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Programme answering listeners' questions about planet Earth and our impact upon it

Home Planet: Dead birds and hibernating flies

15/02/2011

Dead birds and hibernating flies

BBC Radio 4 - Home Planet, Dead birds and hibernating flies

Many birds must die each year, so why are their corpses so rare?

Many creatures hide away during the cold winter months but where do flies and bluebottles go? And would we miss them if they all disappeared?

Many animals hide away during the cold winter months, surviving on their stores of fat as they await the spring. Bats roost in caves and attics; hedgehogs hide in their hibernaculae; adders hunker down in disused rabbit burrows. But where, one listener wants to know, do flies and bluebottles go each winter? 

As the next generation of genetically modified crops emerge from the world's laboratories, you ask how do we know just what's in them and what might be the environmental impacts of their widespread use? 

You also ask why do flying geese honk and why, when millions of birds must die each year, do we so rarely find their corpses?

On the Home Planet panel for this week are ecologist Dr Lynn Dicks of Cambridge University; Graham Appleton of the British Trust for Ornithology and Professor Philip Stott, an environmental scientist from the University of London. 


Presenter: Richard Daniel
Producer: Toby Murcott
A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

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