NATURE Mayo features in new nature radio-doc

Mayo features in new nature radio-doc


A new ten-part radio documentary series, Nature on One, sees Emmy-award-winning wildlife cameraman and TV presenter Colin Stafford-Johnson turn his talents to radio. Stafford-Johnson, who lives in Westport, travels across the country on the hunt for some of our most remarkable animals and wild places. Co Mayo is to feature twice in the show.
The first show, broadcast on Sunday last, May 5, featured Skellig Michael, which lies off the Kerry coast. In 600AD early Christian monks chose Skellig Michael, as a location for a monastery ‘on the edge of the known world’. Stafford-Johnson spent a night there, recording the wildlife to be heard at this World Heritage Site, including puffins, storm petrels and manx shearwaters.
In episode 3, to be aired on May 19, Stafford-Johnson will focus on the grey seal colony on South Inishkea. The Mayo island, which lies off the Mullet Peninsula, is home to one of Ireland’s largest seal breeding colonies.
Stafford Johnson is joined by grey-seal expert Dr Oliver O’Cadhla, who has spent years researching the seals at this colony. Passionate about the Inishkeas and these animals, O’Cadhla explains the seals’ struggle to survive in this harsh environment. It’s mid-October and very cold: There are lots of pups on the beach, but they won’t all make it. The mothers are busy feeding their young, while the large dominant male seals protect their harem. On this remote wild island, we get a peek into the secret lives of the grey seals that are born there.
Mayo features once again in the next episode, in which Stafford-Johnson seeks out one of our most endangered species, the curlew, Ireland’s largest wader. Searching across Mayo’s bogs, he sets out to record the once familiar call of this iconic bird of Irish peatlands. He will be joined by Anita Donaghy, from Birdwatch Ireland, who explains why the curlew is in decline and the organisation’s ‘Cry of the Curlew’ campaign.
Other episodes will feature rare bumblebees on the Burren; a starling roost under a Belfast bridge; and bats swarming in Dunmore Cave, Co Kilkenny; rare snails in Co Longford; a pine martin rearing her young in a Leitrim school; a search for fin whales off the Waterford coast; birdsong at the Devil’s Glen, Co Wicklow; and ‘singing frogs and nattering toads’ in Wicklow and Kerry.

The Nature on One natural-history radio documentary will be aired weekly on Radio 1 at 7pm.