Closed Country: A Spring Audio-Diary with Brett Westwood

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