Bak from University of Edinburgh who have discovered that being bilingual can slow down the appearance of Alzheimer’s disease.

Professor Jubin Abutalebi, from the Universita Vita -Saluta San Raffaele in Milan explains how speaking more than one language increases the grey matter in the brain.

And Gaia asks Alex Rawlings, who speaks 15 languages, how we can persuade monolinguals to learn another tongue.

Morag Donaldson talks to Thomas Bak of her experience of taking part in his experiment that showed just 5 days of learning Gaelic improved her cognitive reserve.

The latest research suggests the bilingualism also gives protection against other conditions, such as some stroke and memory loss, as Dr Thomas Bak and Professor Viorica Marian of Northwestern University explain.

(Photo: Welcome to Scotland sign. Credit Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

More than half of the world's people speak more than one language. Some people may have been forced to learn a language at school or had to pick up one because they moved to a new country. Others may just love learning new tongues and do so before they visit a new place. Recently, psychologists have discovered that knowing more than one language helps us in some surprising ways. The skill of bilinguals to switch focus by filtering out or inhibiting one language to concentrate on the relevant one is the one that is thought to bring wider benefits. Schools that teach in a second language have found that their students do better in tests in their original language.

Image: Children in an English-Mandarin dual language art class at Bohunt School, Liphook, Hampshire, credit: Gaia Vince

Humans have been altering animals for millennia. We select the most docile livestock, the most loyal dogs, to breed the animals we need. This 'artificial selection' is intentional. But as Adam Hart discovers, our hunting, fishing and harvesting are having unintended effects on wild animals - the age of "unnatural selection".

This accidental, inadvertent or unintentional selection pressure comes form almost everything we do – from hunting, fishing, harvesting and collecting to using chemicals like pesticides and herbicides; then pollution; urbanisation and habitat change, as well as using medicines. All these activities are putting evolutionary pressures on the creatures we share our planet with.

Commercial fishing selects the biggest fish in the oceans, the biggest fish in a population, like Atlantic cod, are also the slowest to reach breeding maturity. When these are caught and taken out of the equation, the genes for slow maturity and ‘bigness’ are taken out of the gene pool. Over decades, this relentless predation has led to the Atlantic cod evolving to be vastly smaller and faster to mature.

Trophy hunting is another example of unnatural selection. Predators in the wild tend to pick off the easiest to catch, smallest, youngest or oldest, ailing prey. But human hunters want the biggest animals with the biggest antlers or horns. Big Horn Sheep in Canada have evolved to have 25% smaller horns due to hunting pressures.

Probably the best understood examples of unnatural selection are the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. By using antibiotics we are inadvertently selecting the bacteria that have resistance to the drugs. The same goes for agricultural pesticides and herbicides.

Even pollution in Victorian times led to the Peppered moth to change its colour.

Adam discovers that our influence is universal; often counter to natural selective pressures and is rarely easy to reverse. He explores the impact on entire environments and asks whether we could or should be doing something to mitigate our evolutionary effects.

(Photo: Boxes full of fish at Billingsgate fish market)

In the spring of 1667 Samuel Pepys queued repeatedly with crowds of Londoners and waited for hours just to catch a glimpse of aristocrat writer and thinker Margaret Cavendish. Twice he was frustrated and could not spot her, but eventually she made a grand visit to meet the Fellows of the newly formed Royal Society. She was the first woman ever to visit.

Pepys watched as they received her with gritted teeth and fake smiles. They politely showed her air pumps, magnets and microscopes, and she politely professed her amazement, then left in her grand carriage.

Naomi Alderman asks what it was it about this celebrity poet, playwright, author, and thinker that so fascinated and yet also infuriated these men of the Restoration elite? Part of the answer strikes right at the core of what we now call the scientific method.

(Photo: Book cover of Grounds of Natural Philosophy, courtesy of Chemical Heritage Foundation)

In 1864 a strange type of rock fell from the sky above Orgueil in rural France. Shocked and frightened locals collected pieces of the peculiar, peaty blob from the surrounding fields, and passed them on to museums and scientists.

At that time, a debate had been raging over the origin of life; Could life possibly form from mere chemicals? Or did it need some strange unidentified vital substance?

Into this debate fell the Orgueil meteorite, and because it seemed remarkably similar to loamy soil, some wondered whether it may hint at the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

The great Pasteur allegedly investigated, but disappointingly found no such thing. Nevertheless, the mere possibility prompted later ideas that the origin of life on earth indeed lay elsewhere in the universe, ideas that were greeted with varying degrees of scepticism over ensuing decades.

As Phil Ball narrates, given how much was at stake, and how bitterly scientists argued on either side, the most remarkable thing about the story is the extraordinary secret the meteorite kept to itself until exactly 100 years later.

Producer: Alex Mansfield

Image: These faint shapes found in meteorite AH844001 found in Antarctica were, until quite recently, thought by some to be alien fossils. But thoughts of extra-terrestrial life being carried in such meteorites goes back at least as far as 19th century France. BBC Copyright