Country Focus
Bird Registration and Street Food
Bird Registration - from Tuesday, October 1st it will become a legal requirement for all bird keepers in Wales (and England) to register themselves with the Animal and Plant Health Agency.
Lapwing - some of Wales’ leading ornithologists have been focusing on the plight of our bird populations for Country Focus and this month it's the lapwing brought to us by Dave Anning who is the site manager for a wet and windy RSPB Ynys-hir reserve on the Dyfi estuary
Celtic wildlfower - we meet the Swansea ecologist who's on a mission to save our wildflowers
Pasta a Mano - we hear how the pop-up pastaria from Ceredigion, that won the British Street Food Awards recently, now goes on to compete in next weekends' European finals in Germany. Chef Derw Robertson-Jacobs to hear about the secret to his success of using local Welsh ingredients combined with Italian cuisine.
- Broadcast on:
- 06 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
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LinkedIn. The place to be. To be. Hello and welcome to Country Focus on Caroline Evans. Poetry Enthusiasts welcome new rules to register all birds in Wales. The Swansea ecologist who's on a mission to save our wildflowers. And the Caritigian street food business now taking on the best in Europe with the unique Italian Welsh pasta dish. From this Tuesday, October the 1st, it will become a legal requirement for all keepers of poultry and other captive birds to register their flock. Regardless of size with the animal and plant health agency. Following the largest ever outbreak of bird flu, the UK was declared free of it this year. But vigilance is still required. One man who is registered is Alan Davis from Solver, who's getting ready for next weekend's annual Welsh national poultry show being held in Pembroxure. I've got about 200 eggs, four chickens and three alpacas. OK, you're very busy then. Yeah, well, there's shows coming up that I organise as well, so I'm busy with that too. Yes, now you're preparing right now for the Welsh national poultry show, I believe, on the kind of show ground in the half of the west. It's the first time the event will be held in quite some time, is that right? Oh, yes. It's five years since we last had a show. I mean, everybody suffered lockdowns with COVID-19 in 2020. But it feels to us as if that has continued because bird flu happened then. And we've had the hobby side of our lives disrupted because we just haven't been able to meet up. And when we've got friends all over the country, it's at the national shows that we meet up. So now we have the Welsh national on October the 5th and 6th. And then I'm looking forward to the Portuguese World Federation that built on November the 2nd. So hopefully we can sort of get a bit of our lives back again after all this time. Yeah, are you expecting this to have impacted the numbers coming to the show? Or do you think there'll be a surge? Is people are glad to get back to doing something they love? Oh, it's definite because all the shows are down. I mean, in those five years, people have passed away, other people have given up. And then because there have been no shows, it's impacted on our breeding programs because we would breed a lot each year and hopefully to have something to show. In my case, for instance, last year, because it had gone on and on and on, I only bred 21 cold eggs. But this year, the ban was lifted just in time before the breeding season. And I actually hatched 230. So that's the big difference. But, you see, people who keep large chickens need to hatch them very early in the year because they don't grow in size. You know, they need the full eight sort of months, you know, large breeds like Cachins and Brahmers and that kind of thing. You know, many of the poor breeds are rare anyway. And having had this impacting on breeding programs, a lot of the breeds are even rare now. So it's going to take some time, I would guess, for them to recover numbers? Yes. I mean, usually at the Welsh National, we'll get over 2,000. But if we get 1,000, that would be really pleased, you know. Well, now all birdkeepers who have birds outside the house are now expected to register with the animal and plant health agency. The government says it's a legal requirement that will enable them to keep owners better informed about bird flu and so on. You're already registered, I understand. So I'm guessing you welcome this new requirement. Well, I've been registered for many years. I can go back to 2006 when bird flu first appeared. Deferevets came out and they took blood samples. But there were no signs that any of my birds that ever had that, you know. But you're right, it's a legal requirement now. As of October the 1st, anyone who has even just one chicken or one duck have to register now. Hopefully, you know, they do let us know when there's an outbreak. And I hope it can be more sort of localised in that, you know, not this blanket ban on everybody, whereas, you know, if there is something, you know, they can inform, or put, you know, a 5-mile radius or something around that rather than just shutting down the whole country. Yeah, do you think that it could help you keep the shows open, for instance? Hopefully, well, that would certainly help because then it doesn't mean that we've got to, you know, have a complete ban on shows. And what are you taking to the show? Oh, I'd be taking ducks, definitely. These little cauldics. They're actually about two or three centuries ago. They were used as decoys, and they were known as decoys, but now they're called cauldics. Well, you can hear them shouting, so. And what would happen? They would tether one in the pond somewhere, and that would entice, and she would crack. It's a female, not the male. A female would crack, and because she's got a loud crack, she would entice the wildfowl down. And so that's a good sort of capture them, you know? Do you think you've got a winner? Oh, I hope I have. I don't know. Alan Davis and his noisy coal ducks, and if you want to know more about the legal requirement to now register your birds, there are more details on our country-focused web page at bbc.co.uk/radiolales. And staying with our feathered friends, some of Wales' leading ornithologists have been focusing on the plight of our bird populations for country-focused. And this month, it's The Lapwing, brought to us by Dave Anning, who is the site manager for a wet and windy RSPB Anisea Reserve on the Dovey Estuary. To set the scene of where we are, we're on our Lola Met grassland. And in front of us, there's the Terence, and behind us there are the Cambrian Mountains. And running right the way through the Reserve is the railway line which links through Spritabras with. So even though we're surrounded by mountains, the area that we are on at the moment is very, very flat. You can see for miles and miles, and it's very wet as well. Lapwings are an incredibly special bird. They are very much part of the Welsh cultural heritage of the countryside. They're essentially quite long-legged wading birds with quite a small bill, even though from a distance they look black and white. When you actually look carefully at them, their backs are this metallic green with a hint of purple in places as well. Probably the most diagnostic feature that brings is this very long fine crest that they have. They're very charismatic birds. They're very bulky in that little chase out of the birds around. And they've got this very distinctive flight. They've got these big rounded wings which, when they fly and flap along, they look a little bit like butterflies, but they have all these spectacular display flights as well, which you'll see in the spring. Couple of that, they've got a very distinctive call, which sounds a little bit of their unworldly, so there's a strange pooping, whistling call. It's very evocative, and when you actually talk to farmers who remember them on their farms, they remember with a great deal of fondness. They truly are beautiful birds. One of the problems with lapwings is that if you go back 30 or 40 years, they were very widespread right the way across whales, and they nest in all sorts of different habitats. But as food production has increased to meet our food demands, farmers have had to intensify, and that has had an effect on lapwings. And here at Amnesty here, we've got one of the largest populations in Wales. Currently, we've got 48 breeding pairs, which is exceptional, really. There's very few places left in Wales where you get even approaching that number, which shows the scale of the decline. You know, a bird which was a familiar breeding bird throughout whales has now pretty much been confined to nature reserves. The work that we're trying to do at Amnesty here is very much like traditional livestock farming. We're grazing lapwings fields with cattle to create an open tussocky sword. We're trying to cut rushes to control it, and also manipulating water levels to create wet arrows and spring for the adults and their chicks to feed. Well, a lot of the conservation work that we do is around creating soft edges and wild sort of landscapes. The lapwings is more like painting by numbers. All the parameters that we're trying to create for lapwings are very precise and very measured. We know what lapwings want, and we know what we have to produce, and we can manipulate all these different factors accordingly. One of the problems that we have with lapwings is that when you've got populations which are quite isolated and quite dense populations, the effects of predation are far, far more pronounced. And so a lot of what we do is trying to create good habitats for lapwings, but also trying to reduce the predation pressure on those. And so the RSPB has invested heavily in anti-predator fences to keep predators out to make sure that our productivity is good. One of the key parameters that we're looking at is the numbers of chicks. Each pair produces on average each year. And the magic number is 0.7 chicks per pair per year. And if you achieve that, your population will be increasing. And so this is the measure of our success, 0.7. It's a very precise figure, which we measure very carefully. The good news is that, Anise here, we're doing a pretty good job on that front, in that we're consistently over that figure. And this year, we've, in fact, got up to 1.04 chicks per breeding attempt, which is really good. A long-term aspiration is to increase the numbers of lapwings at Anise here and in the WS tree as a whole, and get to the point where we're pretty much exporting birds to other sites around. You know, the long-term future of the lapwing does not depend on nature's herbs. It depends on them being in the wider landscape, and that's important. And so pretty much, you know, at the moment, we see ourselves as being like an ark, but our aspiration is that the lapwings will move out and to use other areas. But to do that, it's key that we work with other landowners to make sure that good habitat for all lapwings exists over a far bigger area. And that partnership is going to be increasingly important in the future. That's Dave Anning working to help lapwings at the RSPB's Anisea Reserve and beyond. With the popularity for re-establishing wildflowers in our countryside growing, Barry Stewart, an ecologist from Swansea, began getting so many requests for help to find native plants. He decided to set up a business to grow them. Now Celtic wildflowers supplies local authorities and organisations across Wales. Many of his plants can be seen on our roadsides, and the work is helping to save some of our most rare species. We're currently standing in our little entrance area to the nursery. We've got three polytunnels, which are 100 square metres in each. We've got a little shop area for people who want to come down and look at our different plants. And then all around the margins we've got trees, we've got stands of wildflowers, which are obviously in clogs and pots. And we've also got moss beds because we grow moss. And we've got a little workshop. So we've got probably about 300 different species of native wild plants in the nursery. All of this is native. Absolutely. So we basically pride ourselves in getting the very best local provenance. Although we're based in Wales, we do sometimes go beyond Wales for some certain species. But most of the plants we have are actually sourced from Wales, and they're good Welsh genetic stock. And this all started because of butterflies. Yeah, I've been in a college just for 30 years in South Wales, doing lots of planning applications, etc. And there's always a need and a demand for plants of local provenance to support nature conservation initiatives. One of which is one of the sort of the flagship species on grasslands in Wales is the marsh fertility butterfly. Now its food plant is the devil's bit scabious. And without it, the butterfly can't survive. And I was asked by a company of colleges, if I could grow some, as a consultant to colleges, because they just couldn't source any anywhere else. So at the time my wife had left teaching and together we decided, well, let's just grow a lot of devils bit scabious. And I'm sure there'll be other projects. We grew up at 20,000 devils bit scabious in our garden, and we then used those for the marsh fertility project I was asked to help with. But other people then said, oh, we're here growing devils bit scabious. We've got other projects. We've got small blue butterflies. They need kidney vetch and we've got another project. Can you help out with that? So we grew devils bit scabious and kidney vetch. And then it sort of just grew from there literally. There was no planning. It just happened organically. People said, oh, we actually want to do a wildflower area. What other wildflowers do you do? So at that point, we decided, well, let's make a business of this. And we came to Lee Sinini in North Swansea and rent some land from the RSPCA. And I said, here we are today. Here you are. So tell me a little bit about what we've got in French. Should we go and have a look at this? So this is the little shop area we have. Because people come in and a lot of people, they really want to help and support nature conservation. Because as everyone knows these days, we've had a massive decline in our native species of insects and birds. And obviously plants as well. And everybody can be empowered to do something just by planting native plants back in their garden or in their fields or their project areas. So what we have here is something which essentially helps people decide what plants are going to work best for their different projects. So hopefully you've got some of them labeled. I can see limestone chalk grassland. And over there we've got a plant plant. So you're telling people what to plant where, I guess. Exactly, because if you put the wrong plants in the wrong place, they may grow for a year, but eventually they'll die out. So if you live in an area where the soils are very alkaline, limestoney, then you obviously need to choose limestone plants. If you want to do a bog garden or do some wetland planting, then obviously you've got to choose the right plants. So what we've done in the shop area is just to break it down into different habitat categories to make the choice as easier for people. And where do you get these plants from yourself? So we basically collect all our own seed by hand. Because I've been doing consulting ecology for such a long time, I've got a lot of contacts with people like the National Trust, the Welsh Wildlife Trust, say local authorities. And because they know that we're so pro-conservation and that everything we sell has a positive environmental benefit, they're very keen to support us. So they give us permission to collect seed on their land. And obviously once we've got the seed, we grow the plant or cuttings, we can grow the plants and produce them that way. So that's the root. The root, indeed. And I guess a lot of that work is going on in the polytunnels that we can see here. Yeah, so we've got a really great team of people who obviously help us implement all this work. We couldn't possibly do it all on our own. So we've got four people in today helping out. Everybody's hard at work here in the dry in here, of course. There's been a bit of a wet morning, hasn't it? Oh, it has. So Jeff is doing some potting on into nine centimeter pots. What Jeff has got is actually a thing which is very rare, not just in Glamorgan, but in Britain. This is the native chamomile, which is very much a southwestern plant in Britain. And there's only two sites in the Hall of Glamorgan there where this plant occurs. And we got seeds from one of the gower sites, grew a handful of plants, and now we find division is the best way to propagate these plants. So Jeff is basically pulling the plants apart, and from one nine centimeter pot, he's creating about half a dozen Jeff from each pot. But all I have is about three or four from the pot. Three or four from the pot. That's quite a responsibility, isn't it? You've got so little to work. So in South Wales, transport are very interested in doing some conservation verges on their highways. So they're actually going to purchase some of these for a conservation verge, including some devil's biscuits as well, surprise, surprise. And obviously the highways are fantastic for nature conservation, because you've got these long corridors which connect other habitats, and they're a really important customer of ours here. So yeah, we'll go down and see what corn is there. What have you got there, Colin? Well, I have a sort of really iconic Welsh grass species, which is purple more grass. And basically I'm sort of putting them to bed for the winter. I'm giving them a bit of a, a bit of a judge before they go to sleep for the winter. And they form these wonderful mounds. And they build up and it makes this incredible habitat. You've got loads of sphagnum moss growing in here, but you can get sort of nice things like cross-leaved heath and lots of things living inside there as well. There's lots of invertebrates, so. And how rare is this? This is not at all rare, it's common as muck. But it's really important. So it's just an important plan that, you know, it's not all about rare species. It's about what matters to wildlife, basically. And this is one of those really great Welsh species. Yeah, the purple more grass is actually an important species for the marshrotillary butterfly. You know, we mentioned the food plant of the caterpillar is the devil's biscavious. The caterpillar's actually spent the winter basically resting in the millennia tussex. millennia being the scientific name of the purple more grass. So very often it's, it's important when, if you're looking to do niche conservation projects, not necessarily just to focus on one species, but to look at providing a habitat which is very diverse and provides species diversity, it provides a lot more benefits than just planning one or two really good plants for pollinators. Nice. So yeah, Laura's over here, obviously just about to disappear. Now that a lot of the wildflowers have finished going to seed, they tend to need a bit of pruning back and a bit of love. So I'm going to go and get some of the plants that have the wild licorice we grow, prune it back, bottom dress the pots and give it a bit of love because the slugs have been eating all of the new shoots. But we're lucky to have the polytunnels we've got shelving so we can put the plants up on the shelving and get them recovered. You really have to know what you're doing. You're all clearly experts in this field, yeah? Well, yeah, we're all very keen. It's obviously doing niche conservation work. And I think one of the things which Laura mentioned was the fact we've got slugs here. We don't actually use any herbicides or pesticides. We like our plants to be tough and ready to go back into the wild. So we don't necessarily grow prize-winning specimens for shores, but we grow plants which are fit for purpose. And like I said, we've got our own biological control here as well. So we've got a lot of voles and mycenae polytunnels which they nibble away at the plants. So if you were to come here and you would see, not all, but some of the plants are sort of nibbled and chewed by these. But the plants we grow are intended for nature, so if a plant has got insect feeding damage on it, that's actually for us is a really positive thing. If you go to a normal grower, they do everything to try and make the plants look absolutely beautiful, lots of foliage. We're far more interested in getting the plants to look, get the roots of the plants nice and healthy and so that they will support invertebrates. It's really the ecology starts from the bottom up and the plant is the most fundamental part of that. So if you've got nice diverse assemblages of plants, you can support a lot of invertebrates then, which will support the birds, support the small mammals. And that's really the message we're trying to get across, is that it's not just all about pollinators, it's about getting plants that will support really healthy gardens, fields and other sort of projects where these plants are going. So for example, the work Jeff is doing on the chamomile, that will help to support this sort of that grassland community, not just the pollinators that feed on the flowers. You clearly saw a gap, a need, what's the ultimate vision for you? We don't have business ambitions, we really just want to be here to help support people who want to do conservation projects. We're not motivated by money, we're purely motivated by doing something that's good for the environment. The rewards, the mental rewards and the well-being rewards you get from that are far greater than the monetary rewards and we all really enjoy what we're doing. It's just like a really great line of work to be in. So it is, that's Barry Stewart from Celtic Wildflowers in Swansea. A pop-up, Pasta Rhea from Caradigion has won this year's 2024 British Street Food Awards and will now go on to represent the UK at the finals of the European Street Food Awards in Germany next weekend. We spoke to chef Deru Robertson Jacobs of Pasta Romano last month when he was serving homemade authentic Italian pasta from a tiny trailer in Clangranog in Caradigion. So I'm delighted to be able to speak to him again and offer my congratulations. Thank you very much. No, you won the previous round, the Welsh Street Awards with Lynne Greenie, I seem to remember. Was it the same dish you took to this round? So there was a big debate on what dish we would take to London to represent Wales. Previously, our award-winning dish was a crab Lynne Greenie and while it is really delicious, it's a classic really. We felt it was a bit too easy, crabs quite a decadent ingredient and so we wanted something a bit more humble to represent Wales. So we chose cockles. Now, we can get fresh cockles from Caramour who are a sustainable seafood company in St. David's and they source them from the only person who hand-harvest cockles left in Wales and they are from the River D area in North Wales and they're from super clean, grey day waters and so we wanted to create a celebration dish of Wales really and so we took the Welsh combination of cockles, bacon and lava bread and made a pasta dish around that and so instead of bacon we used guanciale which is a traditional Italian ingredient. It's similar to bacon but it's made with cured pig's cheek and it's very fatty and so we had that in the Lynne Greenie with the cockles and also some roasted lava seaweed. So yeah, the judges were blown away by it. There's a classic pasta dish in Italy called Vongole and so we made a Welsh take on that dish and they loved it. It sounds very tasty, they're a part of the pun but give me a flavour of the competition as a whole. How was the competition judged? So the competition was judged on two aspects. There was the people's vote and then there was the judges vote which was a board of triple Michelin star chefs, like original street food heroes and food campaigners. So there was a real array of people with different opinions judging your food. It was very nerve-wracking putting the dishes together and taking them over. So we were only allowed to enter two dishes into the competition so our Vongole went into the best main dish category and we won that category and then we also entered a dish into the best snack which was a bolognese scarpetta and so scarpetta means once you've finished your meal and you get a crusty bit of bread and you mop up all of the sauce off the plate and so we were recreating that with pembroke show Welsh Dexter beef bolognese and that went down really well but we didn't win that category. It all sounds amazing, you're saying we so it was you plus a team of people? Yeah I went with Jack who's been working with us this summer. He's a very eloquent cook and also Will who's just an all-around fixer of situations and quick thinker. Very useful, now when I spoke to you back in the summer you were cooking out of a trailer in Clangranog, are you still there? We're not, that's come to an end sadly but we had a really lovely time. The village were so welcoming. Both of my other teammates were actually from Clangranog in the village so it was very much. We took Clangranog to London and won. Yes because you were saying then how difficult it is for people like you to get pictures to sell your food. Clearly it's helped you start your business, you've won this competition but do you think more could be done to help people who want to start their own food businesses in terms of making pictures more available? Definitely, I think there's a real gap for councils to encourage food traders and small business owners to give them an opportunity to make money and a platform to be creative and show what is unique about the area that they live in. One opinion I have about street food is that it's opportunity to showcase the place from where you live and showcase ingredients that are unique to your area because I think that's what people find interesting at the end of the day because in London you can literally buy anything from anywhere at any time but if you go to a stall and they're selling ingredients that you can only get in rural West Wales then suddenly it becomes interesting. Yeah indeed it does so you're no longer in Clangranog, where are you trading out of now? So we've just got a couple of events lined up before Christmas, one at Fishguard Food Festival which is mid-October and we've also been invited to the European Street Food Awards in Germany which is a very exciting opportunity. Yes we get on to that now because that of course is because of your win, you're off to Germany, are you nervous or just excited to get going? I think logistically it's going to be very challenging, there's obviously some practicalities surrounding Brexit and like the kind of ingredients, you can't just take all of your ingredients into Europe so it's going to be quite difficult to I guess take our Welsh ingredients to Europe without the proper paperwork and all of those things. Something I hadn't thought about, how will you deal with that in practical terms then? I think we just need to be clever and take dried ingredients such as Welsh seaweed and flour and things that are non-perishable. So you're going to have to adapt your cooking then? Exactly, yeah it's a challenge more than anything that I'm looking forward to. Well congratulations once again that's British Street Food Award winner Deru Robertson Jacobs and we wish him every success in next weekend's European finals in Germany. That's it for this week from me, Caroline Evans and the country focused team, thanks for listening and stay safe. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy and reliable so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work.