As the barrage lifted on the first day of the Somme, soldiers in the trenches heard

skylark sing high above. What did the birds of the Western Front mean to that generation

who spotted them from the trenches of France and Flanders.

I'm recording this episode over the weekend of the Big Garden Bird Watch, a project organised each year by the RSPB to get the people of the United Kingdom to record what birds they see in their garden.

And this important report, crowdsourced

information from people right across Britain, enables the RSPB to look at the bird population,

to look at changes in that population and to see what species are in danger. For ordinary people, it's a good way to connect with nature,

to connect with a wider natural world around them

and help produce information that is vital to our understanding

of the birds that live around us.

And I mention this because this week's episode we're going to look at birds on the Western

Front because in the same way that people, as I record this, are looking at birds in their

garden and recording them in all sorts of different ways, the generation that fought on the

battlefields of the Great War kind of did the same. And this is something that we see recorded

in letters and memoirs and newspaper accounts and veterans accounts as well. But before we get

to what that really means, Birds on the Western Front, listening to

this podcast and perhaps following me on Twitter, you'll know about my own deep connection to birds

in the wider natural world. And for me, that began when I was 10. I'd always kind of grown up

in the countryside,

although I lived on a council estate, it was on the edge of a new town,

and surrounding us were fields and forests where I spent a lot of time as a child

and walking that ground with my mum who'd grown up in the Essex countryside,

...