Open Country

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BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of Britain

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

BBC Radio 4 LW

Open Country: How to build and paint a bird nest

How to build and paint a bird nest

BBC Radio 4 - Open Country, How to build and paint a bird nest

Blackbirds, yellowhammers, wrens and crows - British birds and the places where they live.

Susan Ogilvy strides out across Somerset with Deon Warner looking for abandoned birds nests to paint

Blackbirds, wrens, reed warblers, yellowhammers, sparrows and crows - this is a programme about British birds and the places where they live. 

One day botanical painter Susan Ogilvy found a strange object on her lawn. It was damp and green, and had been blown out of a tree by a storm. Once it had dried it fluffed up into a beautiful chaffinch nest. Susan was entranced and began to paint it. 

"Birds follow their own architecture but they use the materials they find around them - twigs and grasses and leaves, and they use them in the spring when they are young and bendy. When we see them in the autumn they've dried up, so everything has become much more brittle."

Over the last five years she's painted another seventy abandoned nests, and she's been increasingly helped by neighbours who find them, plus a local expert, Deon Warner. This programme is as much about Deon as it is about Susan herself. Together they stride out across the local Somerset landscape to see what they can find.

Produced by Miles Warde with readings by Emily Knight.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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Open Country

How to build and paint a bird nest

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